Beware the Persuaders…

Posted on August 25, 2010 by Ben

A portent that the field may be returning to the faculty psychology days of yore? I give you an excerpt of Mark Frauenfelder’s review of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion:

…

How is it that door-to-door salespeople, marketers, car dealers, politicians, strangers, con artists, and cult leaders are able to persuade people to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do? That’s the question Robert B. Cialdini asked himself after falling victim to a huckster’s influence one time too many. But instead of shrugging his shoulders, this professor of psychology decided to study the phenomenon and find out if there is a set of common techniques used to convince people to hand over their money or time against their better judgment. And he discovered that indeed there was, and wrote a book about it called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

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More here.

Tweeting into the Echo-Chamber (Or, The Oily Bird Gets the Worm… to Un-Apologize)

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Ben

(Audio courtesy of Deadwood.)

I’ve long been fascinated by the art of the apology, or in some instances, the spectacular lack thereof. Case in point: a couple of weeks ago, Texas Republican Congressperson Joe Barton notably apologized to the corporate heads of BP in the wake of White House pressure to secure from the company a $20 billion payback fund. Soon thereafter, he retracted that apology… then later retracted his retraction… and then I got bored following the story, so who even knows the apology’s status as of this writing? The malum discordiae for such tone-deaf flip floppery? According to Steven Andrew’s Examiner article “How to Use Twitter to Make Friends and Influence People,” it had an awful lot to do with Twitter*:

Literally before the GOP leadership and the conservative media fully realized what Barton had said, much less had time to think about the consequences, Barton’s comments and the GOBP idea had already ripped through twitter like wildfire and the narrative was set. The Republican establishment, their clumsy Fox News and talk radio dinosaurs rendered useless, panicked and ran for the exits.

Now that the traditional rightwing echo chamber has been knocked back on its heels by this unanticipated blast of disruptive feedback, it’ll be interesting to see how the “tweet factor” is accounted for in the future… And if Barton will eventually retract the retraction of the retraction.

* And maybe a little of this, too.

Science’s Rhetorical Bottleneck

Posted on June 6, 2010 by Ben

Global climate change, childhood vaccinations, evolution, heliocentrism: in most areas of scientific inquiry, you will find its detractors. Thanks to the echo chambers afforded by the likes of cable news (always hungry to frame all issues as right/left controversies) and the web (where anyone with the bandwidth can stand on the shoulders of giants, if only to throw rocks at their heads), these detractors are getting larger platforms from which to mount their offensives. The problem with science is that it relies too heavily on the scientific method, on empirical data, on the cool, unblinking logic of the microscope and slide rule… and too little on the rhetorical arts. Such is the argument forwarded by Erin Biba in her column in this month’s WIRED, “Why Science Needs to Step Up Its PR Game.” A snippet:

“Scientists hate the word spin. They get bent out of shape by the concept that they should frame their message,” says Jennifer Ouellette, director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a National Academy of Sciences program that helps connect the entertainment industry with technical consultants. “They feel that the facts should speak for themselves. They’re not wrong; they’re just not realistic.”

To spin or not to spin… while the white-coats are trying to figure that one out, I should add that some scientists tend to think that denial is a potentially insurmountable force, perhaps even hardwired in our brains. See: “Living in Denial: Why Sensible People Reject the Truth.” *sigh!* With such scientific evidence mounting against the powers of persuasion, why even bother?

The Canary in the Coal Mine?

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Ben

A story that broke last week, from Inside Higher Ed:

SMU Suspends Its University Press

Southern Methodist University is suspending the operations of its university press — a move that has angered faculty members and other supporters of the institution’s publishing arm.

The current economic downturn has forced many presses to economize by trimming staff and titles, and those at Louisiana State University and Utah State University were at risk of being closed last year, but both survived. Part of the reason for anger at SMU is that advocates for the press said they never had a chance to propose alternative cuts or to defend the necessity of a university press.

The article goes on to explain the various political and economic factors caught up in this decision, but the thing that caught me about this was the surprise factor: little warning, no input from faculty. Imagine all of the potential authors caught up in this melee, thinking that they might have been well on their way to press, only to find the rug yanked out from under them (and if some of those writers happen to be pursuing tenure, well, good luck to them).

Given news like this (and so far, this strikes me as the most dramatic example, but university presses are in a bind across the nation), projects like Harlot become all-the-more important in our related fields (rhetoric, composition, communication, digital media studies). Not only do they help give academics new venues in which to publish, collectively such offerings will likely lead to a tipping point in the not-too-distant future where the academic publishing ecology will shift in their direction. With the SMU Press case, we may be witnessing higher ed’s realization that the university press model of scholarship is no longer tenable; while this is perhaps ultimately in the best interest of the field, no one said it wouldn’t be painful.

Google’s Logo: Please Touch

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Ben

Here’s a bite-sized bit of visual rhetoric for your daily blog-scrape. One of my weekend rituals, in fact a way of willfully embracing my impending old age, is watching CBS Sunday Morning while enjoying my morning coffee. While typically fare for the geriatric set or the hoighty toighty, I’ve noticed that the magazine show is increasingly leaning in the direction of the Internet Age with its programming. Case in point: today’s episode had a fascinating segment on the history of Google’s “doodles,” those augmented logotypes that pop up on days such as the anniversary of the barcode, DaVinci’s birthday, Halloween, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. What started out as a modest task bestowed upon an artistically inclined intern has now evolved into an integral part of the “Google experience” and now involves a small army of graphic designers and artists who meet regularly to discuss which upcoming anniversaries are appropriately “googly.” Over the years, the tendency to augment, obscure, and even obliterate the logo (as in the one for Jackson Pollock’s birthday) has become increasingly commonplace.

Brand identity is much more than just a logo, a point that Google gets. Most companies see their logo as a sacrosanct space, inviolate and untouchable, but Google ignores this brick-and-mortar corporate truism. In fact, early on in the company’s history, Google saw its logo as a space for play, for ethos building. The fact that they often opt to commemorate events that lean more towards the science/technology/art end of the cultural spectrum and less towards the political/divisive end attests to the kind of image they want to convey: perhaps a touch more of “Don’t be controversial” rather than “Don’t be evil.”