Word Clouds and Narratives

We are undergoing a communication revolution that is shaping a political one. Over our time as a communicating species, we have gone from symbol to story, and now to reality TV. Corresponding verbal artifacts: Word and myth; Verb and story; Scene, meme and word cloud.

Symbol: naming, nouns, things.

Human speech has long been viewed as a key differentiator for our species (never mind that we haven’t done much about our own ignorance of dolphin and ant.) Children learn to name things, actions, relationships. Each word learned is a symbol, a concept that gives us a different way of organizing the world, and that excludes other ways. The story of naming colors (if there is no word for green you have a hard time telling it apart from blue) and the Eskimos’ many words for snow are examples of that. If I learn different terms for wading birds and nesting birds, I notice those traits; if my names for categories of birds are based on size or color, those are what I see. Magic conflates the world by juxtaposing different things based on their symbols—word sounds, numerical meaning, or sensory signatures.

We hunger for meaning, for our place in the world. A child learning language uses it to control things, to assert her connection to others. Language affirms and shields and circumscribes identity—think Shibboleth. Think debates today pro and anti bilingual education. Songs are the pure language of identity, like the bird calls that speak me, me, mine mine. My place among those I can see, smell, touch. Shared truths are polished like stones through constant handling. Myths, songs, epics. Only as much as can be kept in retelling after retelling

Written language allows hierarchical control at a distance by literacy-controlling elites. How to interpret the world can be controlled from one point, transmitting coded instruction. Limited literacy can largely be organized. Elite—often religious –hierarchies controlled though the advantage that literacy gives in the distance and complexity of control.

Movable type knocked down the economic barrier and democratized literacy laying a foundation for religious and then political democracy. When each man reads the Bible, the King is no longer needed to mediate with God. No wonder that it was prohibited for slaves to be taught to read—and literacy is also prohibited to women in some traditionalist patriarchies.

General literacy paves the way for the notion that there may be common truths that exist in the world which can be discovered, in addition to (instead of? O heresy!) divine truths that are created and emanate through revelation. Rationalism elevates methodical observation that incorporates procedures for testing the validity of connections among elements. Jargon for saying, a better way of testing truth. Verbs. Actions. Stories. Science explodes; so do novels. Different people are looking for different kinds of meaning, different ways to explore possibilities and connections. The great American novel: the idea of expressing a national identity through sweeping narrative. But, as critics from Lao Tsu on down have noted, naming one thing makes us ignore everything else.

Now we have tools that let us communicate thickly. A video spot may include language, emotional cues via music, and a mass of visual information that is transmitted directly. The message may be more diffuse yet more powerful. In our single lifetimes many of us have seen a huge arc of development in a new way of creating and sharing information, and our varying competencies at this have been in wild display during the election.

Mass communication via broadcast and news papers created hierarchical models for dispensing interpreted knowledge. TV and movies let creators image a world entire, with symbols, narratives and layered emotionally dense meanings: with the immediacy of seeing for ourselves, yet operating at a distance. The economic base of this new, democratized hierarchy was commodified desire. Politics and advertising relearned fluidity of meaning, possibilities inherent in inventing and then satiating unnecessary needs. The bombardment is effective yet ultimately unsatisfied. We are all addicts, overstimulated, craving more. Things seem to be meaningful yet the meaning is no longer sharp, sequential. Instructions come in other languages. Videos show rather than tell, but there is no one to correct us when we follow wrongly.

One-to-many mass media—broadcast radio and television--have completed their arc of dominance in a single human lifetime. One inflection point was the Hollywood writers strike. When narrators went silent, studios discovered reality television, with a simple narrative arc of conflict and survival, competition and conquest, with just a little pluck and luck to keep it interesting. A good story requires equal competitors, or there is no suspense. When things get too out of balance, behind-the scenes tweaking injects new elements to maintain interest. Girl on Fire.

Now the Internet allows image/word combinations to circulate while the means of production has been democratized. Cellphone videos confront white ignorance with the evidence of how little other lives matter. Fill the feed with Jackass videos of overloaded trucks, deer in headlights, alien invasions. Revolutions proliferate till tyrants learn how to smash portals shut. The pace of learning and counter-learning is immense, the steps visible to all. A meme deploys techniques perfected in advertising/propaganda, like magic, juxtaposing unlike things and creating a new thing with invented significance—compelling yet empty. Cat memes, then Bernie memes.Then more cats.

For people who like words, a replacement for poems, for stories, is the word cloud. Advertising and politics has long used focus groups and response times to measure associations and find the word that hits your brain fast and hard, the words that amplify impact. Their messages are perfected for the echo chamber of your response. Like so many other tools of language and symbol, they can be descriptive or directive. You can conjure up the word frequency from your personal corpus, see how it evolves. Or you can create and inflict word clouds to manipulate your audience.

