Embodying and Enacting Meaning and Content on the Web: A Dialogue with Heinz Wittenbrink

There are conversations that happen outside what Greeks would call Chronos – the chronological or sequential time, and into what is known as Kairos – the quality, right time, a deep time. My Dialogue with Heinz Wittenbrick happened in Kairos.

Heinz Wittenbrick is a blogger, keeping a blog at Lost and Found, a gallery owner (off_gallery graz) and an active supporter of Extinction Rebellion Austria. He has worked as a content consultant and editor and is a fervent proponent of open web standards, he wrote books on XML and RSS. In 2014 he founded the Content Strategy master program at FH JOANNEUM. The M.A. program in content strategy at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz is the first academic program completely devoted to content strategy. The students’  workload is equivalent to a full-time Masters program but the students are professionals. Project work, an important component of the program, can and should be done closely connecte to the jobs of the students. The goal of the curriculum is to teach content strategy as a discipline as described in the books by Anne Rockley, Kristina Halvorson, Melissa Rach, Rahel Anne Bailie, Noz Urbina and others. (ref. Content Strategy as Practical Knowledge

It was Heinz who first discovered me via my blog and invited me to teach web writing within the program. Back then, apart from being the director of the M.A. program in Content Strategy, he was teaching the course Writing, Editing, Curating. With time we realized how many common threads weave our understanding of what text is and our never-ending quest to find what is meaning. Back then, in 2018, it was the The Brave New Text era of my life during which I was fervently writing about text, linked data and meaning. As an intertext to a share of mine, Heinz wrote:

As a hypertextual, open and universal environment, the web forms the public space for the existing and future relationships of a text to other texts, people and objects.

Cit. The web as the home of digital text – a tweet by @TheodoraPetkova

6 years and many live conversations later, the exchange is again intertextual but more situational. In this dialogue I invite you to read the artifact of a recent exchange. In it, I was curious to hear Heinz’s take on content strategy, AI and meaning. Of course the meanders of dialogue dragged us into different flows. We talked about semiotics, AI, topic maps, philosophy, even read a wonderful article on AI together Mere imitation Generative AI has lately set off public euphoria: the machines have learned to think! But just how intelligent is AI? pondering Minsky’s words “philosophical and language matters [being] trivialities.”.  

Yet the focus remained, and it was the beauty of the Web and the hyperlinked and dialogic, as we would find out, nature of the Web and our knowledge quests.

Enjoy weaving. 

Teodora: Heinz, it is clear that the answers to all the questions are 42 but in this Dialogue I want us to go beyond the art of smart satire into the meanders of semiotics and not knowing.

Let’s walk the talk:

How did you decide to create the Content Strategy Program in the first place?

I must distinguish the name of the program and the content. Years before we began with this program I wanted to set up a program on the specifics of digital communication, especially communication on the web. The main idea was not to teach digital communication as something somehow similar to the print universe with some smaller changes and adaptations but as something, let’s say a system, on its own. I did not really succeed in explaining that idea. Later I discovered the discipline of content strategy, thanks to a message from Eric Eggert with a link to Erin Kissane’s small book. My impression was that here we had a discipline which could be developed and taught in an academic manner and that the name was good and sexy enough. When we started the program our university was much more interested in design than some years before – one reason was that Graz had become a Unesco city of design and that the local and the regional government wanted to develop the so-called Creative Industries. So this time we succeeded.

How is content strategy related to semiotics?

That is difficult to say – it is a question for research. Most real life content strategists have no idea of semiotics. The more academic strain of content strategy depends on developments in technical communication and in the XML community – I don’t know of connections between this community and what is still there of semiotics. I think that you, Theodora, are probably the only person who is really interested in connecting the disciplines or traditions.

Personally I have also a bit lost the connection to semiotics. But I remain interested in it, also because of its relationship with the philosophy of pragmatism which I am just rediscovering. What interests me most is the role of the énonciation or utterance – as opposed to the énoncé or proposition. I think for the success of every kind of communication the énonciation and also the way it is represented in communication, the énonciation énoncée is decisive. The énonciation is the link between the content and situations, and this link is very complex.

