Who Would Have Believed that Obama Would be Worse at Communication than Bush?

About the time the US went from silent movies to talkies, presidents seemingly stopped talking and became images instead of leaders who provided a narrative.

Obama press secretary Jay Carney's retirement is a good opportunity to look at Obama's effort to communicate.

George W. Bush was able to initiate two wars, a department of Homeland Security, TARP, and a massive tax cut. His record of legislative initiatives was not as great as LBJ's list of Great Society initiatives, but at least he matched LBJ for the average number of press conferences per year. It didn't matter that he had a penchant for butchering the language, he put effort into talking directly to the American people.
Obama? Not so much.

Obama's average of 20 press conferences per year puts him below either of the Bush men or Clinton. Congress has made it clear that no issues are as important to them as obstructing any of his initiatives, but Obama hasn't exactly made extraordinary efforts to communicate directly to the American people. In this age of 24-7 news coverage, you might think that he could at least dictate the topic, if not the position on them. (I remember feeling so flabbergasted at George W. Bush's administration's ability to convince the American people that of all the things we could be focused on, Iraq was the one that deserved the most attention. As much as I opposed the war even then, this is pretty great example of what it means to control the narrative, to dictate the topics that receive attention.)

FDR averaged nearly as many press conferences per year as Obama has average per term. And he passed legislation at least the scope of Obamacare about once per year. Can you imagine what FDR would make of the incredible possibilities offered by continuous news coverage?

Just judging from the paucity of press conferences, it doesn't seem as though Obama believes that he can talk over the heads of Congress directly to the American people. I wonder what FDR would say to him about that?

The Illusion of Understanding

There seems to be this notion in matters of diplomacy and relationships that if only two parties understood each other, peace would ensue. The apparent assumption is that engaging in real dialogue with better communication will result in a healthier, stronger relationship.

That, it seems to me, presumes that the two parties really will respect what they come to understand. If the husband likes spending money on every new gadget and could care less about saving, his wife likely won't feel more loving once she better understands this about him. If the Palestinians really do think that you as a people should not exist, better communication will do little to bring peace.

The tough nut always seems to be the same. Without a context of compassion and acceptance, understanding does little to repair a relationship. And while you may easily accept the very different philosophy of someone across town or in another country, it is tougher to accept that your neighbor or lover has a different view of the world than you do. Better communication that lets you understand such differences might just alarm you. If you don't have compassion enough to be ready to accept whoever they are, you aren't ready for real communication. And they probably won't give it to you.

How People Talk

Today we were with my parents. I realized something about what we talk about - my parents and I prefer very different topics: dad likes to talk about things, mom about people and I like to talk about ideas.

I decided to process this by creating a table, adding to it a reference point. The thing I didn't put into this simple table is optimistic or pessimistic - whether someone prefers horror stories or stories with a happy ending.
(To make this table large enough to easily read, you can either click through or buy a huge monitor.)

Bernard on Fragmentation

Suddenly, without warning, Bernard utters, “The elegy of bloom has left this room, there is nothing left to say.”

“Huh?” I respond unintelligently, caught unawares by what might have been some attempt at poetry.

“I’ve been thinking,” Bernard said with the careful deliberation and enunciation of someone who has been drinking. When he’s drunk, Bernard become loquacious and then suddenly stares into space for a few minutes before slumping forward and falling asleep.

“About,” I ask, taking the bait.

“Descendants of medieval serfs now surf the net, talk about cell phones on cell phones and blog about blogging.” He waves his arm with a flourish, “We’re using the limits of language to define the limits of language and struggling to become mindful of our own minds. Do you suppose that this is automated recursion, the curious math of evolutionary algorithms that don't know when to stop? Communication runs amok past the point of anything useful?” Bernard stops and stares at the table, seeming to actually contemplate his own question. “Or do you suppose that we’re just confusing self contained for self reliant? Our own interior life now so complex as to have completely distracted us from the reality outside, like a driver distracted by fighting kids in the backseat and forgetting to watch the road?”

“Bernard,” I begin, hesitatingly. “Yeah. The car metaphor works for me,” I say, not sure what to do with the rest. “Context defines everything, really and yet it is the last place that we look, focused as we are on everything but. The fight inside the car.”