This election was lost (won) in a word cloud. Trump's pollsters noted the inflection after the Comey letter was released. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/trump-polling-data/?mbid=nl_11916_p3&CNDID=36480033 What followed was a depressed Democratic base and a (re-)energized insurgency. More than a renewal of the narrative of cheating (an obfuscation never dispelled by a campaign that failed to respond to the underlying anxiety about secrecy, privacy and the privilege of having any to protect) this last round was a whole new attack via word cloud. It flipped the poles on the narrative of failed sexuality (his weakness, not assault, was Trump’s great sin on the video.) The word cloud was magical, combining Jewish sexual perversity (Weiner! Who could imagine that name!), Muslim (Abedin, complete with whispers of some connection to Muslim brotherhood, almost but not quite Human,) female intimacy, secrecy, out-of-control technology, fear of the spying outsider telling and distorting our secrets. And no one needed to build a narrative. We have been conditioning ourselves to respond to word clouds, and the image-makers have refined techniques of magic for overlaying and merging. With time the spell wears off, but it takes more than ten days. Too late.

---

PREVIEW of next comments...

By the next election we will have passed through several accelerated generations of messaging techniques.  The winners this time included a cadre expert at understanding and manipulating techniques at the edge.  The nation has never been more divided, as competition is based on sorting and separating, complementarity.  Are institutional changes that allow head on competition possible or desirable? What unifying strategies work post election?

Word Clouds and Narratives

We are undergoing a communication revolution that is shaping a political one. Over our time as a communicating species, we have gone from symbol to story, and now to reality TV. Corresponding verbal artifacts: Word and myth; Verb and story; Scene, meme and word cloud.

Symbol: naming, nouns, things.

Human speech has long been viewed as a key differentiator for our species (never mind that we haven’t done much about our own ignorance of dolphin and ant.) Children learn to name things, actions, relationships. Each word learned is a symbol, a concept that gives us a different way of organizing the world, and that excludes other ways. The story of naming colors (if there is no word for green you have a hard time telling it apart from blue) and the Eskimos’ many words for snow are examples of that. If I learn different terms for wading birds and nesting birds, I notice those traits; if my names for categories of birds are based on size or color, those are what I see. Magic conflates the world by juxtaposing different things based on their symbols—word sounds, numerical meaning, or sensory signatures.

We hunger for meaning, for our place in the world. A child learning language uses it to control things, to assert her connection to others. Language affirms and shields and circumscribes identity—think Shibboleth. Think debates today pro and anti bilingual education. Songs are the pure language of identity, like the bird calls that speak me, me, mine mine. My place among those I can see, smell, touch. Shared truths are polished like stones through constant handling. Myths, songs, epics. Only as much as can be kept in retelling after retelling

Written language allows hierarchical control at a distance by literacy-controlling elites. How to interpret the world can be controlled from one point, transmitting coded instruction. Limited literacy can largely be organized. Elite—often religious –hierarchies controlled though the advantage that literacy gives in the distance and complexity of control.

Movable type knocked down the economic barrier and democratized literacy laying a foundation for religious and then political democracy. When each man reads the Bible, the King is no longer needed to mediate with God. No wonder that it was prohibited for slaves to be taught to read—and literacy is also prohibited to women in some traditionalist patriarchies.

General literacy paves the way for the notion that there may be common truths that exist in the world which can be discovered, in addition to (instead of? O heresy!) divine truths that are created and emanate through revelation. Rationalism elevates methodical observation that incorporates procedures for testing the validity of connections among elements. Jargon for saying, a better way of testing truth. Verbs. Actions. Stories. Science explodes; so do novels. Different people are looking for different kinds of meaning, different ways to explore possibilities and connections. The great American novel: the idea of expressing a national identity through sweeping narrative. But, as critics from Lao Tsu on down have noted, naming one thing makes us ignore everything else.

Now we have tools that let us communicate thickly. A video spot may include language, emotional cues via music, and a mass of visual information that is transmitted directly. The message may be more diffuse yet more powerful. In our single lifetimes many of us have seen a huge arc of development in a new way of creating and sharing information, and our varying competencies at this have been in wild display during the election.

Mass communication via broadcast and news papers created hierarchical models for dispensing interpreted knowledge. TV and movies let creators image a world entire, with symbols, narratives and layered emotionally dense meanings: with the immediacy of seeing for ourselves, yet operating at a distance. The economic base of this new, democratized hierarchy was commodified desire. Politics and advertising relearned fluidity of meaning, possibilities inherent in inventing and then satiating unnecessary needs. The bombardment is effective yet ultimately unsatisfied. We are all addicts, overstimulated, craving more. Things seem to be meaningful yet the meaning is no longer sharp, sequential. Instructions come in other languages. Videos show rather than tell, but there is no one to correct us when we follow wrongly.

