Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Communications in a polarized world

(A speech at the World Bank Communication Forum May 19, 2004. Extracted from Voice and Noise 2006)

Dear Friends,

What I would want to use this precious one-lunch-speech-chance-only for, is to talk about a world where opinions seem to become every day more polarized, which is an issue that has worried me a lot lately, coming as I do, from a very polarized country that is a living proof of the dangers of it.

To illustrate the problem, and as we are supposed to be learning from cases, let me use as an example my very own amateurish case.

Every week I sit down to craft out an article to publish in a major Venezuelan newspaper. Believing myself to be a sensible man, prone to reasonable attitudes (though some might say that’s just trying to make up for other types of behaviors), I usually find myself on most issues in an in-between position, where I can identify a lot of pros and a lot of cons.

The true challenge for any writer, who is not into darkness, is to transmit the message in the clearest possible way. In this respect, I like to think of myself as a conservative jumper from a diving board who prefers executing the easy-graded jumps well, rather than going for the spectacular triple in-and-outs, where you could indeed score higher, but you could also completely lose your reader trying.

Therefore, after duly taking inventory of all the pros and cons, carefully turning them around and finding suitable allegories and metaphors and similes that illustrate the topic at hand, I finally come up with what I normally believe is quite an excellent script. Cautioned by experience, I then take the script to my editors. If it is in English, to the closest available qualified colleague and, if in Spanish, then even much closer, to my wife Mercedes.

These critical editors, who probably assess my script in somewhat more realistic terms than my self-assessment, at the best murmuring a “so-and-so,” then usually proceed to split up my 5-line sentences into five 1-line sentences, to be shuffled around. Their professionalism is evident since they always seem to come up with a product that means exactly what I intended to say. I never understand how they can take it to pieces and still manage to put it back together again.

I then send the embryo away and sit down and wait until early Thursday morning, I can see the newborn on the newspaper’s Web line.

Let me now describe how my readers, through their e-mails, react to my babies.

They mostly start with a direct Per Kurowski, as many believe that “Per” is my title and not my name and just as many think that Kurowski is not my name but my alias. In life, I am frequently greeted with an “Oh! Per Kurowski, I didn’t think you existed.”

Their responses classify then in the following three significantly different categories:

“I hate your yellow . . . despicable . . . how could you . . . . Have you no shame?”
“I hate your blue . . . despicable . . . how could you . . . . Have you no shame?”
“Oh, thank you for explaining it so well and in such clear terms!”

Although I obviously prefer the amicable intentions of the third group, and they do help support my ego, I am still never sure whether their praise of my explanatory power is because they managed to see the green I wanted to show them, or just because they saw an even brighter yellow or blue.

And this is the big polarization that is blocking communications and creating worldwide divides.

In 1872, the British Parliament decreed Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park of London as a place reserved for free expression, and initially it attracted all those extremists who, although qualifying as nuts, still had the right to vent their opinions. Lately, we have all witnessed how the original Speaker’s Corner speakers moved into Speaker’s Studios and now radicalism, anarchy, or fundamentalism is voiced on prime-time television. All of us others, modest low-key analyzers or rational in-betweens, have to settle gratefully for slots in after-midnight cable television, dubiously sponsored by the most traditional professional services. As rationality could soon be viewed as symptomatic of a modern nut, we might all have to line up at Speaker’s Corner.

As you understand, this polarization poses many challenges.

How on earth, in an ever more colorblind world, can we be sure the reader knows what color we talk about?

How on earth do we know that we have communicated, when clearly rating is not all nor should be an end it itself and, on the contrary, sometimes a big rating just guarantees a bigger confusion, as when everyone finds it easy to read in his preferred color.

How on earth do you communicate, when the receiver is no longer decoding the message into its yellow or blue components, but only receiving the whole message, as is, through his one and only yellow or blue pipeline? There are times I actually suspect we are going through a genetic mutation, in response to modern information overload.

And friends, this is not a problem just in communications, as color blindness can hit us anytime, anyway, and anywhere. For instance, in the World Bank, most of those who currently speak about Public-Private Partnerships do so only because they feel they have found a more politically correct way of defending a 100% private or a 100% public alternative and not because they would truly believe in PPPs, or even understand what they are.

As you can understand, this raises all types of serious issues, especially for a World Bank that wants and needs to communicate so much Knowledge with Yellows and Blues but that—for it to become the development Wisdom the world so urgently needs—must all be mixed into various degrees of Green.

