Communicating

J.Rice
J.Rice
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read

Over the past year, I’ve been unable to communicate. I shut down my blog, Yellow Dog, which I had been running since graduate school when I initially started it on a Gray Matter platform; I shut down my beer blog, Make Mine Potato, which I began shortly after I moved to Missouri to join the English Department at the University of Missouri.

For some reason, I was deep into mid-life crisis without knowing what that meant. Middle to late ’40s. Successful career. Two children. A wonderful wife. For no reason, I was running out of communication. Communication seemed more difficult than it had previously been. I regularly had been writing online since I secured my Alachua Freenet account in Gainesville, Florida (afn49457 — one hour at a time online) somewhere around 1996, but now I wasn’t writing online. No more blogs. No more tweets. I stopped posting to Facebook as often as I once had.

Then my wife was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She began the physically and emotionally difficult process of chemotherapy. Even more recently, her father has been diagnosed with inoperable stage four cancer. We are devastated. But I am unable to communicate what I feel. No words is a cliché, and a fairly useless one that, at times, we draw upon in order to express shock at a moment or complete surprise. Still, here I am with no words.

My job is communication. I study rhetoric, the basis of all communication, whether oral, visual, or in print. Academic life, like most jobs, consists of communication. In the university, we have a communication department, we exchange ideas in meetings, we publish our research, we share accomplishments via an in house PR department, we receive communication from administrators and colleagues. I am an administrator. I have to communicate.

The easiest form of communication in our age of new media is email. My first exposure to email was as an undergraduate at Indiana University sometime around 1991. We were given email accounts (long strings of numbers and letters) and we could access those accounts by logging into a computer in a lab somewhere on campus. To send an email, one needed another email. I had only one other email to send to, the one used by my girlfriend, who I lived with. When I would send her something funny (or what I thought was funny and silly), she would get mad at me since we lived together and why on earth did I need to send an email. I was unable to communicate.

In today’s university, we use email all the time. Updates. Announcements. Meeting times. Only, we don’t use email as well. Too often, we are discouraged from using email. Email, at a public university, can be subpoenaed because it is a public record. Such a point is important for job searches — candidates can accuse search committees of improprieties if problematic views of the candidate are expressed on email. Lawsuits can follow. But such a point also reflects the desire to deflect discussion. When a colleague or, more than likely, an administrator does not want to address an issue or answer a question, she can not respond. Not responding has become the norm of a great deal of university communication online. At least half of my email exchanges in the university are not responded to. We are unable to communicate.

Indeed, one of the first lessons I learned when I was interim department chair was not to respond to emails. Prior to becoming department chair, I would fire off immediate responses to department heads, deans, vice provosts, colleagues and anyone I did not agree with or, at the least, that I had a question for. Now, I was told to not say anything. Why? Because email generates conflict. Communication, overall, can generate conflict, as social media makes clear. Email, before Twitter and Facebook, made us angry and upset over shared words, suggestion, insinuation, and perceived tone. Before I was chair, I did not care much about upsetting anyone. As chair, I had to stop making people angry. I became unable to communicate.

My children have solidified their communication as screaming. They yell at each other all day. In the summer, when they are out of school and have little interaction with other children, that screaming intensifies. They scream over who gets to choose what TV show to watch, who gets which iPad to play with, who gets to sit where on the couch, who can use the bathroom first to brush his or her teeth, who picks the songs on Spotify. Nothing escapes screaming. They are children, but they are also unable to communicate.

Most of what I read on Facebook from colleagues all over the country sounds like screaming. I don’t blame them. The current political climate should make us want to scream. On the other hand, it sounds a lot like my children screaming over every tiny, minor discrepancy. Academics find these tiny discrepancies in a speech, TV show plot, advertisement, song lyric, off the cuff comment by a celebrity, faulty representation, and so on. Our disciplinary analysis and discussion of rhetorical communication is, too often, the scream. Instead of no words, we scream. We scream into Facebook posts and tweets. Those screams can get someone fired, or they can elicit sympathy. Elsewhere, I have called this point “outragicity,” borrowing Roland Barthes’ notion of “icity” as a rhetorical capture of what we think something is (its representational assemblage based on stereotypes or cultural assumptions) over what it might actually be. The icity of a given moment also is the expression of a particular communicative act. Outragicity is the expression of outrage at everything one encounters in the public sphere — whether it is a dentist killing a lion or a president thinking a tweet can ban a particular group’s service in the military. Outragicity is also the inability to communicate.

What we have here, the canonical line from Cool Hand Luke states, is a failure to communicate. Maybe communication is overrated, hyped, exaggerated, and not as important as I’d like it to be. Maybe we need less communication. Those that reject the world often accept vows of silence. Silence is golden, we are told. One of the few things my kids know how to say in Hebrew is shut your mouth (tistom et ha peh). Maybe not communicating is not a reflection of a midlife crisis a 47 year old academic thinks he is suffering from, but rather a natural evolution from the constant screaming around us.

I don’t know. I still can’t communicate what I’m trying to say.

J.Rice

Written by

J.Rice

Professor. Craft beer drinker. Beer trader. Sometimes I tweet more than Ratebeer reviews.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade