20th Century Take on 21st Century Dialogue

Today I'm going to talk a bit about SXSWi in relation to Bakhtin, Richards, and Burke. More, I'm going to discuss the nature of modern rhetoric and social dialogue as increasingly reliant upon multidimensional forms and referents.

Sarah Lacy, Mark Zuckerberg, and a crowded audience all a twitter walk into a bar. In this case the bar is actually an enormous convention hall in downtown Austin, but everyone involved might have had a better excuse for what transpired if it had been held at a bar.



What transpires isn't fully evident in the video. The audience has twittered itself into a frenzy over Lacy's interview style. She reciprocates their anger afterward in a multitude of ways. This interview with a local Austin reporting right after the incident being one:



Now, keep in mind that Lacy likely has not seen any of the Twitter discussion before either of thse videos. She can't possibly understand the forces at work and isn't in on the discourse her audience has created. Basically, Lacy and the audience are both talking to walls.

Bahktin states that 'The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance.' But consider the wide-ranging nature of this discourse, because it didn't stop with the above.

The blogosphere caught fire, Business Week responded, and a week later, Lacy responded in Business Week. Numerous others then responded in the comment fields to her response.

The mind boggles at how to contextualize this dialogue. Trying to determine the concrete situation in this raging discourse seems impossible. The tangle of space, location, and participants appears complex and irreducible. The live performance contextualizes the video, the video contextualizes the blogs, the blogs contextualize the live performance, the magazine articles contextualize the video response, and comment field contextualize each separate part. As a whole, there's no traditional speaker or audience.

Whose referents matter to Richards' triangle? Zuckerberg's? Lacy's? The SXSW audience? Business Week's readership? In this case, attempting to justify a correct symbol, referent, and idea amongst so many diverse speakers and audiences becomes problematic. In fact, one could argue the only way to make sense of it all is for an outside force to backward rationalize referents unintended at any point during the maelstrom.

More so, keep in mind that Lacy's audience rebelled seemingly out of a feeling of disenfranchisement from her interview style. However, since she could not see the Twitter comments till after, her angry response mimics and reciprocates similar if not the exact same discourse failures as the audience's response. Bakhtin's theme in this case is that by avoiding dialogue, the speaker audience relationship showed disrespect to both agents. Must as Richards fast-talking preacher, Lacy and her audience talked themselves right out of the actual discourse that was occurring.

In Bahktin's view Lacy and audience used creative elements of style (chatty interview and Twitter antagonism) beyond the realm of their audience's social orientation. This lack of understanding, and later lack of respect, could not help but result in a failure of language and dialogue.

Even in Burke's view the story possesses so many elements that uncovering the action of the language seems difficult. Where one party see chaos, another sees empowerment. Where one sees arrogance, another sees professionalism. The number of actors who see different stories threatens the entire discourse. So many screens work against and with one another that the resulting chaos might negate the importance of individuals screens entirely. In the end, is the result not more important than any one screen, even Lacy's, Zuckerberg's, mine, or yours?

And this completely ignores Zuckeberg as a participant.

The point is that as brilliant as these writers are, their binary theories cannot quite solve the Gordian knot of true collaborative communication. These works offer a start, but something inherently less binary than individual/group or speaker/audience is required to make sense of modern discourse. Now I just need to find a sword sharp enough to cut it.