So, what do we do? You tell me. You are the experts! Anyhow, armed with the blissful ignorance of an amateur, let me daringly point out some directions.

We can perhaps keep it a very simple green so that there is no way it could take a blue or a yellow meaning, though running the risk of watering down the message so much, that it is just ignored.

Or—we can complicate it so much that the receiver is blocked from any channeling of the message, as he cannot even start to understand it. Though this does not at all sound very promising, it might in fact be the route some researchers in the World Bank are exploring. Just last week, I read a document that was very cleverly obscured in academic jargon, mentioning “modeling this in a tractable way using autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity” and including so many footnotes that a comparable reference to healthful food would most certainly have included a note: “(Mother. 1958. Published on the magnet memo board on the Fridge)

Or—keep the colors so pure that a blue channel would choke on a yellow message and vice versa. This could be a stupendous idea, but only if we were looking to be ordained as High Priests of the Purist Blue or the Purist Yellow Churches.

Or—do we need really to diversify and open two or three Web sites? One for each color extreme and one for the mix, and how do we hyperlink them?

Or—should we use ex-ante censorship, like some radio and TV channels, where you are only allowed to call in your opinions on line yellow or line blue, to help the producer avoid mixing colors? By the way, this new era of media apartheid seems already to produce its counterrevolutionaries as we can already hear an insurgent movement of color cheaters, the blues on line yellow and the yellows on line blue.

Or—set up ex-post filters with questionnaires that the receiver is obliged to answer before being allowed to leave?

Now, as long as I have you all sitting there, let me also dare some recommendations that could generally help the World Bank in reaching out to a world that does not seem to hear even our loudest fire alarms.

First, I dislike the concept of “The Knowledge Bank,” as it sounds too much like arrogant yellowist or blueist to me, and I would much rather prefer a more humble “The Search for Solutions and Answers Bank” or, even better, “The Learning Bank”: knowledge comes from learning, and the Bank—although having acquired a significant stock of cumulative knowledge over sixty years of operations—has still a lot to learn from its clients. Such an approach would stand a better chance to transform its knowledge pool into wisdom, which, at the end of the day, is what the developing and the developed world really needs.

Second, we need to start talking more with the world instead of with one another, hoping the world listens in. I myself would prohibit the use of all acronyms. I am certain that Mary Poppins would never have been able to communicate as effectively had she used an SCE instead of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, much less Shakespeare had he used a TBONTB instead of a To Be Or Not To Be. Today, I tell you after having asked around, the sad fact is that our lead product, the MDGs, has very low name recognition among the NONNGOs, the normal citizens, and this does not bode well for our future. Do we need a flashy MDG logo?

Third, whatever we do, let us not badmouth the NGOs, since they might very well be, at least for the time being, the only wall that echoes our voice and so, without them, we could find ourselves with virtually no voice at all.

Fourth, we all might benefit from better focusing. Doing and communicating about so many things, ninety and then some thematic themes, might signify, or at least leave the impression, that we are not doing anything at all—which might also be true. For instance, the way the Board is drowned in tons of communications, might be exactly the reason why, frankly, it is currently quite nullified.

Fifth, I believe that it would not hurt if we also lighten up our ways of verbal expression. It has lately become an unbearable fashion to speak in a grave voice, in a tone of solemnity, and with an accent that could come only from using the same tutor as Robert Williams used for the role of Ms. Doubtfire.

Finally, as for myself, as a true green, a radical of the middle, an extremist of the center, with perhaps poor ratings and condemned for ever to Hyde Park Corner, I will go on, doing just the best I can, searching to communicate with simple natural and organic ingredients, while following Dori’s safeguards of … just keep swimming … just keep swimming.

Thank you and, now I am ready for your answers.

NO ANSWERS … just questions, some on the issue of voice.

Q. What do you think about more voice for the developing countries?

A1. Before we worry about our voices in the Bank we should perhaps worry about the voice of the Bank. The sad fact is that were it not for a couple of NGOs, the whole world might be unaware of our existence. Hey! They even ignored our 60th Birthday. We were not able to rouse up even 60 protesters. Is that not a sign of irrelevance?

A2. I could have a big voice and still not be heard at a Knick final at Madison Square Garden, or out in the desert of Tucson. I could have a small voice, and still be heard a lot, if the acoustics are right and so, let us work on the acoustics. At this moment, with about a thousand formal board documents that come our way each year, plus about four thousand other projects, plus about a hundred seminars and brown-bag lunches, plus having to call home now and again, in fact no one at the Board has a voice … and so in the famous words of Alfred E. Neuman: “What, Me Worry?

