[FRIAM] chicken-egg::gumflap-talk

[Prof David West]

The following comment is a reaction to something said earlier about speaker--respondent connection ( or my misreading thereof) and what glen and marcus are speaking about now (or my misreading thereof).

It seems that there must be a whole, call it a Story, that aggregates and integrates parts,  or Discrete Messages (DM). A DM is always a dyad - the expression plus the response. Both expressions and responses can be composites, including tone, subtext, empathic projection, etc.

Background for this comment is the work of Keith Basso and Native American stories.  The "meaning" the "purpose" the "communicative value" of these stories eluded scholars for decades. The reason, Basso asserts, is that scholars were working with transcripts of the stories that included only that which the narrator spoke, omitting the responses of the audience sprinkled throughout the narration. 

Audience responses had a profound effect on the telling of the story, guiding the narrator in different directions, even to alternative endings for the story. Basso argues that the immediate needs of the community were reflected in the responses, guiding the story in directions such that the telling of the story in that place and time for that audience achieved a desired goal, e.g. motivating the community towards some action, increasing communal solidarity, providing assurance in a moment of adversity, etc.

Others have extended Basso's work with different communities, especially African American sermons, Pentacostal services, even Snake Handler cults in the Appalachians.

To me this suggests that the speech act is, in itself, nothing more than 'gum-flapping' but when a collection of 'flaps' are inter-connected / integrated into a conversation, or, more accurately, a story; the story  has an emergent property of "meaning." 

'Flaps' have no "meaning." Stories do.

davew


On Mon, Jun 8, 2020, at 8:36 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> Hm. That sounds like a distinction in kind that's more likely a 
> distinction in degree. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for episodic 
> perspectives. I can read a post at 03:00 and read it in one way, with 
> whatever that perspective might be. Then read it again after a workout, 
> 3 cups of coffee, and a hot shower, and read it in an entirely 
> different way. But I could also listen to a readout of it while working 
> out. And if it's long enough, the perspective I have when I read the 
> 1st part could be entirely different from the perspective I had when I 
> finished.
> 
> I don't see any reason why the pseudo-synchronous meatspace 
> conversations [†] are anything other than compact versions of the 
> asynchronous post-response format.  Some of us may be more or less 
> capable of near-real-time empathy than others. That doesn't mean 
> near-real-time is fundamentally different from asynchronous.
> 
> And just like with NOT moving one's lips while reading relies on 
> inhibitory signals, empathy relies on inhibitory suppression of one's 
> *own* impulses. (It also relies on positive activation of those 
> impulses. But the positive is usually given primacy when talking about 
> things like empathy. My point is that it's a balance between the two.)
> 
> [†] "pseudo" because the stimulus-response is not instantaneous. 
> There's a non-zero transient even in the fastest person.
> 
> On 6/8/20 7:20 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> > Incidentally, I think these asynchronous communications are not speech.  They are another kind of encoding and decoding system.   There is often ambiguity in terminology to be reconciled, and wider and narrower search that can be conducted to do that reconciliation, but that is not what I would call empathy.   Empathy is about anticipation and resonance of feelings.   I think in written communication correspondents should be expected to manage their feelings because they have a good opportunity to do so.
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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