The "daily reminder" as genre

Over on Twitter, I've assumed the identity of a cheerleader as a function of my participation in the debate over Brexit. Placed squarely on the sideline, I try to cheer those on the fields by doing remarkable poses, yells and dance moves to that effect. In the cheerleader-role, I've been running what I call my "daily reminder". Each day I post

"This is your daily reminder that you have millions of friends and allies in the EU."

And then I add some new remark which I feel—for whatever reason—is fitting for the day. Usually these are fairly upbeat; as fits the point of the reminder (see below), but they don´t have to be wholly without teeth.

A ”reminder”, Merriam-Webster usefully reminds us, is “something that calls a memory or thought to the mind”. Our spouse can remind us to remember the car keys, or we can remind ourselves to call the mayor before sunset. The reminder, thus has a clear social and cognitive function, it returns information to us that we might need for one reason or another. The reminder also has a negative side of course, it can bring back memories we’d rather keep away. “The sight of Marie in the crowd was an unwelcome reminder to Lucy of love lost”. However, there is a recurrent element between the two: the reminder aligns the mind with reality; brings back something that for whatever reason, had been pushed in the background. That is the function of the genre.

How about the daily reminder? Well, going by what has already been written it must be something important that tends to get lost or steps into the background every day, and which should be brought to the foreground again. (BTW: I DuckDuckGo’ed “daily reminder”; there’s a lot of motivational claptrap coming up; stay on this channel – don´t google it either; it’s probably even worse.) So, the “daily” reminder has to be there, because something gets lost and lost and lost and lost.

In the case at hand, there are many things that tend to get lost in the brouhaha of the Brexit debate, and many things one might want to use as a daily reminder. For me, one of those most close at hand is the fact that Brexit is an utterly pointless exercise. There is no necessity in it. It is voluntary; an unforced choice of something immensely damaging. And when you look at the consequences of Brexit, the question arises: why do this? This very important banality tends to get lost in the daily exchanges and thus could need a reminder. It’s a little harsh, but many people who have spent time in therapy know, that a hash fact stubbornly held on to can be quite healing. 

However, I chose another daily reminder, “that you have millions of friends and allies in the EU”. Why? First of all, because in a crisis like this with tempers flaring and fates, futures, and lives at stake, there is less kindness to go around than needed. I can’t vote, I can’t demonstrate, I can’t even sign the central petitions. I can, however, show a little kindness. And every day, someone seems to need it. It would take me a long time to count the number of times someone has expressed that they needed exactly that reminder on exactly that day. Most of the time, I don´t even know, why they need it; but they do, and I'm fine with that.

This is, in one important aspect simply reverse trolling. Just as the trolls and bots (remember to block them!!!) use your empathy to tear into people's feelings, because they know that we automatically establish a human connection around their awful utterance and treat it as if is is somehow meaningful, even when it is just hateful, I use peoples' empathy to soothe their feelings, because I know that they automatically establish a human connection around my consoling utterance and see it as meaningful, and thus put more into the words than I can. Empathy is a superpower—and can be harnessed for good.

However, there is a second—even more genre-like point: the recurrence makes the reminder move in time. You had one yesterday, and the day before that, you recognize it today, and you know it will return again tomorrow.  In my terms, you recognize it as a #genre and it works on you as such. And so, the recurrence adds power to the simple, apparently insignificant message. Just like nagging or criticism can wear you down, drip by drip, my little reminder accumulates impact, because it always returns. 

(Well, always and always. You get the point.)

It’s slightly pavlovian, of course, I am aiming for a conditioned response, but if that response is that someone smiles, feels better, and can handle what the world throws at them a little better, I’ll take it. 

NB: Again, this post was originally a twitter thread. You can see it here.

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News and Real News

We all know what "news" is, or at least we think we do; and over the last few years we have come to learn more about "fake news" (see my blogpost on the genre label "Fake News" here) than most of us ever cared to. But another genre term lingers in the background. In discussions of news, we repeatedly hear ourselves or fellow debaters say sentences like, "but the real news is that..."