Bernard stares at me, slack jawed. “This is about language, Ron. No one seems to get the joke - the fact that we're using linear language when the world is made up swoops and swirls and dynamic relationships so convoluted that no one even remembers what is being related.” Bernard is on a roll now, and he sits up, waving his hands so dramatically that I begin to fear that he’ll sweep the drinks off the table and into our laps.

“We tune into shows that translate our confusion into simple words. We create different tribes and different cultures by translating it into different words. We read books. We talk to each other. We make sense of our world, each explanation an elegy of things gone wrong or right. And yet each explanation is doomed to failure because it must be comprehensible, and really, how could it be? How could anything that made sense really make sense when none of this does?” Bernard sweeps his hand to enclose the room.

“And through this all we move forward in the clunkiest of time machines,” Bernard points to himself, “a time machine with only one speed and one direction – these bodies that carry us through time.” And then he leans into my face and chuckles, “and call ourselves ourselves even though everything about us changes, bits and pieces of us strewn behind us like a child carrying a bag of flour. A lost conviction here. A changed belief there. Our hair.”

At this point I make no attempt to respond. He’s on a roll and simply needs to express.

“And I have been wondering, Ron, if the Hindus aren't right about reincarnation and whether just a few thousand whole souls that began the world have busily divided into smaller and smaller fragments in each generation, dividing to keep pace with a population of billions. That means that each one of us becomes smaller fragments of soul as the world grows larger – a world full of specialists helpless on our own.”

"We think that communication has anything to do with communication when it has everything to do with connection." Bernard draws his hands together, like a bad speaker who is consciously trying to use gestures to communicate more clearly. “We’re fragments that are finally drawn together through cell phones and blogging and language and minding each other’s minds, drawn together by what’s missing on our own. Fragments made to feel briefly whole again each time we connect and click, like puzzle pieces trying to put themselves together again with no way to see the picture on the box or even whatever they’ve become so far, no way to step back to see the invisible context, the whole that determines if this is the right click for the larger picture – only knowing that this click doesn’t clunk.” And suddenly, improbably, Bernard speeds up.

“And all this communication and information might do nothing to explain these complex dynamics of the world – nothing to do with markets and financial madness and everything to do with the swirl of fragments coming back together. That might be all the motion – all the force – in the world. Maybe the world’s dynamic is nothing but the swirl and maybe there is nothing more to explain, no more need for language - not after these fragments click.”

And as if he’d suddenly had been clicked off, Bernard stared across the room for about two minutes and then, his chin fell onto his chest and his eyes closed. I decided to wait awhile before carrying him out to the car to drive him home.

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other blogs
Sara Paretsky on The Novel in the Age of Fragmentation
Cultural fragmentation

Massive Connectivity Now - Social Simulations Next

Aristotle said that there were three ways to report truth: history, science, and fiction. History reported facts. Science made those facts into laws that could apply to past or future. Fiction was the highest form, though, because it included what could be. (I'm almost positive Aristotle wrote this. If not, it was someone else. And if no one wrote this previously, I'll just take credit for it. I often confuse my memory and imagination, usually to my detriment, but I digress.)

Our brains spend lots of energy running models of what ought to be. We simulate a lot. It helps for the various regions of our brains to have models that run in parallel - in situations as varied as interpersonal behavior and navigating our way around a garden.

But this capability to simulate so much would be mind boggling if not for values that guide the activity. All that massive potential is guided by wants and needs - we simulate in ways that guide us towards desired states rather than send us adrift into the sea of infinite possibilities.

We've evolved massively impressive internal systems that allow for all this to take place within the confines of our head, dense brains so tightly packed with connections that "a cubic millimeter of brain tissue contains about a mile of axons and a couple of miles of dendrites. (1)" The brain is a mass of connections and those connections are often busy with simulations. It was not until this massive redundancy emerged that the capacity for simulation emerged with it. There are parallels in the social world: we're beginning to see a massive growth in parallel connectivity between people.

