Cross purposes in public discourse (audio blog)

Texts as tools. But what for?

Reading books is slowly turning into a very special
skill again, like reading musical scores.

Currently, I’m reading an intriguing book by Lavinia Marin and am struck by a couple of thoughts that answer a number of questions I have been pondering on for the last year. The motto above captures the issue quite well. Drawing on Ivan Illich’s commentary on a 12^th century text, Lavinia clarified how texts, in the context of early universities, might have become abstract “things” that allow us to think about and with them. At some point, then, written texts became, not just records of what someone had written, but tools for thinking. Things that allowed you to distinguish sections, jump back and forth, keep your attention on one paragraph, while side-glancing at another, and so on. Like you might now rush to the final sentence, wonder whether you’re really interested, and decide whether to stay on or go. Will you stay with me for a few more paragraphs? What I hope to do in what follows is suggest that our way of reading written texts might be changing in some crucial ways. And if it’s true that texts have been, inter alia, tools for thinking that might change, too.

Let me begin with an illustration: (1) I just went for a run. After some initial thoughts about the light drizzle my attention returned to a puzzling passage from William of Ockham’s commentary on De interpretatione. I first read this text very intently over thirty years ago when pondering on my MA thesis, but now came back to it with quite different questions. What I’m saying is: the basic ideas in the text stuck with me over thirty years, but now some new questions (about medieval theories of written language) drew me back in and had me wonder again what it all meant. (2) When I came back from my run, I gulped down some glasses of water, while setting eyes on the social media app Bluesky. My attention came to rest on what I took to be a slightly insulting response to a post of mine. I wanted to reply immediately but thought better of it, realizing that it kept nagging me until I wrote a lame retort. (3) Returning to my thoughts about reading books as being a special skill, I inserted a thesis into an LLM, prompting it to list empirical studies on the issue. The summaries the LLM generated had me think a bit, until I realised that the suggested stuff pushed me away from my initial questions and so I closed the pertinent tab.

Now I’m sitting here, writing and wondering what all of this means. Let’s just characterize these moments: Experience (1) is something I had learned at school and uni: I read texts; they stick with me; I think about them – interested but somehow dispassionately. Here, the text is a tool for thinking. Why so? Well, there are many points to be made, but a crucial part is that the text doesn’t come with indicators of immediate relevance. It’s not addressed to me; I have to make an effort to get it; the few relevance indicators that made me read it are kind of remote (like “you should read Ockham’s commentaries on Aristotle”). If linguistic sign use (the production and/or consumption of signs) is generally related to action cycles or to factors of relevance, this kind of reading experience is decoupled from either. Now, my hunch is that this decoupling of reading experience from immediate action cycles or relevance factors is actually what allows written texts to be tools for thinking: in being open to various readings they allow for internal dialogues with myself much more than spoken texts, a conversation for instance, ever could.

Now contrast this with experience (2). A crucial difference is that, even though it’s written language, the text not only addresses me directly but also elicits an affective response. Reading social media posts comes with lots of social cues (for instance about the desirability of aligning with them), signaling and pressure to respond. If what I recently wrote about so-called fingered speech is correct, this kind of reading experience is very much socially embedded in the way spoken language is, while the written form still suggests that it can be treated like a common written text – which is what I attempted in postponing my retort. My hunch is, then, that such texts are tools for thinking only for those who have undergone other experiences (like 1) with written texts. By and large, however, social media posts are tools for social alignment. If they fail in that, they prompt misalignment, and very quickly so. To see this, imagine yourself in a class or conference setting and think about how you socialize there in relation to a book and what sorts of exchange you might envision. Now imagine that you have just read a couple of outrageous social media posts by some interlocutor in the room. I guess that this might cause some irritation even if the interaction about the book is still sort of fine. Ultimately, the social media experience lures us into a different mode of interaction.

Finally, compare these experiences to the final example (3) with the LLM. The strange thing is that the LLM might be said to look like, depending on prompted style, an experience in line with (1) where the text is a tool for thinking, while at the same time the reaction of the LLM is as fast as the affective social media experiences in line with (2) can be. I don’t know what to make of this, but a first hunch is that this experience (3) drives me to consider both former experiences as meaningless. Why? I kind of see that the arduous production of a text in response to experience (1) can be done in a second, while I’d need days. On the other hand, the LLM also seemingly imitates an affective stance by generating kind sounding sentences on my prompt. I don’t know whether LLMs are tools then. Butr they clearly disrupt known uses of texts.