PS. Some posts by which I started to fight odious polarization profiteers

PS. The "yellow, blue or green" I speak of above had its origin in an Op-Ed I wrote in Venezuela. Translated to the USA it would read as, "red, blue or purple". That Op-Ed ended with: 

"Friends, how do you communicate something when the receiver is no longer able to separate the yellows, blues or green resulting from the mix and only knows how to capture it through a single unicolor channel? This problem of media color blindness is not unique to Venezuela, since it seems that humanity is mutating, probably in reaction to the exaggerated volume of information in the modern world. Will the day come when we will never be able to see green again?"


PS. That Speaker’s Corner I then said had moved to TV Speaker’s Studios has now moved to Social Media, where you can connect with millions with a zero marginal cost. Never ever has Speaker's Corner been so dangerous.

PS. A decade later I came to suspect that the most profitable business in town is polarization. “You attack me as hard as you can, I attack you as hard as I can, we convince our followers we are the best ones to save the world from the horrible threat each one of us poses… and then we split the profits 50-50”

PS. Social media, which allows polarization and redistribution profiteers to send out their hate and envy messages at zero marginal cost, has become social harmony’s worst enemy.

PS. It is now 2018, polarization is getting worse, and I have found myself forced to tweet comments like:

“Since things got way out of line during the White House Correspondence Dinner, and ordinary decency was abandoned, at least the polarization profiteers had a bad night. And that’s good news, for all of us citizens.”

To: “When the constipated Left and the smug Right blow off in social media...True to the laws of physics, when two identically charged particles meet, they repel each other”... I answered, “Are you sure of that? What if many of these Left/Right members are just the same, namely polarization profiteers engaging in fake fighting?”

“The polarization profiteers are having a heyday exploiting the “separated children” issue up to the tilt with blatant exaggerations and crocodile tears. I am afraid that will backfire on those we wish to protect.”

“Are polarization profiteers throwing first stones? That anti-Trump restaurant owner who booted out Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is he appealing to the same refusal rights as those in that case where someone refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple?”

"It saddens many of us seeing John McCain exploited by polarization profiteers, and not being able to publicly rebuff them, as he could and did while being alive"

"I saw some twitter threads generated by the Nathan Phillips vs. Covington Catholic School incident. I now ask, how long before polarization profiteers convince their respective targeted and exploited tribe members to tattoo themselves in best MS-13 fashion?"

Polarization Profiteers must be stopped!

 We should keep a ranking on the web of the 100 most aggressive and insidious polarization profiteers continuously updated, so as to shame them accordingly.
PS. April 13th 2019, when walking on Fleet Street I heard a 7-8 years old girl ask:
"Mommy, what's worse murder or Brexit?”

Now in the US, 2020, any moment I expect a child ask her mother"
"Mommy, what's worse Trump or Coronavirus?”

We sure are suffering the impact of a polarization pandemic😡

Main and social media write in red or blue, purple is all but gone 

Coronavirus / COVID19 has provided all polarization profiteers an extremely potent resource that they are now exploiting up to the hilt

PS. April 15, 2019 I went to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park London, sadly I heard the sound of silence, there was no one speaking there, there was no one but me there :-(

Indeed Speaker's Corner has been relegated to history

PS. Dated 2020: When a majority of social media, teams up with a majority of the main media, all in order to imposing political correctness gags, thereby silencing not-fitting facts and impeding frank discussions, that dangerously weakens any nation’s willingness to defend itself.


PS. Dated 2020: The most dangerous underlying condition of Covid-19, is that it broke out in the midst of a raging Polarization Pandemic, in which way too many polarization profiteers have a vested interest in blocking the development of a harmony vaccine.


PS. November 2020: In these times when we are all suffering the impacts of a worldwide raging polarization pandemic, whether the loser in USA’s presidential elections is Biden or Trump, is of much less importance than the losses produced in the democratic spirit of America


PS. January 2021: Social media threatens the survival of newspaper so these have sought refuge in more profitable polarization and bad/false news. So, paraphrasing Upton Sinclair "It is difficult to get a journalist to report the truth, when his salary depends upon his not reporting it!"


PS. January 2021: Can it be that the Senior Advisory Committee of the Institute of Politics at Harvard among its members have explicitly declared not to include one single of those 72 million Americans who voted for Trump? Please tell me I’m wrong.


PS. March 2021: The battle of our times: Herd Immunity vs. Herd Docility