Normal

There is a neutral, technical, use of the term ‘normal’. Normal is a statistical concept. A particular breed of grass has a normal height. The Earth’s orbit has a normal frequency and vibration and the Earth has a normal distance from the Sun. Ice cream normally melts in the sunshine. There are different ways of calculating these norms, but despite this, these are perfectly reasonable, neutral was of speaking.¹

But.

Even though it is statistically normal for humans to have a generally heterosexual orientation, in most public and social contexts, it would be completely inappropriate to say that homosexuality is not normal. To say this, even if you are not cognizant of the impact, is homophobic. Intention is not the issue here. It is, after all, not what you say, but what people hear.

And this is the difference between normal¹ and normal². One of them is loaded. One is politically and socially significant. One is inappropriate in many contexts. Thus, as my very good friend has pointed out to me, “normal is only found on washing machines.” ²

Success or failure

An old roommate of mine once lamented the moralization of the terms ‘success’ and ‘failure.’ When an engineer says something failed, they generally mean this in a neutral, technical sense. The bridge stopped functioning and collapsed. The circuit did not uphold the intended logic. Constructs fail. No biggy. It’s my understanding that, back in the day, success was simply what happened next. One could very well have said that after the bridge was erected, it succeeded in failing. ‘One thing succeeded another’ had no implicit expectation of progress, in much the same that that engineers say ‘failure’ without a tacit moral condemnation.

But.

‘Success’ and ‘failure’ need to be used cautiously. There are some contexts where you are better off not mentioning success or failure. This is a simple social moray. Break it, and you could lose your job, or hurt your loved ones. To say out loud, for example, that your son’s team failed on Sunday, is absolutely tone deaf to the impact of your words.³ To note that your wife has failed to send out the invitations on time, lacks social nuance.

I’m actually of the nerdy camp that says we should have courage to use it more often. Let’s get neutral and descriptive failure. The folks in silicon valley do it: Fail Faster, etc. The reason I am including this digression into success and failure, is that many people understand this, in a way they don’t about ‘normal’ or ‘special interest.’ This case is less abrasive and if you bust someone socially abusing ‘success’ or ‘failure’ there is less chance that they will feel a need to retreat to the more neutral use.

Special interest, or special interest group

There is a neutral use of these terms. Special interest groups are bands of people getting together to advocate their interests. Awesome. This is a somewhat unusual usage, however. Much like ‘statistically normal’, this is the more technical and neutral meaning that folks retreat to once they have revealed their politics, sometimes accidentally. It’s a somewhat broad meaning because, by this criteria, any social movement or lobby is a special interest group.

That said, I do think the term is somewhat slippery. It’s a relative term in so far as some groups will be more special, or more specialized, than others.

But.

This phrase plays an important role in social and political discourse. It is a loaded term. It is value laden, and it can sometimes reveal the values of those that use it. And there are many contexts in which it is inappropriate to attribute it to a group.

Canadian Suffragists, for example, were not a special interest.⁴ To say so, flattens the importance of their interests in the larger tapestry of our society. I am not a woman, but I still benefit from, and am thankful for, the hard work of the Suffragettes.

First Nations are not a special interest. To say so glosses over the tragedies of historical and contemporary colonial practices. To say so, makes colonization an afterthought.

Unions are not a special interest group. There are over a half million Canadians in CUPE alone. To say that unions are a special interest makes it sound like the interests of union members, or the interests of labour, are fringe. But the interests of labour are fundamentally at the center of the way we should form our communities.

What is a special interest group

A paradigmatic example of a special interest group, is Falcon Breeders. They are few. And they form alliances in order to lobby the various provincial and federal ministries about all things falcon. Most people will agree with me that they are a special interest group.

Interestingly, it is likely that the falconry folks will, themselves, object to being identified as a special interest. Most people don’t like it. That’s because some folks listen to the conservative framing and priming served up by the National Post and other big business media for the last last thirty years. They have been slowly and patiently grinding away at the legitimacy of special interest groups. It is often a term of derision.

One commentator I follow has noted that “there is a problem defining special interests in the same way one goes about defining who’s a terrorist.” ‘Special interest’ can be code for the group that I hope no one will listen too, because they are small, or unique, or loony, or have an opinion that is not mine.

