Having described this background I have to say that some forms of word art are more adaptive and flexible towards that tendency than others. Philosophers like Nietzsche, looking at such tendencies, probably would have concluded or generalised that the world moves from a divine style of message to a man-to-man style, or that hierarchical structures of relationships are being replaced by horizontal ones. In my last entry we discussed the communication model created by another Russian philologist Roman Jakobson, which also shows that the prerequisites of any communication act are the sender and recipient of a message, the message itself, its reference, channels and code.Īs we can see from that, it also supports the notion of an interaction between the sender and the recipient of the message - in other words the notion of a dialogue. Even a monologue can be interpreted as a dialogue of a person with himself, a kind of autocommunication. According to him, the novels of Leo Tolstoy are traditionally monophonic, whereas the literature of Fyodor Dostoevsky is based on different principles of polyphony and it is a dialogue constructed of different characters, voices and ideas that plays the main role.īakhtin goes further and says that in fact all literature is a form of dialogue. There's a deal of literature about this tendency and the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin is the foremost representative of this way of thinking.
In short you understand what I'm talking about. But true dialogue demands an equal emphasis on those other conversational skills: listening and responding.With the growth of so-called 'user-generated content', we in journalism are engaged in an ever more reciprical conversation with our audiencesĮven parenting is more about finding common ground with your children, rather than flogging and smacking them.Īs a public we are finding dictators who flex their muscles in international relations increasingly unpalatable and prefer diplomacy and compromises. As their use of a social-media platform like Twitter shows, even today journalists tend to think of their primary media role as talking. For any participant in a communication, the most important elements are first, truly listening to what others say, and then meaningfully responding to them. We tend to forget that a conversation is not simply one person talking, then the other. Despite the ongoing efforts of organizations like the Associated Press to control when and how their employees speak, journalists now have the same power as everyone else to speak directly to their audience.)Īs I say, all this is old hat for anyone even slightly familiar with new media. (SImilarly, the publisher’s role is no longer to dominate or control the journalist. The journalist’s role is no longer to dominate or control the conversation, but to participate in the conversation, support it, and help a variety of other voices to be heard. It is no longer a one-way speech, but a two-way exchange. Now, as Storyful’s David Clinch told Mashable, “journalists must be able to pivot quickly between the idea of using the community as a source of news and as the audience for news, because they are both.”Īs a result, the nature of journalistic discourse is transforming. Journalists can no longer rely on the idea of professionalism as separating them in a meaningful way from “amateur” bloggers and other kinds of citizen journalists. This change means that traditional distinctions between the journalist, the reader, and the news source are breaking down. Not only can they talk back to publications, but they can also compete against those publications by talking to other readers directly. What’s more, they can now be publishers themselves, whether through their own blogs, Twitter, Facebook, or other forms of social media. Now, readers can easily and immediately comment on stories by commenting on blogs. Digital technologies have dramatically changed the balance.
Publishers talked to their readers, but few readers could talk back, and in only limited ways. In the beginning of their chapter, in fact, they point to magazines as a “form of market conversation.” But the publishing industry’s advantage is only relative it too has tended either to ignore or to dominate the conversation.īefore the Internet, journalism was largely a one-way form of communication. Searls and Weinberger were addressing their comments above all to public relations and marketing people. But however obvious the idea may seem, it remains a powerful, foundational concept for new media. Today, for anyone who’s thought much about social media, it verges dangerously on being trite. In 1999, when Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote in The Cluetrain Manifesto that “ markets are conversations,” it was a fresh, radically new idea. Doc Searls and David Weinberger: "Markets are conversations"