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.

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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?