That’s the connotation. But back to the nerdy, neutral, relative use.

Can a political party be a special interest?

The short answer is, obviously, yes. The Rhino Party was (is?) an example. The Natural Law Party was another obvious example.

Can a (major, national) political party be a special interest?

If you can get past the initial worry that the question appears to contain the answer, I think this question is interesting. It’s interesting because I think ‘special interest’ is a relative term. It’s also interesting because conservative commentators have been insinuating or explicitly saying that the NDP is a special interest group for years. They posit this, much the same way folks continue to claim that unions are a special interest.

In my humble opinion, the Conservative Party of Canada is more of a special interest than the NDP: the Conservatives serve a narrower class of interests.

Have you ever seen that episode of the Flinstone’s where the aliens take Fred and then there’s a duplicate-alien Fred running around, and then when the real Fred comes back, no one believes or understands him? That is my worst nightmare. There is nothing so lonely to me – so utterly alone making – than being misunderstood or disbelieved. In my next life maybe I’ll keep a psychiatrist on staff to help me with this. In this life, I surround myself with friends that share my values. And when I heard David Suzuki taking the time, in a public and well attended lecture, to point to a common artifact of our culture and draw out the significance of the apparent contradiction, I felt totally sane.

In conversational language, we use the word “animal” in a way that excludes humans. Rationally and scientifically, everyone admits that humans are animals. But few people care that the sign says something so wrong. ¹

The fact that so few people find these signs to be notable, is partly because so many people, deep down, deep deep down, beneath their scientific and rational brain, actually think we’re not animals. People act as though we’re special. Well, okay, we are kind of special. But it’s more than this. They also act as though we’re outside of, or separate from, or above, or better than, or not fundamentally connected with. And this might explain some of our less than intelligent modes of being in the world. This might be what’s wrong with the sign.

Now let me make this clear: the sign is not the problem. Sure, the sign is part of the problem. It’s at the very least a symptom or a reflection of the problem. But it’s also a state endorsed problem entrencher. It’s a kind of low level, under-the-radar, reinforcement of the idea that humans aren’t animals. The sign is, after all, quite common.

And this is the rub. If you actually talk to the people that act as though humans aren’t animals, they will tell you that humans are animals! Well there’s a fun (apparent) contradiction. The people who behave as if humans aren’t animals, still, intellectually, believe that humans are animals. ² It’s sufficient here to say, simply, that the gap between what we believe intellectually, and how we actually behave in the world, is a gap that is of the utmost interest to advertising, the art of persuasion and social engineering.

We all have a gap between what we think, and how we act. So those of us who read the sign and don’t really notice what’s wrong with it, can at least be excused for being busy. But what is troubling about this sign, is that it was written by someone. Someone was paid to make this sign. Someone was paid to think about the meaning of the words.

Back in Halifax that night, Suzuki argued that this kind of sign is evidence of the human pretension that there is an invisible divide between humans and the nonhuman natural world. He also argued that this idea is at the root of our current incapacity to live in balance with our Earth. He also speculated that this idea, this human pretension, was a result of our Christian heritage. And still to this day, I find this interesting and compelling. Could it be that the mainstream Christian notions of  a soul, a heaven, and a human-centric God lies at the heart of our imbalance with the Earth? It’s possible. ³

It really boils down to this. That all life is inter-related. we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny so that whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. – Martin Luther King, 1967

And it’s not just me. Fair Trade is an important part of coffee culture in Victoria, and beyond. Of course, there are many people who don’t care about these things. There are even those that think that the price controls of Fair Trade coffee is a ruthless attack on market capitalism.

But the vast majority of people that think about Fair Trade coffee, think it’s cool. On my view, you have to understand the coffee trade in the context of four hundred years of colonization to really see why it’s so important. Coffee grown in South America, for example, is grown as a cash crop by regions that have suffered centuries of invasion, debt incurred by corrupt regimes imposed by colonial interests, civil war caused by the resultant political instability, disease, genocide, religious persecution, and human rights atrocities that still continue to this day. So desperate communities will grow coffee beans at great social and environmental cost and sell them for very little. Four centuries of colonial abuse has taken away the ability of many communities to negotiate a better price.