So, if we take this distinction to be meaningful what, then, is  implied by it? If you look at the newsflow you will see "news". Defined loosely as "notable events that have happend within the last approximately 24 hours". Interestingly, the "happend" here may also mean that a previous, sometimes much older, event has come to light (think #metoo), or that an existing story has taken a new turn. Thus, one of the reasons (but only one) why a player in the media landscape may opt to not comment on a given story is that the comment updates the story, and gives it new life and a new turn through the news cycle; or probably two new turns as there is likely to be comments upon the comment.

But, and this is where the genre label "real news" comes in, underlying this stream there may be other factors at play, some much more fundamental than what is made evident in the news cycle.

To add an example, picked again, as in previous posts, from the UK Brexit debate. When Theresa May declared a few days ago that the UK will leave the customs union when Brexit kicks in. she may do so to appeases the hard Brexiters in her party. However, by consequence, she also declares for a hard border in Northern Ireland and Gibraltar. The only alternative is to demand that the EU should no longer even try to control its own outer border, since that would be for the benefit of the UK, but is otherwise a fairly strange demand. This, in turn, fits into a much longer narrative of both the manifold twist and turns, and the overarching structural questions at play in the Brexit process.

The border/customs union double-bind, as well as the inept handling of it, is brilliantly caricatured by SKZ Cartoons:

So, returning to the starting point of this post, the news may be May's declaration of her intention for the UK to leave the customs union. The real news, however, is that this declaration is undercut even before she makes it. This is, obviously, slightly exasperating. As long as the attention of the news services stays in the news, you'll get an endless flutter of turns and twists that leaves nobody the wiser and only contributes to confusion and - ultimately - a dejection with politics.

However, the problem remains: the underlying story, critically important as it is, stays the same, and it all springs from the badly underpinned assumptions of the decision to Brexit. However, the real news usually does not change enough in a 24 hour cycle to make it into the news cycle. Thus, it most be a recurrent attempt to get complexity somehow represented in the more simplistic genres of the news cycle.

Therefore, if you want the real news represented in the news, the former must be constantly updated and recontextualized to match the latter. This, however, is usually more than can be handled within the famework of a fast moving news cycle, or within the individual story. So, the story roars on, and all we can do is to try to insert the real news into the stream of the news at opportune moments. Here, for instance, you can see an attempt to introduce the real news into the news of the customs union/border example mentioned above.

Moving back again to the genre perspective. news is an established genre; real news is not. However, it still much used, as it gives form to a recurrent rhetorical move: The attempt to contextualize the news, to tell the underlying, more slow-moving, story that is of more importance, and of a wider reach, than most of the news stories that appear in the news cycle.

Like many other genre moves, this one is a battleground. A person keen on Brexit might say that the real news is the EUs recurrent attempt at keeping the UK from winning its sovereignty back. The guiding opinion would be different, but the genre move would remain.

Thus, as often before, genres are fields of action: we have the news, the real news, the struggle over what the real news is, and the recurrent attempt (not covered here) by different actors to make their real news appear in the news. No wonder this is confusing.

Oh, and if you want to see more of SKZ Cartoon's brilliant work on Brexit look here.

Update
Even years later the real news story remains  well-nigh the same. Here is  SKZ Cartoons in late August 2019 after a meeting between newly "elected" PM Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel.

NB: Like the previous post, this one was originally a twitter thread. You can see the thread here.

Update April 16th, 2018: Added link forward to blog post about fake news genre labels in the first paragraph of this blog post.

Updated again 22 august, 2019. Cartoon from SKZ Cartoons added. You can find more of the artist's work here.