One-to-many mass media—broadcast radio and television--have completed their arc of dominance in a single human lifetime. One inflection point was the Hollywood writers strike. When narrators went silent, studios discovered reality television, with a simple narrative arc of conflict and survival, competition and conquest, with just a little pluck and luck to keep it interesting. A good story requires equal competitors, or there is no suspense. When things get too out of balance, behind-the scenes tweaking injects new elements to maintain interest. Girl on Fire.

Now the Internet allows image/word combinations to circulate while the means of production has been democratized. Cellphone videos confront white ignorance with the evidence of how little other lives matter. Fill the feed with Jackass videos of overloaded trucks, deer in headlights, alien invasions. Revolutions proliferate till tyrants learn how to smash portals shut. The pace of learning and counter-learning is immense, the steps visible to all. A meme deploys techniques perfected in advertising/propaganda, like magic, juxtaposing unlike things and creating a new thing with invented significance—compelling yet empty. Cat memes, then Bernie memes.Then more cats.

For people who like words, a replacement for poems, for stories, is the word cloud. Advertising and politics has long used focus groups and response times to measure associations and find the word that hits your brain fast and hard, the words that amplify impact. Their messages are perfected for the echo chamber of your response. Like so many other tools of language and symbol, they can be descriptive or directive. You can conjure up the word frequency from your personal corpus, see how it evolves. Or you can create and inflict word clouds to manipulate your audience.

This election was lost (won) in a word cloud. Trump's pollsters noted the inflection after the Comey letter was released. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/trump-polling-data/?mbid=nl_11916_p3&CNDID=36480033 What followed was a depressed Democratic base and a (re-)energized insurgency. More than a renewal of the narrative of cheating (an obfuscation never dispelled by a campaign that failed to respond to the underlying anxiety about secrecy, privacy and the privilege of having any to protect) this last round was a whole new attack via word cloud. It flipped the poles on the narrative of failed sexuality (his weakness, not assault, was Trump’s great sin on the video.) The word cloud was magical, combining Jewish sexual perversity (Weiner! Who could imagine that name!), Muslim (Abedin, complete with whispers of some connection to Muslim brotherhood, almost but not quite Human,) female intimacy, secrecy, out-of-control technology, fear of the spying outsider telling and distorting our secrets. And no one needed to build a narrative. We have been conditioning ourselves to respond to word clouds, and the image-makers have refined techniques of magic for overlaying and merging. With time the spell wears off, but it takes more than ten days. Too late.

---

PREVIEW of next comments...

By the next election we will have passed through several accelerated generations of messaging techniques.  The winners this time included a cadre expert at understanding and manipulating techniques at the edge.  The nation has never been more divided, as competition is based on sorting and separating, complementarity.  Are institutional changes that allow head on competition possible or desirable? What unifying strategies work post election?

Neither Clinton Crone nor Bernie Bra

I don’t like my choices. I want to have the chance to vote for another Barack Obama, or a Bill Clinton without a zipper problem. I’m not seeing either on the horizon and if the Supreme Court wasn’t so old, political and narrowly divided I might even take a pass on this election. But they are so I can’t.

 

From the luxury of the whitest state in America, one of the most clean-politics, secular places south of the Canadian border, I welcome the insistence on clearly articulated progressive principles. I share the anti-war, pro-equality vision. Overdue. On the other hand, a tempered warrior with incredible span, who has done retail politics in one of the poorest, most rural states and in the state that epitomizes wealthy cosmopolitan urbanity. Who went from being a political outsider , literally married into trailer trash, to defining inner circle in the course of a couple of decades of determined, grinding effort, showing that political position is something that can be created by sheer will. Who has the audacity to unapologetically have a Muslim woman heading up her staff. I should love them both.

 

But I don’t. They feel stale, wrong for the time, not enough. Trying too hard at the wrong thing, not trying hard enough, too soft, too hardened, disconnected, overly connected, zealots, publicans...

 

I’ve been spoiled by living through the reigns (I use the term deliberately) of a couple of the most talented politicians a person could hope for. Both wanted to find a way for America to move ahead together, not in splinters. One took a strategy of looking for a third way down the middle. One tried to help us see ourselves as citizens of the world. What each got for their efforts was their butts handed to them by a party of opposition that defines itself by that opposition, decades of ever more expert division-baiting, and a mushy center that does not hold. 

 

Whatever gifts the current candidates have, both are going to start with a much harsher oppositional face-off. I haven’t heard anything from either that persuades me they’ll overcome that. Clinton’s long demonstrated ability to clench her jaw and swallow ordure isn’t very attractive to people who brush their teeth after every meal. Bernie’s idealism sounds risky to people who have weathered a cliff-hanger loss and subsequent World War III mid-wifed by a third-party idealist and a runaway Supreme Court.

