Technologies enter
into the fabric of our daily lives and activities as they become more familiar
and convenient to use. Albert Borgmann attributes this sense of comfort
with technologies to the pervasive “device paradigm” that tends to guide
thinking about technologies, the conduct of technological practices, and
evaluation of their effects. Commentator Mora Campbell (2000) explains.
Devices make such things as light, heat, and water available to us without the burdens of complex social relations, the need to understand where things come from and how they work, hard physical labor, or real dangers like a well freezing or wood house catching fire, they also deskill us (p. 260).
The contrast is with
focal things and practices, wherein “the social and physical engagement
required to learn and practice a skill like making a canoe or preparing
a holiday meal opens us up to the cultural, historical, and natural dimensions
of the world of canoeing or a celebration.”
The same arguments
are applicable to communication technologies, which can “blur distinctions
between the actual and the virtual or physical and textual.” Dialogue,
undertaken in co-presence, for example, is replete with context, much of
which can be discomfiting, even paralyzing because of the surrender of
control that partners in conversation must submit to in order to have authentic
dialogue, as opposed to a ping-pong match with words. New technologies
become convenient and familiar – and more usable – when the sense of context
surrounding them disappears.
What permits the blurring of distinction between the virtual and the real, the textual and the physical on communication networks is lack of context, such as could be afforded by face-to-face conversation. Negation of context is the defining feature of the device paradigm.
The temptation to
romanticize face-to-face communication – co-presence – should be resisted,
but so should the tendency to ignore the possibility with new technologies
that “the ‘radical’ move we are making in embracing these technologies
is simply to become ever more entrenched in this governing pattern” whereby
“people reduce themselves to textual intelligence and offer each other
such reduced and ambiguous intelligence on communication networks.” Face-to-face
intelligence, on the other hand can take the form of personal and relational
intelligence, which “brings us into a world of responsiveness” (p. 261)
as opposed to a world where communicators “’gain authority over ambiguity
by getting hold of its controlling conditions’” (p. 260).
The dominant
perspective on public relations practice aligns with this latter perspective
where successful communication amounts to authoritative control over ambiguities
and the conditions that can give rise to them. From this vantage point,
the potential associated with new technologies is a systematic reduction
of communication from a ‘world of responsiveness’ to a field of ‘textual
intelligence’ that establishes authority in the most efficient and effective
way. An alternative conception of public relations as relationship-building
has acquired recent credibility as theories of dialogue present an ever
more detailed picture of how conditions of mutuality can supplant conditions
of control (see Ledingham and Bruning, eds., 20000.
MITTEN inquires
into the conditions of mutuality and dialogue mainly through the different
subject-area working groups. More can be done to improve this aspect of
the program. The temptation should be resisted to reduce contacts within
the groups to functional encounters that focus almost exclusively on what
participants did or did not accomplish through the particular technological
means they sought to deploy. The conversation should include person-centered
explorations of what participants value as teachers, as mentors, and as
apprentices. Will I recall and be nourished in the future by what I learned
about the persons and their visions? Or will I mainly take with me the
lists and notes of what individuals and teams did with technologies? I
can imagine that the latter records will become quickly outdated. The relationships
have the possibility of affecting all of us for our working lifetimes.