Genre, Persuasion and Truth in Public Opinion

It is a commonplace in contemporary genre studies that genres are something akin to omnipresent in human culture, communication and cognition, and, thus, that we as social beings learn, think and act through genres. (More on the basic tenets of genre studies here). In research, this is usually attributed to Carolyn Miller's groundbreaking article "Genre as Social Action" (1984 - more about it here). So, given that, we must expect any large scale campaign to influence public opinion to be deeply dependent on genres. This includes any participation in a large scale debate like the UK-Brexit debate (on genre in the Brexit debate here).

However, it is worth noticing, that genre use is never automatic. There is always an individual element involved. Amy Devitt puts it this way: "genres [...] live and breathe through individual instances and interactions across and within genres". (2009, 39) So, coming from the stance of genre research we would expect to find many genres creatively used, when we search for influences on public opinon.

To this we have to add one more point: Genres are regulators too, They enable particular ways of presenting any given topic, and they allow for different variations and deviances from what would usually be considered normal communication. The vagueness of that last sentence calls into question, of course, whether such a thing as "normal" communication even exists; in particular, given that I have already said that all communication is involved with genre.

But I digress. To understand what is meant by the claim that genres allow for different variations in communication, look at the slogan in the picture below.

The slogan, encountered on the central shopping street in Copenhagen, "Strøget" is on the front of - you guessed it - an Emporio Armani shop. It juxtaposes two statments "Everyone has a different story" and "Everyone wears Emporio Armani". Interestingly, the two statements may look alike, but there is a quite crucial distinction. The first statement is obviously true, the second is obviously not true. Not everone wears Armani. If for no other reason then simply because that stuff is expensive. Even if it is the cheaper Armani brand. In fact, the point of the slogan is probably to highlight how Emporio Armani is a more price-accessible brand than Armani proper.

Does the not-true claim then mean that Emporio Armani is lying in the slogan? Not by a long shot. The genre is "commercial slogan", and it is known that the truth felicity conditions of such a slogan are different than those of other genres. So you may blame the slogan if it causes you to make bad choices in couture purchases, if the stuff is overpriced, or if the product advertised is of bad quality. But claiming that the slogan lies by saying that everone wears Emporio Armani is silly.

Moving from this back to a parallel example from attempts to influence public opinion. A very obvious example of a genre used to influence public opnion is the election or referendum promise. Now, it is obvious that the election or referendum promise is social action: It is a form of persuasion. It is also obvious that it moves between norms and creativity/variation.

The promise is normative. It can only be effective, if the voters believe that it carries a certain weight. And it has to be formed in accordance with specific genre norms in order for the voters to even recognize it as a promise. At the same time the promise is creative. It has to be new, it has to inspire a feeling strong enough to make voters vote, and it has to distinguish the person or movement making the promise from the competition. If you successfully combine the two you get a rhetorically effective promise; one which acts in the situation, one which makes voters follow you.

However, the question remains: When can an election or referendum promise be said to be fraudulent; be said to be a lie or a manipulation? In particular, since in one sense they are all manipulations: they try to make us do what the utterer want. There is no free pass like the one, I just awarded the commercial slogan. If you say something you know to be false, in an election or referendum promise, you are indeed lying.

However, there are still complications. Let me stick to just one. Those of us who live in parliamentary systems based on proportional representation, rather than on first-past-the-post, know that minority governments or coalition governments are quite common. Single-party majority governments are hard to achieve. Thus, you must compromise, and some of the compromises WILL affect the promises you made during your election campaign. And - please note - this is not lying. This is a trade-off, and an intelligent electorate (oh does such a unicorn even exist?) will know that.

Why is it not lying? Because the electorate did not give the party the political strenght to follow its promise all the way through. Let me illustrate: An amazone captain tells her general "I will conquer this city if you give me 10.000 able bodied warriors". The general gives her 5.000, she attacks, but fails to conquer the city. But the general is not entitled to say: "You are a liar. You promised me to conquer the city."

