A Small Detour into Communications Theory

Ed Zitron, the angriest man in tech media (and I mean that as a compliment), posted a derisive post on Bluesky (yes, that is an awkward wording, but I cannot bring myself to call them skeets. A man has his pride.) about how a researcher didn’t speak normally. He deleted it, I would suspect because people pointed out that the researcher was making solid points on the context of his research paper, points that Zitron would generally agree with. But I don’t think he was entirely wrong. I think he and the researcher were victims of a kind of context collapse. And I think, rather unoriginally, that that sort of collapse harms leftist politics.

The researcher’s post was, to be fair, hard to parse if you are not immersed in the peculiar terminology of his subfield. And that is generally fine. Every industry, every job, every group, has its own short cuts and terms of art. Human beings communicate in in group shorthand all the time. I suspect that tendency is hard wired into us. But it is difficult to sustain the meaning outside of your in group. Even in my company, for example, the business and tech sides can often speak past each other when speaking in their respective shorthand. And we are in the same company, working on the same projects, with the same context (the business we run). Imagine how confusing it is when you are trying to reach people who do not share your context.

That, I think, is some of the problem with leftist politics. Much of the terminology comes from academic or activist shorthand. That shorthand makes perfect sense within its context, but is easy to mischaracterize. White privilege makes sense in its original context. But privilege also has a common connotation that overrides the term outside of its normal context. Same with Defund the Police. Most activists mean “spend less money to have cops do things they suck at, like mental health interventions, and more money on addiction support, homeless support, education, and good paying jobs so there is less for cops to do.” (I do recognize that some activists want to remove police altogether, but my sense is even among people who use the term they are a minority position. Apologies if that is incorrect) But defund, outside its context, means ending all money to police.

If you are explaining, it is often said, you are losing.

Now, this is not a panacea, of course. Critical Race Theory and DEI are clear and yet the right wing media was able to turn them into boogey terms. the information environment is terrible for truth and nuance and great for bullshit and bad faith. But I don’t think that is an argument for continuing to do what we are doing now. Everything, for better or worse, is public. And while nothing can prevent bad faith attacks, communications need, I think, to be framed with the possibility of bad faith attacks in mind. If that means being more verbose or using terms that take into account the connotation of the words in everyday usage, then I think it is incumbent upon people who communicate to try and do so.

Even on social media, even when your post is meant for your peers and not the general public. Everything, as I said before, it public now. If you post on a social media platform, for example, you must be aware that your audience is not only who you intend but who will see your words. Which is almost certainly many more people, almost all of whom do not share your context, than you think.

This is not fair, of course. In a decent world, we would live in an information environment where nuance, context, and good faith would be supported. We do not live in that environment. And until we do, if you want to help advance understanding and good policies, you have a obligation to communicate in a manner that does that. It’s more work and as I already said not fair, but that is your choice, as rotten as it may be.

Either take into account the broken information environment we live in or contribute to the misinformation and misunderstanding that the information environment fosters.