In content strategy there is often a very naive way to speak about so called narratives. Here, too, semiotics could be important, especially the analysis of narrative forms by Greimas and his successors.

Why didn’t you pursue the PhD in Philosophy you started?

I did not start a PHD in Philosophy but in German Literature (*Germanistik*). It was about the structure of the narrative form called *Novelle* in German. I wanted to do a kind of cross analysis of the *Novellen* of the Swiss/German author Gottfried Keller and texts of Sigmund Freud which have a similar structure – let’s say what was called a psychoanalytic explanation in the early time of psychoanalysis was a *récit*, a story, with the structure of a *Novelle*. There is a similarity of the dialectics of desire – the theme of the analytic cure – and the narrative structure of the *Novelle*, especially of the closed and somehow simple-looking works of Keller. At that time I did not really have the theoretical and conceptual tools for this project. I read a lot of Lacan, but I didn’t really understand him, and I also had a bad conscience in writing about psychoanalysis without any education in this discipline and without having been analysed myself. So I gave it up. For some time I thought about writing a thesis about German translations of modern French literature (Leiris, Ponge, Beckett), but that did not keep me interested enough.

Seen from the distance: I was interested in what makes a story (a narrative structure) a story, what makes it possible to close, to terminate a story, and I saw an opposition between the closed stories and the non fixed, open, anarchic or however you call it processes of language or speaking, which draw from the material of language, its physical side.

How is our Web related to our other ecologies?

I am not sure whether it is still possible to distinguish the web from the other layers or realms of the net or of the digital. For me the web has always been the open web, something based on open standards, something I would call – with Yochai Benkler – a working anarchy. The open web is not lost, it is still existing and probably even needed by the corporate juggernauts who have overtaken most of the internet – but only a small minority is really using it as an open medium, and most of web communication is controlled by monopolistic corporations who make their profits ether by selling consumer goods which are driving the ecological catastrophe and or by providing the infrastructure for other growth oriented corporations and also for the states.

The web today is one of the most important parts of the infrastructure of globalisation – closely related to the other parts of this infrastructure like the energy and the transport systems. The *globe* of this globalisation is – as Bruno Latour has described it – very different from the earth, from the critical zone between the earth mantle and the upper atmosphere which has been formed by life and is essential for our survival. It is essential to keep at least a part of this infrastructure open – e.g. for science, for journalism, for activism. Whether we can keep it open depends on human cooperation and on human institutions – the W3C ist one of them. It will not depend on technical tools.

Where does knowledge live? And how do we enact knowledge?

The questions remind me of my PhD project: I am not sure whether I have the conceptual tools to answer them. Only a year or so ago I discovered the concept of 4E-cognition: Cognition is always embodied, embedded, enacted and extended.

Cognition and knowledge are very different from a representation of a so called reality that would exist independently from knowledge or cognition. Subject and object, knowledge and reality, are intertwined, and there is no sharp distinction between things in our conscience and outside of it.

Knowledge depends on forms of cooperation, on institutions that can distinguish what is true and what is not true, e.g. on scientific and journalistic institutions. These institutions are formed around objects, they are not purely human or social in the conventional sense which distinguishes social and natural facts. The institutionalized cooperation of situated actors who continually have to reenact and to redefine ways to decide what is true and what not cannot be replaced by markets, by majority rule or by technical procedures. (Therefore social media are not a replacement for journalism and large language models are not a replacement for scientific cooperation.)

I see the enactment of knowledge as the formation of a network around a topic or – as Latour names it – around a matter of concern. There is always debate, conflict, about matters of concern, and the network has to find ways to organize these conflicts. The networks contain a lot of artifacts, of objects which embody knowledge and also former conflicts. The IPCC is a big example of such a network and also of its institutional dependencies. – Very roughly said (this is why I am interested in pragmatism) the objects of knowledge and the enactment of knowledge (of issues, of matters of concern) depend on each other. Global heating e.g. is not just a physical process – what we understand by global heating ist defined by networks for data gathering and by limits as the 1.5° od 2° limit. That does not mean that global heating is not real but that we cannot speak of it outside of these networks. Institutionally it would be defined differently if the focus were not so much on the climate but e.g. on biodiversity.