Summing up, I see three different reading (and pertinent writing) cultures: (1) one that has emerged during some centuries and allows us to use texts with sustained imagination as tools for thinking, (2) social media interactions that still look like written texts but have the relevance indicators and social cues of immediate interaction, and (3) texts that look like interactions and seemingly share elements of both while being neither. There is a lot of food for thought here. But what I wonder now is whether the kind of reading we’re socialized with mostly affects other modes of reading. In other words, has my exposure and upringing with experiences like (1) primed me for other text uses? Will so-called ‘digital natives’ be primed by the more interactive reading culture as illustrated in experience (2)? Will that mean that, for them, texts will no longer work as tools for thinking? Obviously, I don’t know. But it strikes me as a conversation worth having. It seems, then, that written texts can be tools for the various kinds of actions we perfom or undergo: (1) texts can be tools for thinking, (2) they can be tools for social signaling and hence mainly affective tools, or (3) they can be both and none of these tools at the same time, in that the products of LLMs might look like the imitation of either, while they are, in fact, just a distant echo of our reading and writing cultures. (OK, I don’t really know how to end this.)

Stupid readers? The significance of cooperation in online communication

My daughter Hannah began to indulge in irony probably around the age of six or seven. Depending on the context, she could be quite frustrated or even fearful when she didn’t get it. When she finally would get it, it was often with great relief. Now, at the age of nine, she still sometimes asks, “you meant that ironically, didn’t you?” What’s so upsetting about it? Part of it is that, when she doesn’t get it, the world or I am being unpredictable to her. If she does get it, we’re in sync again. Being “in sync” doesn’t just mean that we share a harmonious mood; it means that we established a cooperative sign use. I produce the sign “I’m actually a famous rock star disguised as your father”; she interprets the sign. But if she doesn’t immediately get the non-literal sense in which the sign can be used, it can be confusing, at least for a moment. The example is light-hearted, but I’m sure you can imagine grimmer versions that are disruptive to the point of triggering feelings of existential threat. – Now, did you notice how I just placed the (cognitive) responsibility on my daughter?

I said, “she didn’t get it”. Instead, I could have said, “I didn’t produce the right kind of sign.” But this move is so common that it’s hard to notice. We assume that “irony” and other figures of speech are well established conventions. Assuming that there are stable linguistic conventions and assuming that speakers and writers used them aptly, we tend to place the burden on the listener or reader, rarely on the producer. This is particularly obvious in online communication. Writing blog posts, for instance, I often wonder why people don’t read what I wrote but rather seem to single out a side issue and run with it. Of course, I’m joking now, readers of my blog are the most competent ones. But what’s going on here anyway?

The ableism involved in charges against (online) readers doesn’t help, but it’s not the issue I want to tackle now. Nor is the point to place the burden on the writer instead. The point is that linguistic conventions don’t just exist ready to use. When I say that someone “didn’t get it” or someone “didn’t express it clearly”, I’m supposing that it is a stable convention that I can hit or miss just like I can sing in or out of tune. But isn’t that the case? Well, it is and it isn’t. Linguistic conventions, I assume with a little help of Ruth Millikan, are stabilized for a reason. They serve certain purposes for the producers and the consumers of signs. (Consumers and producers should not be seen as humans or whole organisms but as cooperative systems, but that’s by the by now.) It’s the purpose or function that keeps the convention alive. If the proximate purpose of a remark is social alignment through irony, then it’s not enough for both parties to “hit” or “get” the convention of irony as such. Rather, the purposes of social alignment have to be connected to the use of irony for both parties, too. Why? Because the purpose of social alignment is what stabilises the convention. “Getting” the convention cannot be separated from participating in the function that that keeps the convention in existence. It’s not enough then to share knowledge of linguistic conventions; we (or our cognitive systems) have to participate in a certain set of common purposes. Such participation has to be established.

Why is that so difficult in online contexts? For Hannah and me, the purposes of social alignment can be established through various ways and sign uses. If one communicative attempt fails, there are thousands of other attempts that make up for it. Generally, in familiar local contexts, conventions are commonly established in relation to joint purposes that, in turn, will stabilize even most idiosyncratic conventions or codes. We form a community, both in the sense of linguistic conventions and the purposes that stabilize the conventions. Given then that we’d interpret and produce certain linguistic items in keeping with joint purposes, we might call this community an interpretive community. By contrast, in online contexts, we often have random or very reduced encounters. Here, it’s not a given whether we share in common purposes. An ironic remark might aim at social alignment, but it might also aim at detachment. While we might recognize familiar linguistic conventions, we cannot be sure that they are used in keeping with the same functions. Someone might write an ironic remark, but for the readers randomly hitting on that remark online the irony might not be related to social alignment. In such situations, we’re at odds. But we’re at odds without noticing it, because what’s in front of us, the written ironic text, doesn’t reveal the mismatch of purposes. (There are many purposes, even purposes driving our own actions, that we are not aware of.) Neither the writers nor the readers are stupid. But they’re out of sync. They do not form an interpretive community.

In fact, online contexts are not only often populated by people out of sync. The playful recontextualization of conventions and memes lends itself not just to jokes and shitposting. It also undermines and destabilizes the cooperation required for forming interpretive communities. If the reassurance available to us in offline local contexts is entirely missing, we are often kept in limbo, yielding frustrated attempts of cooperation in sign use.