 

What I want and won’t get: Someone who speaks to the center with ringing idealism. A grounded vision of what replaces our relationships of production and value when industrial employment goes away (because industry doesn’t depend on American labor) and when capital arrangements that were the cleansing, accelerant scavengers of a robust system become the corrupt stench of a moribund economy. Someone who can articulate humane and compassionate values that include a wide span of beings. A candidate who demonstrates healing discourse, not identity politics. Someone who makes me laugh and soar by feeling how connected I am with people who are different from me. Someone whose light erases fear’s shadows.

 

Since that paragon isn’t running this time out (and I don’t see her/him waiting in the wings of a brokered convention) here’s what I’m shooting for this cycle.

 

A primary that leaves us strong for the fall, sprinters and marathoners alike. Enthusiasts willing to pledge themselves for the slog even if they lose because the November loss really IS that much bigger. Bernistas who understand that even if they don’t get to overthrow the order, they need to press just as hard to keep it from being replaced by a patriarchal theocracy based on triumphalism, torture and white supremacy. Clintonians who cherish the spark, who delight in the fresh passion of newcomers and take care not to confuse cynicism with caution.

 

Most of all, because without this it doesn’t matter a minute who wins the presidential primary: A powerful push to bring the vision of a good community to seats all down the ticket. Lots of seats in the Senate are in play this year! Dare to dream of recovering the House. State legislatures—where the redistricting lines that create permanently entitled political classes are drawn. County and municipal government—because that’s where we play out whether black lives actually matter.

 

Here are my heroes: people like my Mayor and City Councilors who take on the hard and often excoriated task of balancing mind and heart and open ears for their whole community in the real, difficult daily work of making a small town a shining place. Saunders and Clinton and all their impassioned supporters, but especially the ones that insist that dignity is not a zero-sum game. People who know they can’t see both sides of the moon and so seek out people whose worlds look different from the one they can see.

 

People who keep going even after they realize it doesn’t end here. Especially when they realize it doesn’t end.

Crone Corps plots to take back Malheur

In the Name of Misfortune

Take it back for the grandchildren

In the name of the land, of the birds.

In the name of passage and shelter in  transit

I call the grandmothers

Come with soft feathers, robed in  down,

helmed with silver hair

Our deep knowledge and dry wry anger.

Let us come together like a covenant of owls

A murder of crows

We answer an older law

They must answer to us for what they have done

Calling the grandmothers, the crones, the silver ones

Let us walk together in the white winter light

This is our time

Come together like a smother of feathers

The dry hidden talons

It is time

Take it back for the feathered things

For the silver spill of damp in a dry place

Calling all crones

To a place called misfortune

It is time to stand up like dry reeds

Whispering protection for the tiny hot transients

It is time to take back the sacred places of the dead

So we know we can also lie in peace at our time

Calling the flightless ones, the winged ones

The ones that ride the  broom

To the place called misfortune

In the name of the horned soft being who demands, WHO

It is time.

Racism, sexism and why you don’t trust Hillary

How do you trust someone you harmed unforgivably?  Even if they say they’ve moved on (because, really, what else can one do?  Otherwise the aggressor steals the future as well as the past) you know you could never get over it.  So you don’t believe them.

White America and slavery.  Europe and American tribes.   A sixth of us are children of Africans who were kidnapped, raped, tortured, treated as things.  Of course Blacks are scary.  How could they forgive that?  What revenge are they planning?   I am Jewish and haven’t been able to make myself visit Germany.  Yet the survivors of this continent’s holocaust have nowhere to go.   If I were they, of course I’d be planning to get my own back.

And Hillary.  It isn’t about the policy and the politics because if it had been a man in the same role the explanations would make sense and we’d objectively parse her out, around the 65^th percentile, left of Obama but right of Bernie and still well left of even the Democratic median.  We’d acknowledge that the one area a woman in national politics HAS to overperform to make a nationally credible run is in a show of military toughness.

It’s Monica.  We wouldn’t forgive and we don’t believe she did.  But she’s still married to the horndog, so what does that mean?  Is it about family and a child and being a village and greater good?  Is it a sign of personal ambition that will accept even that humiliation, so what other horrors does it accept?  Or is it the calculated indifference of a political mechanic?  Or—why doesn’t this narrative surface—the stoic public face of None of Your Damn Business?

She is going to have to talk about it. I am so sorry because she shouldn’t, any more than you would go up to a friend and say, well, what do you think of slavery, how do you feel about not being able to live where your ancestors lived, happy Yom HaShoah.  That is ridiculous.  We know what the answer is.  Pain, rage, sorrow, a deep and permanent wound.

Yet until she shows hers you aren’t going to trust her.