What does content strategy miss when it comes to thinking about content through the very fabrics of the Web?

I would say content strategy has two strains – one as a discipline and one as practice. In the latter practitioners or let’s say agency people who are somehow responsible for content dominate. For many of them the technology is mostly a given. It’s something they use and they try let’s say to comply with traditional standards of communication but often without a real interest in the inner workings of the Web. And another strain is the technical communication. In this domain the communication is again not very web-oriented. Maybe people have a base in XML even SGML but are also often not interested in the specifics of the web. They are more the omnichannel side of things. Meaning: I create content and I distribute it everywhere. I think this is not sufficient.

But then how can we make this transition painless, because nobody wants to do the extra work, isn’t that extra work?

Yeah but the extra work would be to say what are web specific forms of content. 

What does only work on the Web? And we could say that somehow only things related to hyperlinks are only working on the Web. And then we can say what is already working – wikis are working, blogs are working. They cannot exist outside of the Web. And on a second level you could ask even more –  what would be possible? And then you come into this Xanadu direction, with  bi-directional links.  Personally I’m just now discovering a  tool called Logseq (https://logseq.com/)  – it’s a personal knowledge management tool, but it has bidirectional links. And text.

And in content strategy I would say there is no match to these forms of Web content.

Content strategy people normally either say “I have one content and I use many channels for the same content without respect to the specifics of these different channels”, or they say “ I am just  just doing something for the Web and I’m using the Web just as a platform for communication, or  I use Facebook or whatever it is.”

I think it is like that because of the history of content strategy.

Content strategy has been developed by agency people and it’s also related to the self-marketing of these people. They are selling their role in web agencies or in corporations which need content strategies. And the other thing is the technical communication. There people are interested in developing content as independently as possible from the specifics of the platforms – web pages, document bases etc. And they want to do it in an economic way. That’s why they have the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA).

But isn’t that a bridge – the intent to create content in a somewhat lingua franca, so that it can go anywhere?

Yes, that could be a bridge. But in reality it cannot go everywhere. If it is on the Web and it is linked to other content it is sufficient, you don;t need any other platform than that. And to understand why you don;t need any other platform about that you should have an understanding of the Web platform. And that brings us back to your question about content strategy practitioners and the specifics of the Web. The web as a platform, as a communication platform and also a storage platform. And of course, this is my very traditional view of the Web, today there’s much more on the Web. Web sockets and chats etc. And on the Web today you can hardly differentiate what is Web technology and what is not. 

To get off this purist perspective, into your work with the Content Strategy Blog, did you manage to weave at least one thread of that understanding into the building of it.

Not yet as far as reflection of the web platform is concerned. But on a practical level we have now documentation of a growing part of the content of this program which is web-like. The way it is represented – I would say for the first time after some years of trying – works. Thanks to the students who developed it.

The way we don’t understand the practitioners, this is how maybe we don’t understand their soft skills, and the fact that communication has redundancies.

Yes, maybe. But maybe not. I will get back to a topic that keeps me up at night – climate change.  I am still a member of the Media team of Extinction Rebellion. Here in Austria. What we are doing normally is to prepare a press release. And this is basic content. And then on the basis of this press release there are social media posts – Instagram, Mastodon, X. Neither is one and the same. They are slightly different depending on the platform. And then there is an action. So we have basic content and basic messages, but we don’t have one and the same message for the different platforms. And also only the newspapers get that first press release. And this is much more realistic than having one content spewn everywhere in the same form.

Can we link that to “enunciation” in semiotics?

Yes. Because it is enunciation. Enunciation means who says what at which moment in which situation. And that is a very important part. The message “In Austria there are too many highways” in a sentence in a newspaper is different from that same sentence said by a 21-year old activist before a policeman who arrests the activist. The sentence is linked to a certain moment, let’s say in history. In other words, certain sentences have many different meanings in many different situations. And if you participate in the situation you know the meaning. With a “computational only” approach you can only go that deep into the situation beyond its language representation.

