The Art of Communication in a Polarized World This page intentionally left blank The Art of Communication in a Polarized World KYLE CONWAY Copyright © 2020 Kyle Conway Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771992930.01 Cover image © Suchat Nuchpleng / Shutterstock.com Cover design by Natalie Olsen Interior design by Sergiy Kozakov Printed and bound in Canada Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The art of communication in a polarized world / Kyle Conway. Names: Conway, Kyle, 1977- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200162683 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200162691 ISBN 9781771992930 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771992947 (pdf) ISBN 9781771992954 (epub) | ISBN 9781771992961 (Kindle) Subjects: LCSH: Intercultural communication. | LCSH: Translating and interpreting. LCSH: Communication and culture. | LCSH: Language and culture. Classification: LCC P94.6 C66 2020 | DDC 303.48/2—dc23 This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities and the assistance provided by the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund. This publication is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivative Works 4.0 International: see www.creativecommons.org. The text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original author. To obtain permission for uses beyond those outlined in the Creative Commons licence, please contact AU Press, Athabasca University, at [email protected]. For K., my compass For E. and B., world-changers Contents List of Figures ix Preface: What This Book Is, and What It Isn’t xi Acknowledgements xvii Introduction: People’s Minds Are Hard to Change 3 1 Communication Is Translation (So Please Mind the Gap) 25 2 Newspeak as a Manual for Translation 47 3 Translational Invention, Inventive Translation 71 4 Fake News and Perspective Unmoored 93 Conclusion: Jumping In 117 Appendix: Notes on Teaching 129 Bibliography 135 Index 147 This page intentionally left blank Figures Figure 1 Cultural translation 6 Figure 2 Parallax view 19 Figure 3 Mural depicting Fatty Arbuckle 20 Figure 4 Sender-message-receiver model 29 Figure 5 Encoding/decoding model 31 Figure 6 Sign and interpretant 33 Figure 7 Hero 1 asks a question 35 Figure 8 Hero 2 answers 35 Figure 9 Hero 1 thinks Hero 2 is a jerk 36 Figure 10 Hero 1 has had enough, and Hero 2 objects 37 Figure 11 Hero 2 wonders what went wrong 37 Figure 12 Translation as transformative substitution 40 Figure 13 Brecht’s judge devises the correct question for a wrong answer 44 Figure 14 Translation of emotion words into variations of goodthink 55 Figure 15 Newspeak cuts someone off from a sign’s interpretants 58 Figure 16 Winston hears a thrush and thinks of freedom 66 Figure 17 Winston tells O’Brien he will do terrible things to overcome Big Brother 68 Figure 18 Sacrifice and freedom take on a new meaning for Winston 69 Figure 19 Competing frames for understanding 2016 fires in Fort McMurray, Alberta 73 Figure 20 A climate change skeptic changes her mind when she sees the phenomena in a personalized frame 75 Figure 21 Petr Pavlenskii performs Segregation 81 Figure 22 Pavlenskii’s Segregation as interpreted through a psychiatric frame 85 Figure 23 Pavlenskii’s Segregation as an act of political protest 86 Figure 24 Pavlenskii’s Freedom as interpreted through a legal frame 87 Figure 25 Pavlenskii’s Freedom as an act of political protest 88 Figure 26 Percentage of people who think media are biased, as a function of political orientation 100 Figure 27 N-gram representing the use of the phrase “fake news,” 1900–2008 101 Figure 28 Google searches for “fake news,” January 2016–July 2018 103 Figure 29 Donald Trump’s use of the word animals interpreted through the frame of recent history 110 Figure 30 Donald Trump’s use of the term animals interpreted through the frame of security 111 Figure 31 A feedback loop focusing on violence in recent events 113 Figure 32 A feedback loop focusing on expressions of nativist tendencies 113 Figure 33 Me, arriving in St. Étienne, France 119 Figure 34 My workbench 122 Preface What This Book Is, and What It Isn’t This book is part of an answer to a question I asked when I was rede- signing a course I often teach: how might a class, taken as a unit of which a book is merely part, serve as a vehicle for ideas? I was think- ing about how different types of writing express ideas differently. A song, a novel, and a comic book can all recount the same events, but they won’t tell the same story. Likewise, a monograph, an arti- cle, and a conference paper can all report the same results, but they won’t convey the same ideas. So how might a class—with its books, its syllabus, its assignments, its regularly scheduled meetings, its questions and answers—become a collective, collaborative text? Who could read it? What would they learn?1 I wrote this book with these questions in mind. It’s a trace left by the course, so to speak—an echo that gives some sense of what my conversation with my students sounded like. As a result, the chapters that follow might sound like lectures or, if I’m doing things right, turns taken in that conversation. That’s by design, in that I use this book to demonstrate the ideas I describe. In the introduction, for instance, I give an example of two people trying to come to a shared 1 I’ve long admired the students of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist whose Cours de linguistique générale (1916; published in English in 1959 as Course in General Linguistics) laid the foundation for structuralism. He didn’t write the book himself. His students did, based on their notes from the course. His clarity and their dedica- tion showed what a course, taken as a unit, might be. xi https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771992930.01 understanding of an object through a series of back-and-forth ques- tions. I engage in similar exchanges throughout this book. The things I want to understand better are communication theory and cultural translation, and those are the things we talk about in class. Consequently, my first audience has been the students in the course I was redesigning—a third-year undergraduate course on communication theory at the University of Ottawa. They have been worthy partners in conversation. They are smart people, capable of careful and rigorous thought, if they’re so inclined. They’re willing to work, although like anyone else, they object to work that serves no clear purpose. The most meaningful difference between them and me is that I’ve had twenty more years to spend reading: when I make ref- erences they do not catch, it is not because I’m smarter but because I’m older. These things—my students’ intelligence and work ethic on the one hand, and the disparity in our respective levels of experience on the other—explain two choices I’ve made in the pages that follow. First, I’ve explained every reference I think even ten students (out of a class of a hundred) might not catch. I’ve also glossed technical terms they might not have encountered before. Second, I’ve used pic- tures wherever they are useful for cutting through the abstractions to which I’m prone, and to which the subject matter lends itself, especially in cases of metacognition and metatheory (thinking about thinking and theory about theory). I want this book to demonstrate that clarity and rigour go hand in hand, a lesson for which I have my students to thank. So is this book a textbook? Not in a conventional sense. Typical theory textbooks are secondary sources in that they present con- cepts others have developed, along with explanations of context and explications of ideas. Perhaps the best in this genre is Theoriz- ing Communication: Readings Across Traditions, by Robert Craig and Heidi Muller, who organize communication theory into seven such traditions. They reproduce original articles and book chapters to give students more or less direct access to the original expression of each xii Preface https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771992930.01 tradition’s ideas. But their contribution—what makes their book a textbook—is the work they have done to organize, summarize, and contextualize the readings. In other words, it’s a secondary source. This book approaches theory differently. When I teach, I want to do more than give students a set of ideas to memorize.2 I want to engage them in the process of doing theory—of approaching a question the way a scholar would approach it. In my experience, that means responding to, arguing with, and refining ideas other scholars have proposed. The end result is a new set of ideas. The point of this book is to walk students through these steps—to teach by doing. My model has been the books published for the Open University in England in the 1990s, such as Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman and Representation: Cultural Representations and Signi- fying Practices.3 Although they were intended as textbooks, adopting a familiar tone and focusing on the building blocks of theory, they are also about the praxis of teaching.