Two Cultures, Two Kinds of Audiences, and Two Forms of Communication

May 11, 2009 By 3 Comments

Tuning into the current stream of our collective reflection upon last Friday’s symposium, here I put in my two cents. Like my fellow attendees, I found Jeff Jarvis’s Google speech extremely exciting and thought-provoking, which made him the perfect fit for the morning session. It is, however, Peter Elbow’s talk about the usefulness of occasional ignoring of the audience that resonates more deeply in my mind. I am currently reading his book, Writing with Power, and it allows me to think again about how the relationships between author/speaker and audience should change according to two different forms of communication, verbal and written. To reiterate the point he made, writing is more solitary and process-oriented than speaking is, so audience-forgetfulness can be a good strategy for early stages of writing. Elbow’s empiricist approach also classifies the different types of audiences such as safe or dangerous, caring or discouraging, real or imaginary, and so on. I found his notion of the ghost audience that we carry with us in our head particularly intriguing:

“The audience in our head usually affects us more when we write than when we speak. When we speak, the real audience is right there dominating our attention and drowning out other audiences. When we write, however, all audiences are in the head, even the real audience. In the dark of the brain a real audience is easily trampled by an insistent past audience” (187).

Elbow’s advice is that, in order to exorcize the demon of the dangerous internal audience that inhibits our words or thoughts, we need to actively “change” our audience and capitalize on the support of a loving audience that we once had or that we can imagine. I think that this suggestion could prove useful in improving our teaching methods, too.

Finally, attending the Institute’s symposium reminded me of C. P. Snow’s 1959 argument on the division of two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. I assume that in this case it is the division between business and academia whose cultures we try to bring together, as partly shown by Jarvis and Elbow. I see how these seemingly disparate fields can hit it off and have productive conversations in the right setting like this year’s symposium.

Filed Under: Audience, BLSCI, Symposium

Gardner Teaches, Part 4

May 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

In this final segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at the “Mother of the All Funk Chords,” a Youtube mashup by the Israeli musician Kutiman, they discuss the implications of the notion that “you choose a channel; your audience will choose the channels after that.”

This video is 12 minutes long.

Filed Under: Audience, Symposium, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

Gardner Teaches, Part 3

May 8, 2009 By 1 Comment

In this third segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at an advertisement from Kaplan University (featuring Uncle Phil) and explore the nature of authenticity and credibility in a Web 2.0 world, the implications of tools that empower the audience on “for-profit” higher education, and the challenges producers of information have in maintaining control over their intended messages once they get out.

This video is 10 minutes long.

Filed Under: Audience, Symposium, Web 2.0 Tagged With: ,

Tweetripper, or, Geeking Out After the Symposium

May 7, 2009 By 3 Comments
Following the conversation via Twitter. Photo by Alan Levine.

Following the conversation via Twitter. Photo by Alan Levine.

If you attended the Symposium on May 1, you no doubt saw that Twitter played a major part in the event: as a topic of conversation (as in Gardner Campbell’s session), as a means of broadcasting what was happening over the course of the day, and as a way to connect with others out there in in the Interwebs interested in what we were talking about.

Our friends in media services wheeled over a beautiful 46″ flat panel display, which we used with Twitter Camp to display all tweets tagged #blsci as they came in. By the end of the evening portion of the event, there were almost 300 tweets on the Symposium from attendees as well as a few other folks chiming in or sharing our tweets with their networks. (See Boone Gorges’ great post on the use of Twitter as a backchannel at the Symposium for more on the impact of microblogging on the day’s conversations.)

Naturally, we wanted a record of all this and started looking into ways in which to pull all #blsci tweets and save them for posterity. Unfortunately, there was no one good option. The native Twitter search was ok, but only returned a few tweets at a time. Twazzup was very nice but only returned about 100 tweets. Hashtags.org returned even fewer results grouped according to no clear logic at all. (These sites are fine for following tweets live, but not so much for archiving old ones.) A Twitter contact in Texas suggested a Python script (scary) that didn’t quite work right either.

