I don't know anything about Japan. A little geography, maybe. Once, there were samurai. But I do know there are two types of art out of Japan that have been on my mind over the last few days.
The first is emakimono scrolls. Last term, I stumbled upon a paper by Kimberly Boal and Patrick Schultz (2007) that connected transformational leaders with emakimono scrolls: they create a vision of the future by linking it to the past. It's nothing too profound, except that it's given me some perspective in my internal communications work. And it's helping me to connect the disparate projects I'm working on.
Then there's the other bit of art. Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa. In it, four narrators describe their perspective of the same crime; no account is identical to another. I see there's an article by Heider about the Rashomon effect. In fact, didn't Silverman talk about someone's multi-perspective research? Or was it de Vaus? Hmm. Maybe I need to do some re-reading.
Many in our cohort started to question their roles after studying organizational theory. Me, I've been thinking quite a lot about control within an organization. This idea of perspective and multiple accounts challenges the typical practice of communications. Imagine what a tool like Twitter could do?
The tiny anarchist in me likes the possibilities.
2 comments:
I was thinking about the vanishing point in relation to mass media. The vanishing point implies a single source/viewer/producer and mass media implies a single source/viewer/producer. The web fractures the vanishing point into millions, billions, googles (ha!) of pieces - think cubism. It can be no accident that post-modernists produced the web. Or did the web produce the post-modernists?
In any case, I think that you are right that power and control in the organization are tied to a singular, dominant perspective. Twitter and all the rest should be scary to those who want to maintain this dominance. Cubists unite! Or disunite!
The single source/viewer/producer has been the norm and typically continues to be the norm in organizations, doesn't it? And isn't that what we support in a communications role? One voice.
It's also a 2-D phenomenon. There's no vanishing point in oral media. Instead, we compartmentalize the oral through time. As long as I'm listening to a radio station I know, I don't need to see a clock.
But even if the cubists dismantled perspectival art, they still, literally, framed their context. And I'm wondering, really wondering, if the millions of pieces in the social cyberspace are exerting their own form of control by fracturing voices.
I've started this conversation on the whiteboard in my office, too. A couple of people have joined in. My whiteboard is too small and my printing too large.
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