Years ago, some clever do-gooders thought they might be able to help some coffee growing communities to negotiate a better price for their coffee.¹ These do-gooders wanted to get a price for these communities that allowed them to save and build and to do more than live in abject poverty. They reasoned that if some coffee buyers shared the same values they did, that they would pay a little more so that others could live a better life. But how would customers know whether they could trust that the extra money was actually going to the farmers?

The solution was to create an arm’s length third party to assess and approve trade scenarios to certify that communities were actually getting a fair price. Now the term, “fair price,” is an interesting one. Free market purists will scoff at the term, arguing that a price is set by demand and supply and the willingness of individuals to pay. Free market purists will argue that there is no such thing as a “fair price.” But pretty much every other sane human will agree intuitively about the fairness of pricing, and this is all that counted.

So here we are in Victoria, years later, and there are many coffee shops that will serve only certified Fair Trade coffee. The certifications come from Transfair or, I think, a variety of twenty other international certifying bodies. And most coffee drinkers have heard of fair trade coffee. And this idea, “fair trade,” has become a valuable part of the brand of any company doing business in coffee.

And here’s where it gets interesting. It gets interesting because every coffee shop wants to be thought of as community oriented, and socially responsible and a good global citizen.

Starbucks, for example, will take out one page ads in the Globe and Mail telling readers about the way they serve Fair Trade coffee. And when I find myself at a Starbuck’s and the barista asks me whether I want dark or medium, I say, “oh, just give me the Fair Trade one.” The barista will inevitably say that they’re both Fair Trade. Now, inwardly, I’m smiling when this happens. Because I know that Starbucks only brews certified Fair Trade coffee one day a month.² So then I say ask them to show me the label and what certifying body says its actually Fair Trade. And the poor embarrassed, and someone surprised, barista has to admit that it’s just Starbucks that says it’s fairly traded.

And that’s the difference between certified Fair Trade and fair trade or fairly traded. See, any free market capitalist can say the price they pay to cash crop exporters is fair. Anyone can say they serve fairly traded coffee. Yup, we bought this stuff from a family who couldn’t make the mortgage payments and were going bankrupt from medical costs and whose child was born deformed from the pesticides and fertilizers they are required to use, in order to pay the militia that was trained by the CIA – but don’t worry, we payed them a fair price.

This is why the third body certification process is so important. This is why I ask the barista to look for the TransFair logo. See Starbucks may very well pay all of their suppliers a good price. But unless they get certified, I don’t trust it. And I think they’re creating an illusion when their ad has the TransFair logo on it because they brew the certified Fair Trade coffee one day a month. This is pretty effective branding because most consumers don’t pay enough attention to see through this. This is also effective internal branding, since most of their employees even believe that all of their coffee is FairTrade. It’s a very convenient omission.

Now, in their defense, it’s not just Starbucks that does this. Actually that’s not a defense. But it is a dispersal of guilt. Well whatever. The point is that lots of coffee shops serve fairly traded coffee. When pressed on this issue, many coffee shops train their employees to say that they don’t serve certified Fair Trade coffee in order to pay the farmer more. The reasoning goes like this: since the certification body has infrastructure costs to pay, the certification process is more expensive, and that cost takes money away from the farmer.

I think this is unfortunate. I think it’s a fancy way to undermine people’s confidence in the certification process, while getting the benefits of the brand value that the very same certification process created. It sounds to me like the very same argument put forward by companies that claim governments shouldn’t regulate, because it costs the consumer.

This is an interesting kind of repositioning. Now I know that some people don’t like it when I stretch the meaning of “branding” or “positioning” to include, well, everything. But it’s fun and sometimes instructive. And words have constellations of meanings not unlike the kind of things we more conventionally consider to have a brand. So let’s imagine for a minute that the word “fag” has a brand.¹

In this episode of South Park, they point out that the meaning, or brand, of “faggot” has changed considerably over the last couple of centuries – it was sometimes used in reference to old women, sometimes in reference to feeble people. I actually don’t really know if this is true. But it’s plausible. The more contemporary, and slanderous, associations with gay folk is not a necessary part of the brand. There’s usually very little about a brand that is necessary. This is the physical sciences – it’s the social sciences and meaning is just, well, made up.

