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Interest (What is this for?)

Program

0.0 BILL: What, then of programs of interest? In what ways may their rhetorics different? Here, we want to make a distinction between programs of interest oriented to sameness, in contrast to programs oriented to difference.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 208-09.

0.23 BILL: Here’s the home page of the New York Times.

The top bar is screaming rhetoric, an advertisement for Amazon Web Services. Then, there is a series of articles about national politics, and at article of social commentary, about changes happening in a mining town – rhetorically, these texts relatively open as you might expect for supposedly “balanced reporting” — though many a critic of the New York Times will question whether interest-less balance is ever possible. And, in the last two columns, ten articles expressed in the relatively closed rhetoric of “opinion” pieces.

The assumption is that everyone landing on the home page will have the same interest, curated for them by the editors of the newspaper. Except for the comments, there is little opportunity for readers to participate, and none to create news.

The theorist of modern nationalism, Benedict Anderson, spoke of the “imagined communities” created by these kinds of media, where people were connected by reading the same news at the same time in the same newspaper.

We call this a program of assimilation. Nationalism is the illusion that we are all the same because we share the same story.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 220-21.

1.38 BILL: Now, here’s my Facebook feed in a screenshot taken seconds after the picture of the New York Times home page that I just showed you.

There’s an obscure piece of news about a new train service in a feed to which I subscribe. My friends are creating news, voicing their own opinions on big questions of climate change, or little questions, about a restaurant they visited today and the meal they ate. The place down the road where I get my car repaired has an advertisement for me.

Everyone’s feed is radically different depending on who our friends are, the groups we belong to, the feeds we subscribe to, as well as Facebook’s own reading of what might be good for us to see given of our profile and our activity. Facebook’s artificial intelligence has got to know a lot about me. This is a program of differentiation, your feed compared to mine.

The result: we end up in information bubbles. And more: the effect of a rhetorical program of differentiation is to amplify our differences. Today, broadcasting media with an assimilating effect (of which the New York Times is an example) have been to a large extent displaced by narrowcasting media with a differentiating effect.

Rhetoric is happening in both these programs—opinions, advertising, news (fake or otherwise). It’s just happening programs designed to push our meanings in opposite directions, either towards sameness or differentiation.

2.58 BILL: So here now, is a rough map of these two programs. Let me take another example, consumer objects.

3.06 BILL: Here is Henry Ford with his famous model T. “Any color you like as long as it is black” said this inventor of mass production, and the mass consumption that came with it. Today, you can order from the factory any unique combinations of model, color, and features. The business theorists call this “mass customization.”

3.25 BILL: We also have customizable objects – smart phones, for instance, which do just the things we want them to do with the apps we have selected. So, in the world of commodities, there has been a parallel shift from objects whose program is assimilative to objects that differentiate.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 229-35.