The Art of Communication in a Polarized World

Kyle Conway

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781771992954
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

People's minds are hard to change. In North America and elsewhere, communities are fractured along ideological lines as social media and algorithms encourage individuals to seek out others who think like they do and to condemn those that don't. This social and political polarization has resulted in systemic discrimination and weaponized communication trends such as gaslighting and fake news.

In this compelling new book, Kyle Conway confronts the communication challenges of our modern world by navigating the space between opposing perspectives. Conway explores how individuals can come to understand another person's interpretation of the world and provides the tools for shaping effective arguments capable of altering their perspective. Drawing on the theory of cultural translation and its dimensions of power, meaning, and invention, Conway deepens our understanding of what it means to communicate and opens the door to new approaches to politics and ethics. An essential guide for surviving in our polarized society, this book offers concrete strategies for refining how values and ideas are communicated.

1

Communication Is Translation
(So Please Mind the Gap)

What you are reading is a translation. It began as a lesson in one of my classes, replete with slides, and now I have turned it into a book chapter.

No, that’s not right. It began much earlier. My lesson reworked a keynote talk I gave at a conference, and my keynote reworked an opaque theoretical article I published in the International Journal of Communication.¹ And that article reworked Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to see what it had to reveal about translation. (For that matter, so does this chapter.) And Hall’s model reworked Marx’s take on political economy in the Grundrisse. (And the Grundrisse reworked older versions of political economy, which reworked . . . which reworked . . . which reworked . . . )

In other words, there is no single point of origin. What you are reading is the result of one long series of transformations and substitutions: encoding/decoding substitutes for the Grundrisse; my article substitutes for encoding/decoding; my keynote substitutes for my article; my lesson substitutes for my keynote; and now, this chapter substitutes for my lesson. It is a translation. It could not be otherwise.

It is no coincidence I’m describing it as a translation. My purpose here is to demonstrate the strategy of the parallax view by asking what would happen if cultural studies scholars talked about translation. Or, more to the point, what would a theory of translation look like if it were grounded in the field of cultural studies? The answer I give is as performative as it is expository. That is, the logic that shapes my answer also applies to this chapter itself, in that it shapes its form. Like every other form of discourse, this chapter participates in an economy of substitution—of trading words, sentences, and ideas for other words, sentences, and ideas. When I speak of translation, that trading is what I mean, and in that respect, my opening examples are strategic: they show how translation works before I even say what I think it is. The examples I choose in the sections that follow are also strategic: they illustrate a key relationship between signs by moving between semiotic systems (for example, between words and pictures or between formal and informal linguistic registers).

So what, then, is that relationship? What exactly is translation? To answer that question, I propose three axioms:

1. To use a sign is to transform it.
2. To transform a sign is to translate it.
3. Communication is translation.

In the following sections, I approach these axioms by providing two parallax views. I begin by describing an early model of communication—the sender-message-receiver model—developed by electrical engineers in the 1940s as a way to improve the telephone networks they were building. Then, to work through these axioms, I peer at the sender-message-receiver model from a different angle, the one provided by Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding.”² It serves as the basis for a materialist approach to semiotics, which in turn provides the conceptual tools to take a new look at “Encoding/Decoding” itself. The point is to pry open the act of speaking and responding to see how signs are transformed when we use them. Taking my cues from Hall, whose essay has had a profound impact on scholarly notions of politics, I finish by arguing that the transformation and substitution of signs opens up a space for a politics of invention, where we can rethink our relation to cultural others so that people we once feared can find their place in the communities we claim as our own.

Sender-Message-Receiver

One of the most influential models of communication developed from efforts by electrical engineers in the 1940s to find ways to make telephones work better. They were asking a technical question, namely how to overcome the noise that interfered with the transmission of information, especially as telephone lines got longer and noise increased. They wanted to calculate the point where signals were transmitted with maximum efficiency, but they had to balance efficiency with redundancy. The most efficient transmission would be one where each element of a message is sent once, but only once. The problem is that the channels used for transmission introduce extraneous signals. If each element is sent only once, the receiver has no way to know whether it has been corrupted because there is no way to confirm that the message received is right. (The receiver would have to ask “Did you say . . . ?” and then repeat the message, thus sending it more than once.) Think of the children’s game of telephone, where one person whispers a message to a second, who whispers it to a third, who whispers it to a fourth, and so on.³ It’s an efficient system (each person whispers the message once), but the message the last person receives is always garbled. And since there is no feedback from one person to the next, the last person cannot know for sure whether (or where) it is garbled until the first person tells everyone what she or he said.

One solution to this problem is to build in forms of redundancy, especially in the form of feedback, although doing so makes the transmission less efficient. Imagine again our game of telephone. If the second person repeated the message back to the first, making sure to get it exactly right, and then the third person repeated it back to the second, and the fourth to the third, and so on, the message would likely be less garbled when it arrived, but it would take much longer for it to work its way down the line.

To solve the problems they faced in the 1940s, engineers proposed the sender-message-receiver model. Claude Shannon published the first iteration in 1948, which Warren Weaver helped popularize in the years that followed. A transmitter, they said, transforms information into a message that can be sent through a channel like a copper wire. The receiver then transforms the message back into its original form. Or, to use Weaver’s terms, “The function of the transmitter is to encode, and that of the receiver to decode, the message” (figure 4).⁴ But just as in the example above, no transmission is exact. There is always noise, and it takes feedback from the receiver to the transmitter to be confident the information is transmitted correctly, or at least that any corruption is kept to a minimum, as Shannon showed with a set of mathematical formulas for determining the optimal levels of efficiency and redundancy.

Although this model has been influential in communication theory, it has drawbacks. The most important, from a cultural studies point of view, is that the “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”⁵ In other words, Shannon was concerned only with the reliable transmission of information, which for him could be any set of symbols, whether they were imbued with meaning or not. He was not concerned with content, which could be “fsd jklrwiouv kldf sa” (a string of letters I produced by smashing my fingers on the keyboard) just as well as “To sleep, perchance to dream.” In either case, the engineering problem remained the same. (Weaver, to be fair, did address the possibility of meaning in his efforts to popularize Shannon’s model. “The formal diagram of a communication system,” he wrote, “can, in all likelihood, be extended to include the central issues of meaning and effectiveness.”)⁶

Figure 4. Sender-message-receiver model developed by Shannon and Weaver showing the steps of message transmission. Adapted from Weaver (1949, p. 12–13).

The question of meaning would be Stuart Hall’s point of de­par­­ture, the pivot around which he would walk to see the sender-message-
receiver model from a new perspective.

Theoretical Foundations: A Materialist Approach to Semiotics

The axioms I propose above have two starting points: materialism (a philosophical stance that grounds analysis in people’s lived experience) and semiotics (the study of how meaning functions).⁷ The materialism comes, as mentioned in the introduction, from Stuart Hall’s reaction to the sender-message-receiver model in his essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” better known in its revised form, “Encoding/Decoding.” Hall argues that television programs are only one moment in a circuit that links producers and viewers in a specific social context. The meaning with which they imbue a program is grounded in this context.

The encoding/decoding model, in fact, is an application of Marx’s political economy, as laid out in his introduction to the Grundrisse.⁸ Marx’s insight was that production and consumption were not independent moments in the circulation of commodities but were, on the contrary, mutually constitutive—one could not exist without the other. On the one hand, to give an example, the objects a cobbler produces become a pair of shoes in a meaningful sense only when someone puts them on her or his feet. In this way, the act of consumption is implicated in the act of production. On the other, the cobbler produces shoes in such a way as to influence how people wear them, by altering materials and styles to create a demand. In this way, production is implicated in the act of consumption.

Hall extends this analysis to television. He describes the moments of production and consumption—“encoding” and “decoding”—as mutually constitutive. (Note the common language with Shannon and Weaver.) Producers encode certain meanings into shows, but viewers do not necessary decode them as intended. Nonetheless, the moments of production and consumption are linked in that producers anticipate viewers’ reactions, and viewers interpret shows in part based on their knowledge of producers. The shows themselves are complex signs that link producers and viewers, who also operate within a shared social context.

In short, production and consumption are linked in a relationship of mutual dependence. Hall frames these forms of mutual influence as a circuit, which he illustrates in figure 5.

Note that I have adapted the figure Hall presents in the earlier version of his essay (from 1973), which differs from its better known counterpart (in “Encoding/Decoding” from 1980) in one important way: it has an arrow that runs from the factors that influence decoding to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface: What This Book Is, and What It Isn’t
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: People’s Minds Are Hard to Change
• 1 Communication Is Translation (So Please Mind the Gap)
• 2 Newspeak as a Manual for Translation
• 3 Translational Invention, Inventive Translation
• 4 Fake News and Perspective Unmoored
• Conclusion: Jumping In
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index