But shifting the current brand of an idea like “fag” is really a gargantuan task. The campaign we see in this episode of South Park is effective because gay folk, and well, everyone else, start to use the term to refer to inconsiderate and annoying people, and not gay people. As the term gets redeployed, we witness the repositioning of the concept “fag” against, not with, gay.

Of course, it’s just a cartoon. I’m not saying it’s okay to deploy the term. As I’ve said elsewhere, sometimes you can be responsible for more meaning than you make, so we gotta be careful. But it’s interesting nonetheless. Thank you South Park.²

In the wild of human to human interactions, more meaning is made than can be understood. It’s air and water. It’s simply everywhere. And whether we try to understand and rationally consider the currents of meaning that flow around and through us or not, there is more meaning than we can ever comprehend. The meaning shapes us. It animates us. So when someone says, “that’s not what I meant!” or “that’s doesn’t logically follow from what I said!” it might not matter. It is entirely possible for the meanings we create to be beyond our intent and within our responsibility.

Some of you will find this obvious. Others might find this to be a head scratcher. There are, of course, obvious legal examples. When you enter into a legal or written contract, it doesn’t matter what you intended by saying or writing such-and-such. What matters is what the legal meaning of the words are. These legal meanings are largely out of your hands. We hire lawyers and judges to sort through the words and figure out the meanings. This is not to say that they aren’t interested in intentions. They are. But in the end, you can be found to be legally responsible for meanings you never intended.

There are also obvious non-legal examples. In the context of a WordPress conference, you might intend to be speaking about adding pages, but if you use the language of posts, then you will be misunderstood and/or corrected. The extent to which you are misunderstood and/or change your behaviour is entirely your responsibility. You can’t expect hundreds of thousands of WordPress users to adopt your conventions, no matter how correct they seem to your personal logic.

But it’s not just  WordPress, or Canadian law, or an analytic philosophy lecture on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. One might run into these meaning regimes and their pre-existing meanings in any given community. We will encounter meaning regimes in our families and our intimate relationships. We can’t simply ask everyone else to get on board our intended meanings without sometimes being willing to do the same. We share language and we negotiate the conventions and meanings of the terms. The catch is that the more fixed a given community or meaning regime is, the less negotiation there is. Intentions be damned, you will be responsible for your unintended meanings.

I get that trying to distinguish between maximal and minimal approaches to meaning making could be controversial for some folks. Especially when I add ideas like implicit, explicit, connotative and denotative to the mix. It’s not a definition. And it’s not a hard and fast distinction. I say that minimal meaning making tends towards certain ways of making meaning. And I say that maximal meaning making includes other kinds of meaning. Maximal meaning making includes minimal meaning making. By way of attempting to illustrate the difference in these kinds of meaning making, please consider the following table.

Where am I heading with this distinction?

If you’re feeling a little uncertain about getting on board this program, perhaps you’ll feel more at ease if you know what I want to do with it. Partly, I want to make fun of philosophers. More broadly I want to make fun of folks who become insulated in their way of thinking and talking about the world and then forget the impact, or lack of impact, that their words have on people.

But I also want to broach a topic close to my heart surrounding advertising. What happens when someone thinks an ad is inappropriate? Why is hard to explain to other people why it is? Why do people think they’re free to say or write anything? I think at least part of the dynamic at the heart of these questions is helpfully elucidated by considering minimal and maximal approaches to meaning.

More broadly I want to make fun of folks who become insulated in their way of thinking and talking about the world and then forget the impact, or lack of impact, that their words have on people.

Before getting into the issue of assessing, say, ad copy, allow me to illustrate this distinction a little more by looking at two semantic concepts that philosophers love; conjunctions and universal instantiations.

Conjunctions and universal instantiations

Newbie logicians and philosophers ¹  have a minimal approach to the meanings of conjunctions. They believe that words like ‘and’ and ‘but’ (even commas sometimes) act to conjoin two propositions such that the larger statement is true if both individual propositions are true. So, for example, the statement, ‘I like bananas and apples’ is true if it’s both true that I like bananas and it’s also true that I like apples.

Same goes for the universal generalizations using ‘all’ or ‘every’. A universal generalization is true if every instance of the assertion is true. So ‘all swans are white’ is true, if every thing that is a swan, is white.