Back to politics: This does not make the election or referendum promise void after the referendum. It merely sets the question: When can a politician or a political movement feasibly be said to have followed through on a campaign promise? Often, the answer must be case by case. But I think it could be feasibly said that an election promise is false/the promiser is lying if the promise contradicts established knowledge that was available to the promiser at the time the promise was made. Also, the promiser can prove false if the electorate gives her or him the political strength to fulfill the promise, nothing radical happens to block the promise, and the promise is still not acted coherently upon.

So, for instance, the infamous BrexitBus-promise (during the UK Brexit referendum campaign 2016 (see above) fails obviously on the first point. Not only was it known that the 350 million was far too high, it was also known at the time that the gain would be more than offset by losses on other counts. Thus, Emporio Armani may not have lied, but Boris Johnson sure did. The information was available and you had to be dumber than a bag of hammers, or seriously mislead, by false promises to buy into the assumptions underpinning the promise.

A promise which after-the-fact exposed a false promiser, was the recurrent claim before the election that "leave" did not imply that the UK would leave the Single Market. It is absolutely fair to say that you became what is known in the Brexit debate as a RemainerNow (a person who voted to leave the EU, but has since changed her mind) because UK-politicians failed this promise by working actively to take the country out of the single market and even claiming that this was the will of that aberrant metaphysical entity The Will of The People.

So, indeed, genre - as well as our interpretation and use of it - plays a crucial role in the shaping of public opinion. Though few reflect upon it, we are actually quite strong genre interpreters and genre users (read more here).
This post, like the preceeding one, is based on a twitter thread. Find the original thread here.

Brexit Genres

I am supposedly on Twitter to discuss genre research (my twitterhandle is indeed  @genreresearch). However, as a huge fan of the EU, I have been lured into spending quite a bit of time hanging around the #FBPE-crowd and discussing Brexit instead. 

Or is that indeed "instead"? A central finding of genre studies is that genre is well-nigh omnipresent in human culture, cognition, and communication. Thus, we think, react, and act in genre patterns, and we all have a surprising aptitude for understanding and using genre. Thus, if you participate in the Brexit debate it may never have entered your mind that you are constantly using and discussing genre. But you are.

Allow me to show you.

At the center of the Brexit debate (itself a genre) is a thing called a "referendum". That's a genre. Moreover, this particular referendum had as its particular character that it was an "advisory referendum". A variant genre or, if you will, subgenre to the referendum. Now, as you know, the fact that this was an "advisory referendum" meant that a number of safeguards connected to stonger referendums (for example a demand for a supermajority) were not present. Had such safeguards been in place, Brexit wouldn´t be on its way

However, and this is, as you still know very well, just not in those terms, the result of the advisory referendum result (another genre) was taken up, not as a narrow win (yet another genre), but as an expression (genre) of a metaphysical entity called The Will of The People. This nonewithstanding that there were critical problems connected to several crucial genres in connection with the advisory referendum. One being that one of the campaigns (genre) leading up to the referendum were dominated by lies (yet another genre). Another genre which should ideally have played a crucial role to both campaigns, the "expert testimony", was aggressively discounted beforehand, and never got to play its necessary part in enligtening the decision of the voters.

Then, of course, there was the hidden asymmetry of the "voting ballot" (yep that's a genre too) which displayed to completly unequal opportunities, one well-known and stable (remain) another almost wholly unknown and highly dramatic (leave) as if they were similar.

And this is just the beginning. The resulting "advise", taken up as a "decision", gave rise to "negotiations", and "debates", including (far too few) "parliamentary debates". Into this came "newspaper headlines" and "articles" leading to, among other things "death threats". Leading, of course, to the rise of a number of "SoMe interchanges" which helped form "hashtags" (yep, a genre). So basically y'all. While we are FBPE-ing, we are also acting in accordance with a set of genre expectations.

This post is a genre-reconfiguration. It was originally a Twitter thread. You can see the thread here. After the thread I have added a number of specimen of other, more special genres I have found in the Brexit debate. Check it out.