Then, our good friends Lucas Thurston and Zach Davis of Cast Iron Coding, the genius code-poet developers of our Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool (VOCAT), came up with a solution: a simple PHP script they called Tweetripper that dumped all the tweets we needed to a text file. When we ran it, Tweetripper, which came with simple but thorough instructions, gave us something that looks like this (these are just a few of the day’s tweets in reverse chronological order):


#blsci Elbow suggests we should learn the skill of ignoring audiences during speaking/writing. Says @jeffjarvis closed eyes during talk.
TiffanyPR
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:56:08 +0000

Elbow: first audience when writing must be yourself. #blsci
lwaltzer
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:50:59 +0000

A Twitterati gallery has emerged at the rear of the audience at #blsci. This might be related to the need for outlets.
boonebgorges
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:48:05 +0000

Afternoon speaker, Peter Elbow, is taking the stage. Author of "Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process."; #blsci
TiffanyPR
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:48:01 +0000

Wish I was at #blsci!
katemo
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:36:52 +0000

Fantastically stimulating conversation at Baruch Communication Symposium #blsci. Boring academics? Nay. They are the Twittelligentsia!
alberrios
Fri, 01 May 2009 17:10:04 +0000

Perfect. Just what we were looking for: a way of creating a record of all the furious tweeting from a remarkably stimulating and memorable event.

Zach and Lucas wrote this script absolutely pro bono, in the interest of others out there like us interested in a way to archive tweets. They created something the community wanted and shared it, enabling others to tweak it and adapt it and develop it further. That is the spirit of open-source right there. So, in that spirit, here is the Tweetripper script for those not afraid of a command line interface. Use it well. If you modify it, let us know.

Filed Under: Conferences, Symposium, Tools, Twitter, Web 2.0 Tagged With:

Gardner Teaches, Part 2

May 7, 2009 By 1 Comment

In this second segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants explore the concept of speaker and audience in the Emily Dickinson poem “This is My Letter to the World,” unpack the meditation on connectedness in the segment “Truck Stop” from the film 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (the Youtube version of this film is embedded below workshop video for more easy viewing), and discuss some core defining principles of the Web 2.0 world.

In response to a question about how these tools have altered or challenged our sense of time, Gardner offers this wise nugget, which just about sums up his approach to thinking about all of this stuff:

Thinking at that meta level as much as we can without driving ourselves bananas is the only kind of thinking that persists through whatever the next tool is going to be.

This clip is about 25 minutes.

“Truck Stop,” from 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvhfqks7r2w[/youtube]

Filed Under: Symposium, Web 2.0 Tagged With: ,

Gardner Teaches, Part I

May 6, 2009 By 7 Comments

This is the first in a series of posts presenting video from our 9th Annual Symposium on Communication and Communication-Intensive Instruction.

We’re going to start off with four videos (we’ll publish them over the next four days) from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World.”

What I love about this particular workshop is the generous balance in Gardner’s approach to Web 2.0: he talks with equal interest about the inanity present in much online conversation and the new implications for connectedness offered by the Web 2.0 world. Unlike many thinkers who’ve chimed in on communication in a Web 2.0 world, he sees it as neither a panacea or a harbinger of doom. His interest is in exploring the broad, rich ideas generated by these new methods of communication, and in generating more questions than answers.

We were so fortunate to have Gardner play such a significant role in our Symposium for the second straight year. His enthusiasm was infectious, and his social note taking was prodigious.

In this first segment, Gardner and the attendees of his workshop explore Twistori and Twittervision, two Twitter apps that offer provocative examples of how “connectedness” is changing in the Web 2.0 world. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to catch the beginning of this workshop; we pick things up a few minutes in, and this first video is a shade under 20 minutes long.

Filed Under: Symposium, Technology, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , ,

Reflecting on the Symposium

May 5, 2009 By 7 Comments

Planning to steal Mikhail’s thunder at our upcoming staff meeting this Wednesday, here I am/writing to open up the blog space for reflections on our symposium. Please contribute.

It was a good day, this past Friday. I think I most enjoyed its dynamic, happening quality, as if in defiance of the rain outside. And I did indeed get out of my academic bubble to look around a bit and see and hear what those non-academics think about writing. One of my favorite parts was the opening lecture, actually, Jeff Jarvis’ talk. (At the Players’ Club, Olga was telling me how much she enjoyed Peter Elbow’s talk because of its introspective quality, and I agreed with her. The upbeat, popping quality of the first speaker got me, however, and I think it was an excellent choice to start with in the morning.) At moments, I wondered at the striking American-ness of the entire speech, and I felt this with all my convoluted sense of belonging and Americanized brain. I liked the way the speaker opened up the creative act for necessary mistakes (“Everything is miscellaneous”), inherent flair (“elegant organization”), and I loved the little spiritual tag that came with the package (“Make mistakes well, and don’t be evil”). Peter Elbow, on the other hand, wanted to celebrate “the glory of writing” and that inward turn that it brings, and I was nodding big time then too.

What about you, my fellow audience-members? :)

Filed Under: Symposium

Reading and creating ‘the air’: a fun clip

February 13, 2009 By 3 Comments

A couple of you who shared the table discussion session with me at last year’s symposium might remember me talking about how Japanese people appreciate the skills to actually ‘read’ what’s not spoken, referring to this as ‘read the air’ (we do also have that well-known expression ‘read between the lines’ for written communication, so reading ‘the air’ is more about oral communication).

Even though some of my table-mates seemed really fascinated with this notion, it is obviously not something that you only experience in Japan. Good air-reading skills can definitely help us be good audience (the theme for the upcoming symposium).

Without making today’s post too serious, I would like to introduce this funny clip from Clint Eastwood’s latest installment ‘Gran Torino’, definitely one of my recent favorites. Clint Eastwood’s character is trying to ‘man up’ this Asian boy so that he can get a job in construction. Check out and enjoy how the boy learns to ‘read’ and ‘create’ the air that he never breathed in before.

Filed Under: Audience, Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Symposium

Reading the Cold Air: Negative Social Vibes and Hot Chocolate

September 18, 2008 By 1 Comment

One of the great points that stayed with me after our last Symposium was a Japanese concept of “Read the Air,” introduced by Yukiko. Emphasizing different non-verbal components of communication, it obliges us to be conscious of our and our interlocutors’ body language and mood, as well as our surroundings. Apparently, this subject has been of some interest to the scientists. It turns out that reading the air is not only something that we do, consciously or not, but also something that affects our physical sensations. There was an interesting NYT article “A Cold Stare Can Make You Crave Some Heat” by Benedict Carey about a scientific analysis of the effect of social rejection or the ‘cold stare’ on people. It was found that when feeling disregarded or dismissed (verbally or not) in a social situation, people perceive a decrease in the outside temperature. Next time you get that coffee or hot chocolate, think whether it’s really a caffeine craving.

Filed Under: Interpersonal Communication, Symposium

The 8th Annual Symposium Blog

June 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Symposium Blog is up and running!

The Miscommunication: 8th Annual Symposium blog had it’s opening post on June 5th at 3:03pm. For the next few weeks there will be regular posts highlighting different tables at the symposium. I have enjoyed reading through the notes and table discussions and looking through the photographs of the day.

As I worked on setting up the blog, I felt the urge to post every note and conversation and image that happened during the event. It seemed so important to share with all of the participants what had happened and show them what they had been able to accomplish in one day. But I also have been thinking of how this blog should be more than a showcase or even more than a place for us to revisit and comment on our work after the event.

I have been thinking of the blog as a way to continue the Symposium community, which is nearing its 9th year of existence! At the same time I have realized that my pedagogical side is stepping in and I am not sure that having another blogging community out there is enough. Yes, I want more. Is there a way to make it into something that builds momentum and takes us onward and into the next phase of our extended community?

Mary Hocks uses a term — “Hybridity” — which refers to how the web as a medium or channel can be a space for the “interplay” between the visual and the verbal in a structured environment, perhaps that of a blog (Hocks, 2003). More than the hybridity of a blog medium, I am moved towards this notion of interplay where the use of visuals such as design, graphs, images and even MySpace pages can be intertwined with writing, discussion, and blogging to begin building ideas and areas of study for the next symposium. And it certainly seems that much of the discussions at the symposium were about the constant interplay of communication elements and channel and the influence this had on miscommunication. I like very much the idea of interplay in building momentum or knowledge for the coming symposium. That through reading and writing and linking and posting and images and everything else this medium invites us to do, ideas will form, and a sort of collective knowledge will develop.

So maybe the symposium blog could be, as is often the case in an online community, a place where we look and represent what we have said and have thought about an event. But instead of just commenting on each other’s work, we could seek out threads that can be investigated further and areas of reflection that we would want to develop and bring forward in next year’s day-long dialog.

This might start out being chaotic in the beginning and strange for a blog to go in every direction before some sort of collective knowledge can be shaped or directed towards a detailed thesis around the notion of interplay. But as was mentioned by Hillary Miller during the morning discussions at Table II: the idea is to encourage the messiness of the writing process. As it is from this stage that great reflection can begin. So please come to the symposium blog and inter-PLAY!

Filed Under: Blogs and Blogging, Symposium
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