In the strict confines of logic puzzles, computer languages and perhaps contract law, this is just fine. The trouble is that words like ‘and’ and ‘but’, ‘all’ and ‘every’ have many more layers of meaning for English speaking humans. So as soon as the newbie logician or newbie philosopher starts to apply their minimal approach (with respect to conjunctions, etc.) to human meaning making, things go awry. Consider:

1. I got in my car and drove away.
2. I went grocery shopping and I didn’t buy cigarettes.
3. My mom asked me how my marriage was going and I told her that everything was fine.
4. All of my lovers from Venus were lazy.
5. Every elephant in my fridge enjoys to dance.

Now from a minimal perspective, each of the first three statements is really about the truth conditions of each conjunct. So, is it true that I got in the car and is it true that I drove away? That’s the meaning of the statement.² So under this minimal approach to meaning, it’s equally true that: “I drove away and got in my car.” Under this minimal approach, newbie logicians will argue that the meaning of the statement is the same if you switch the order of the conjuncts. ‘A and B’ is the same statement as ‘B and A’ (where A and B stand for simple statements). But in human contexts the statement, ‘I drove away and got in my car’ obviously has a significantly different meaning. ³

Similarly, on the minimal approach, statement #2 means simply that I went to the grocery store and I did not purchase cigarettes. But in the scope of a human conversation, the listener would create gobs of meaning around this statement. It’s a well described facet of conversational implicature, that the choices regarding what we say and don’t say are relevant and important to meaning. I went to the grocery store and didn’t buy a torpedo launcher. I went to the grocery store and didn’t buy a slave. I went to the grocery store and didn’t buy a cake. There are a bazillion facts about what I didn’t buy. The fact that I mention cigarettes makes it reasonable for a reader to make assumptions about my relationship to smoking.

I leave conjuction #3 as an exercise for the reader to grapple with the minimal and maximal meanings. #4 and #5 are both interesting examples of statements that would be considered to be true by many standard logics. It’s very common of universal generalizations that they are made true by an empty set. #4 would be false if one lover that I had from Venus was not lazy. But since I have not had any lovers from Venus, #4 fails to be false!

I’m really just trying to focus on how a more minimal approach to meaning will fail to understand human interactions and human marketplaces.

Of course some more sophisticated logics try to account for and solve these anti-intuitive results (and many others) but this only further aids in distinguishing between the minimal and maximal approaches to meaning. The more artifacts of conversational implicature that you try to save in a given system of logic, the more maximal the system becomes.⁴ I am not bashing logics here. From from it! I’m a huge fan, even if I fail to be logical enough sometimes. I’m really just trying to focus on how a more minimal approach to meaning will fail to understand human interactions and human marketplaces.

It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear

This basic principle of advertising can be glossed over by people operating in specific contexts like a philosophy department, or within the confines of a programming language, or within the conventions of particular community that polices the meanings of things. And these communities are very important. Let’s call these communities, meaning regimes.

What’s cool about a meaning regime, is that it’s precisely not what people hear. It’s what you say. If someone heard you wrong, that’s their problem. You just point to what you said and let the restrictions and definitions of the meaning regime do the work for you.

In the context of a particular meaning regime, it’s a relief to be able to say what you want without some random person saying that you made some meaning you didn’t. I for one hate-hate-hate being misunderstood. And it’s never my fault. LOL

Of course, meaning regimes aren’t always as clear cut and well defined as we hope. And even when they are to other people, they only work when it’s clear to everyone. A lot of work goes into building meaning regimes so that we better understand each other. It takes a lot of work, a lot of cooperation, and a lot of selflessness. Ever meet someone that is constantly using terms in a different and obstinate way? Ever put an analytic philosopher, an English prof and a Political Scientist in the same room together. Chaos. Unless they each have a high emotional intelligence and a heightened awareness for their different meaning regimes, it’s chaos.

Taking responsibility for meaning making

When you operate outside of a particular meaning regime, when you operate in the wild, you do not have the luxury of not thinking about the way meaning is made. And to some reasonable extent we are responsible for the meaning that we participate in making. “Reasonable extent” is a weaselly phrase of course. I mean, it’s ambiguous. I mean, it leaves lots of wiggle room and I don’t want to have to define it. It can be perfectly meaningful without having to define it.