Dissemination genres of my ivory tower

Over the last 2-3 decades universities have had obligations of “public dissemination” and “innovation” added to their tasks. This has happened under a constant demand that academics should “leave the ivory tower”. 

There is much sense in wanting the universities to interact with the rest of society, even more so, as the demand for qualified employees and for knowledge of complex problems is ever on the rise. The universities have dutifully followed through on the demand, not always with enthusiasm, but generally with acceptance, and often with engagement.

However, a vexing rhetorical problem remains. The understanding that the universities are ivory towers persists, as if nothing has changed. Just now, a reputable publishing channel in news about academia, Times Higher Education ran a blogpost headlined "Brexit: a chance for universities to leave their ivory towers behind". I practically screamed. In the text, at least, the ivory tower is in quotation marks:

Every crisis is an opportunity. Brexit is, therefore, the ultimate opportunity for universities to connect and engage with society. Brexit can help to break down the “ivory tower” walls between academia and society, and I firmly believe that this is something that can benefit us all in the long run.

Even without the meaningless abstraction "Every crisis is an opportunity," I find the passage endlessly annoying for its use of the metaphor; even after all these years, and all this effort, re-sticking us behind the walls of the ivory tower can happen at a whim if it benefits a particular argument. The metafor, in fact, annoys me so much, than when reading the article, and the quote in question, all I get out of it is this: 

Brexit is such a huge mess brought on us by politics, that we as universities have to engage with politicians in order to avert disaster, and this will force us to open up to society.

(my summary, somewhat sharpened)

For an avid EU-fan such as myself that is hardly a compelling reason for anything.

One of the fundamental problems of the original metaphor was, of course, that the ivory tower probably never existed in the first place. Even in its most exclusive forms, the university was always a place, people moved through, picking up knowledge. The central point of teaching is influence society in a positive way. Young people entered, spent a number of years at the institution engaging with the knowledge it both developed and represented, and then left with this knowledge to make it, and themselves, useful in the surrounding society. The interchange between university and society was always there.

Moreover, a number of structures in contemporary university life excludes the public in new and hitherto unknown ways. The exclusive focus on publication in scholarly journals inaccessible and incomprehensible to the public at large, threatens to make expert knowledge an affair exclusively for experts. I know of no wall resembling an ivory tower more closely than the paywall of Elsevier. 

Also, many successful academics now work in research centers and research project that have little or no contact with university students, thus severing the classic link between teaching and research; these centers, too, may at times look like ivory tower inhabited by the lucky minority of researchers able to procure large sums of external funding–mainly through having success in publishing in exclusive journals.

However this may all be, the reemergence of the metaphor had me thinking about what genres I actually use or participate in when disseminating from my room in the supposed ivory tower. As a literary scholar, I am taken to be very muck out of touch; to inhabit a room very high up in the tower. But still: if I exclude the normal teaching genres, in what genres do I actually communicate with a broader public?

Foredrag (public lectures)
The foredrag (public lecture) is a big thing in Denmark, following a tradition dating back to N.F.S. Grundtvig. It's basic structure  is one where an academic lectures a broader audience about a topic of common interest, and in a way that is both enlightning and entertaining. In fact, these two must be combined in order for the foredrag to be considered a success.I have done a few hundred of those. 

Believe me: They cannot be done from the ivory tower. I have seen ivory tower-foredrag attempted; I do not want to see them attempted ever again. It's physically painful to watch.

Oh, and communal singing is often involved.

Journalist briefings
Aforementioned Grundtvig is central figure to Danish culture, so being an expert on him has often entailed briefing journalists about him. I have also briefed on other literary figures, on news satire, and on PhD education. This is a lot of fun, as you can be a little bit lighter when you are just presenting background and do not have to be quoted yourself.

