The academic disconnect

One of the problems I often encounter is the ability to translate academic work into conversation that those not in the discipline can understand. It's the kind of thing you notice when you're having a conversation with someone about politics, and that person brings up a stereotype that has been repeated over and over again by the media, like something as simple as "older people tend to vote more conservative" which is followed by the unconscious corollary of "as people get older they tend to become conservatives". Now, if you were just spouting off information that comes from the media, the two points seem pretty logical. The first one is generally correct. The second one is not caused by the first, and in actuality is incorrect. However, explaining this to people is very difficult because they've already made the connection from point A to point B. Therefore, as you try to explain that the people who were 20 years old in 1960 became 40 years old in 1980 and 60 years old in 2000, there is a disconnect between how one thing really feeds into another. The real argument is that people within certain generations tend to maintain their political affiliation, but as they get older, so does their generation, and thus, the political affiliation doesn't change, but the people just got older. Now, having read this, you can probably say, hey, that makes sense. But in conversation, you rarely get that opportunity because people aren't willing to listen and make those connections with you.

Which brings me to the subject at hand. I was having a conversation with some very highly educated friends of mine outside of the communication discipline about narratives and counter-narratives, and what I discovered was that no matter how much I tried to explain Fisher's logic, the conversation kept going back to preconceptions of what they already knew. New knowledge and new theories were irrelevant. A narrative was nothing more than a story, and thus, it made little sense in trying to explain the process of communication. What was important was the facts of the situation, not the story-driven interpretation. When I brought up Yeltsin, and the counter-narrative involved, I discovered that they had little recollection of the facts of what happened in August of 1991, and because of that, they couldn't understand any other interpretation than Yeltsin somehow responded to the people, was probably drunk, and tried to suppress the Russian people; none of which actually happened, by the way.

I guess this is part of what bothers me about politics in general. Everything is interpreted through someone's personal narrative before people discuss it. There's really no common story of what happens but what is interpreted, and thus, we end up manufacturing discontinuities that make little sense. Look at this whole Imus situation. We have people running off half cocked spouting how it's racism, it's a response to racism, it's really the fault of people like Al Sharpton who focus on racism, it's really the fault of the media, it's the fault of the people who imbibe in the media, it's no one's fault because it really isn't important, it shouldn't be an issue at all, etc.

I recently read a conservative's take on the stem cell controversy that by the time the argument was done (with multiple responders from all sides of the spectrum), it was hard to tell which party was for or against stem cells. There was a serious disconnect with the facts and the personal stories that people brought to the issue.

So what part does academia have in all of this? My experience has been that the outside world rarely listens to academics anyway. The issues are usually framed by a media with an agenda of some nature, regardless of what that agenda may be (keeping in mind that having an agenda does not necessarily mean that it is evil...that's such a red herring these days). Academics like to think that they are impartial and above the petty bickering, but if you think about the medical community's involvement with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments that lasted decades, claims of impartial and dispassionate behavior does not always translate to impartial and dispassionate actions. Doctors told themselves that they were focusing on the bigger picture, while doing more harm than they were doing good, kind of in somewhat of a bizarroworld sense of a Dr. Mengele HMO. It's only been a few decades since doctors cast off the horrible treatment of these patients with framing them as "Negro patients" rather than referring to them with some sort of humanization. One has to wonder how much we've really changed, or if we even have. I sometimes get the impression that we're one or two scandals away from exploding, and the only thing we have in our favor is the laziness of the American public to fill in the missing data connections. People get all paranoid about conspiracies, but I'm more worried about what is happening out in the open and the ramifications of framing all that activity as "for the betterment of humankind", which lasts only as long as no one starts filling in the data.

Stumble It!