There are obvious cases where the utterer of a statement, or the writer of an ad, are not responsible for the meaning that someone makes out of it. And there are are clear cases where the writers are responsible for the meanings that are made.

Case #1: An ad reads, “Hungry? Try Galiano apples. They’ll fill you up.” Someone reads the ad and is offended and feels demeaned and becomes rather upset because “apple” is a slang term for prostitute in their community. To make matters worse, their niece has just become street involved, started using drugs, has lost their job and moved to Galiano. This is, I hope, clearly a case where the people who wrote the ad cannot reasonably be held to be responsible for the meaning that was made.

They might even believe that good humans should work to prevent this, out of love for gay men. But that doesn’t stop the ad from being messed up. Case #2: An ad reads, “God hates gay folks. But he hates gay women less.” Okay this might be a weak example – there is something kind of John Stewartesque about it. Suppose the ad actually reads, “God sends fags to hell. With our love, and your support, we can end gayness.” Now the copy writers might actually believe that their God sends gay men to hell. They might even believe that good humans should work to prevent this, out of love for gay men. But that doesn’t stop the ad from being messed up. This is, I think, a clear example of when the copy writers can be held reasonably responsible for the meaning that is made in the minds of readers. The ad is demeaning and derogatory.

Hopefully these thought experiments make it obvious that there are cases where folks aren’t responsible for the meaning they create – and there are some clear cases where folks are responsible for the meaning they create. In between these clear cases, there’s a large class of cases where it’s not so clear. This is the very grey zone.

Meaning oozes

In the wild of human to human interactions,⁵ more meaning is made than can be understood. It’s air and water. It’s simply everywhere. And whether we try to understand and rationally consider the currents of meaning that flow around and through us or not, there is more meaning than we can ever comprehend. The meaning shapes us. It animates us.

So when someone says, “that’s not what I meant!” or “that’s doesn’t logically follow from what I said!” it might not matter. It is entirely possible for the meanings we create to be beyond our intent and within our responsibility.

The retreat to minimal readings

So what happens if someone suspects an ad or an article is, say, racist. One challenge in assessing utterances, statements, articles and ads is that readers will often retreat to a minimal approach to the meaning of the ad, article, what-have-you. So you have this gooey, oozing, amorphous, multi-layered meaning and then buddy says, “look, I just said that the indians I knew were lazy. You can’t argue with that because it’s true. I’m not saying all indians are lazy.” And then he retreats to this very logical and minimal reading of what he said. This is a really common tactic whether it happens in the context of racism or not. Regrettably, this tactic can be very effective.

This defensive tactic is most effective when the status quo creates a situation where the burden of proof is placed on the accuser (for lack of  a better, less militant term). So if I suggest an ad is racist in a household full of people who don’t see the ad as racist, likely it will become incumbent on me to show how and why. In this context, the retreat to a minimal reading of the ad will be very successful. However, if I suggest an ad is racist to a bunch of people who mostly agree and see the ad as racist, then it would become the duty of the lone defender of the ad to argue for why it’s not. In this case a retreat to a minimal reading would be more readily recognized as simply ignoring or overlooking the issue.

Asymmetry of impact

So in our work as designers, we’re often in the position of telling people that even though people don’t notice the drop cap or color scheme or typeface, people still experience these design elements. And that’s super interesting in the context of inappropriate ad content. Even if you don’t notice them, they’re still impacting you – just in a very different way. Imagine a young boy and a girl, of similar cognitive development, looking at a sexist ad. Neither child may consciously notice the impact that the ad is having on them. And the impact is very different.

On my view, adult humans aren’t so different from children. But I think that one important difference is that for adults, when the felt impacts of the the subtle implications are negative, it’s easier to be more consciously hurt by them. With support and training each of us can become more aware of the way our views of the world are shaped by the ads around us. But for people who are demeaned by an ad, it will be much more obvious that the ad is inappropriate.

In conlusion

Well that all sounds more obvious and less helpful than I thought it was going to be! I will like to return to this issue and perhaps find more and better ways to think about these phenomena. Any ideas?