Interviews
These cover several media, TV, radio, newspapers and an assortment of web pages, and they range from short quotes on this or that to extensive pieces of talk radio and even portrait-ish pieces. The media being what it is, I'm sometimes the expert, sometimes an "interesting person". In either case the interview form I encounter, is milder than in the interrogative form often adopted by journalists when interviewing politicians. So, I usually look pretty good - usually.

However, there is a catch. Journalistic interviews will often be seen from a specific angle, and the journalist does not have time for all the caution, all the nuances, and all the hedging, I like as an academic. So sometimes I feel slightly uneasy with the persona of me which appears in news outlets - and from time to time, I'm simply misquoted and look positively silly. But that's the name of the game, and I can live with it.

Answers to inquiries
I have not done a lot of this lately, but ever so often somebody simply gets in touch because they want to ask me stuff. It's frequently either retired people who  are just curious, or  it is active, and often charmingly assertive, high school students. The queries are often of a curious kind in the sense that questions to be answered tend towards, "what is, you know actually, for real-ish, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything". And these people mean business and are not taking 42 for an answer. 

It's not mass communication but it is some sort of outreach (or "inreach" by the public, if you will), and it can get very intense. The payoff is probably not equal to the effort, but I quite like it.

Newspaper reviews
In my line of work, I could do newspaper reviews for ever and ever. A number of my colleagues have a strong dual identity as researchers and reviewers. 

I have never done that many; I am no good at judging literary works in public, and even when reviewing non-fiction my hand seems to shake. ("Non-fiction", by the way, is a strange genre label, defined by a negative, but covering most of the writing that actually takes place, Jack Andersen, my colleague  at the Center for Genre Research, can tell you more about that.) I simply don´t like taking the sharp approach that defines most good newspaper reviewers - and, I think, all the legendary ones. 

Thus, my newspaper reviews always end up being quite friendly, and my persona as reviewer is somewhat defanged. I don´t do a lot of reviewing, and I don´t think I ever will. As a scholarly reviewer I seem to re-aquire my teeth and have no trouble at all biting to the bone, but those reviews are, obviously, not public outreach.

"Dissemination research"
I am not quite sure if this thing even has a genre name. But previously I did a lot of scholarly work in contexts where the actual publication was aimed at a broader audience: anthologies, popular journals, a literary history. This was actual research work, and a lot of what went into these publications was new knowledge fully on the level of my more sombre publications aimed exclusively at an audience of researchers.

I liked working in this genre. It combined my interests in research and in public outreach nicely, and it gave a broader audience access to my actual research; not "just" a later dissemination-version of said research. And given the central role of the interchange between academia and a wider public in Denmark (see "Foredrag" above), it also made me a lot of friends and drew an amount of attention worth the effort.

However, given the way money, status, and recognition moves in a contemporary research landscape, there is little time for such endeavors. Research efforts have to appear in publications that are clearly recognizable as research publications, and they have to be in English, and thus I lose my public research audience, even before the game begins. 

This is a great loss and a cause of grief for me, but the structures are against the genre. It is of marginal importance in my writing today.

Newspaper articles and commentary
I have written a few of these, but they are rarely research dissemination proper. They have to be cut too close for (my) comfort. But I'll probably do a few more, come time.

Blogposts
QED. 


So, it seems to me that the walls of my supposed ivory tower are pretty permeable. There are a number of genres available to me, in some of these, the outside world even comes to me in order to ask me to disseminate. Moreover, many of these genres are traditional in the sense that they have been handed down to me by previous researcher; and in turn I hand them down to new researchers as a way of getting them to work with dissemination. 

When confronted with the metaphor of the ivory tower, I sometimes ask to know where it is, because I want to get in. This, of course, is fine for polemic purposes. But, truth to tell, I don´t want to get in; I am fine in a lively interchange.

And, on this day, I most certainly do not need Brexit to get me out of any ivory towers. In fact, the incompetent orange narcissist in The White House aside, I believe Brexit is one of the few things that could make me depressed enough with the world to isolate myself in an exclusive concentration on my research and the genres connected to it.