Social evolution lags species evolution. In 1866, a transatlantic cable was operating between North America and Great Britain. When it was first laid, a New Yorker wrote in his diaries, “Yesterday’s [New York] Herald said that the cable is undoubtedly the Angel in the Book of Revelation with one foot in the sea and one foot on land, proclaiming that time is no longer. Moderate people merely say that this is the greatest achievement in history. (2)”

It has taken about 150 years for this simple cable to transform into massive redundancy. In today's world, there are millions and millions of connections between individuals. The Internet has become the simplest, catch-all for this phenomenon of massive interconnectivity.

When the transatlantic cable was first laid, it was used by bankers like J.P. Morgan to execute bond trades between Britain and the US. It was a cable used for action. Now that there is massive redundancy in the connections, it is increasingly used to generate what-if scenarios, to define what could be. The difference between news and blogs is often as simple as that: it is the difference between reporting on what happened and reporting on what could be.

Blogs might be a kind of social fiction - reporting on what could be. What if the capacity for generating social simulations just becomes more enhanced? What if it becomes a tool that that both expedites the articulation of desired states and makes it easier to navigate towards those?

I suffer from wild bouts of optimism, a condition I've never been able to properly explain. I think that we'll learn more about how to join brains together into social simulations that move us towards the better community. The Internet, blogs, even Democracy, will be looked back on as the equivalent of the telegraph. The connections are proliferating. The simulations have begun. Now, we watch it ratchet up. The fiction that makes reality is, after all, the strongest form of truth. Eat your vitamins. It is going to get really fascinating and you want to be alive when this happens.

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For those of you keeping track at home, this appears to be my 700th post, about 100 more than I would have written had I been posting once a day. Still no cure for my idearhea.

(1) Read Montague, Your Brain is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions (New York: Plume, 2006) 35.
(2)William J. Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created (San Francisco: McGraw-Hill, 2004) 186.

Don't Talk - Simulate

As part of the on-going experiment I call life, today I offer you a multimedia editorial - opinion and music. (Scroll down to "Don't Talk" Video.)
If you want to cross the room, you'll walk. If you want to cross town, you'll drive. If you want to cross the country, you'll fly. We've figured out that, when it comes to transportation, it's worth changing tools when we change the scope of our travels.

We've yet to figure this out when it comes to communication and planning. When you want to plan lunch, you talk. If executives want to plan next year's goals and activities, they talk. If politicians want to lead us into the next decade, they talk.

I imagine that there are quite a few reasons that our politics have entered a stage of such widespread discontent. We've learned from advertisers that progress comes from discontentment, and in this age of unprecedented affluence, we may well suffer from unprecedented levels of discontentment. We have little power over the policies we vote on - getting to choose at the end rather than getting involved in crafting a choice. All these and more could be reasonably pointed to as reasons for the discontent in politics. But I suggest that there is one more reason.

Kids who have to travel across the room don't usually grumble about walking. Make them travel across town by foot and they play a different tune. In our choices of politicians and policies, we continually confront the question (implied or explicit) of longer term consequences. Few can think through the fall of the dominoes very far. (My friend and occasional commentator Norman says that studies indicate that 85% of the population is unable to follow or explain if, then logic.) No wonder the polity is grumbling.

The real political leadership is going to come from the people who find ways to popularize simulation tools that credibly assist folks in planning the future. In my job, we work with project teams to plan their future, developing new products. This process inevitably reveals flaws in their current plans that would not have occurred to them without the use of our process and tool. Future implications too quickly become too complex to properly influence our present actions - unless we have tools to reveal these problems. This is even more so in the realm of politics, an area far more complex than product development. The political leadership that matters in this century will be leadership that brings us beyond talk - or, rather, gives us more than talk. Literally. It will be leadership that gives us tools to help us to create our joint future.

And, to close on this point, I'll take you to Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs performing the song, "Don't Talk." Natalie does not just have an incredible voice, look like that beautiful neo-bohemian that at once enticed and intimidated all the boys in college, and write lyrics that go down like poetry. She dances like the little girl next door who doesn't know anyone is watching. If that doesn't grab your heart by the lapels and give it a twirl on the dance floor, then you really do need your break this weekend.