So understanding is situational, meaning is situational?

Yes. It is. And the person, the situation of utterance are key parts for the success of the communications.

What is successful communication?

In a very primitive sense that the people, that is the addressees, understand what was said and why it was said. And this is not necessarily in this performative sense that they do something afterwards, but in the sense of illocution– what is done by the act of communication.

When did you first hear about the Semantic Web?

Back in the days when the Web was still new, I was in a kind of exhibition in Munich related to William S. Burroughs. And they showed things like Gopher, somewhat connected to pop culture. And there was also Mac with Hypercard. And that was before the Web. Around this time I worked for an Encyclopedia of Literature. We were the first team in the Bertelsmann Publishing Group to work with computers. We had a programmer, whom many people didn’t really trust. And he said, there is something new and there are things that connect everything. And this about the hyperlink. Back then I didn’t understand the word link. And then I was immediately fascinated by the Web. it was really difficult to imagine that. Once you have it you can rephrase the past. But before you have it it is extremely difficult to imagine.

I started reading about topic maps and in that context I read about RDF. And there was a conflict: topic map people thought their format is better than RDF.

Next to the Web-specific threads, there are semiotics specific threads. People are usually saying that communication is different from semiotics as it has evolved as a discipline with a different intent. What’s your take of that?

If you mean communication in the academic sense of a discipline, that is for sure, it is different from semiotics. But I must also say that I am so much out of this field of semiotics, that I cannot really say how a contemporary approach would look like. The last thing I remember is Manovich, he speaks about semiotics, and is somehow related to this Russian tradition of semiotics. And semiotics is a complex field. One reason ist that there is Peirce’s pragmatist tradition, starting with this notion of sign, and the French tradition buidling on Saussure and they somehow coexist, but I would say in very small academic circles.

I see these circles mainly outside of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. I know of some people in Italy in France and maybe in Bulgaria and I don’t know,  there’s not much semiotics in the States and the United Kingdom, as far as I know.

Heinz, if we look at communication in a very basic way as “somebody is saying something to someone”, then what’s the very core of communication and of meaning? Where does meaning emerge? If we try to rationalize and compartmentalize what we are saying and the vocabularies we are using and then map those, it’s impossible that we understand each other? Isn’t it?

But we understand each other quite well.

How come in this wild variety of vocabularies and contexts we manage to understand each other?

Because we are not starting as let’s say, as single cells, which then afterwards get into contact. We are already constructing this together. 

It’s not somebody here and somebody there and and he or she says something to the other. It’s developing. Developing a text together.

It’s like a relationship –  is this metacommunication?

Yes. And let’s say the individual is not so individual. 

You are very theoretically oriented many times, how come you got into the adventure of creating the content strategy program where it is all about practice.

Yeah but I cannot say that I really had a theory for that. I was really interested in having something practical but oriented towards let’s say improving the quality of websites. And I also thought the Web is new and it takes a lot of time to develop formats. Still today I would say most of the things which we are using are old, it’s 20 or 30 years old. From the beginning of the Web there is not so much that has come after that time.

And if you go back to print, it took 100 years until the organization of a book with numbered pages became common. It does take a long time to find the right format, and because we have increased storage capacity and the processing capacity for example does not necessarily mean that we have understood hypertextual formats and what we can do with them.

It was these days that I was invited to a BarCamp in Austria, and still now if you say I’m going to a barcamp nobody knows what that it. And the barcamp is a mixture of Web-typical forms and other communication forms. 

Nestroy once wrote that one of the properties of progress is that it always looks much bigger than it is.

Can we say that the program is the search for the right format(s) for the Web?

Yes, that was my intention. And bringing practitioners together. In the end it has become very different from what I imagined. That must not be bad. It is now much more marketing oriented.  Maybe so it’s much more oriented towards achieving goals via  communication as opposed to what I was interested in  – the illocutionary side  of communication. More about what happens after you say something on the Web. what is realized by communication.And how the effects of communication can be measured has also become very important.

Who’s gonna interview the interviewer?  

What follows is a section within the dialogue, that aims for a sort of symmetry, albeit tiny one 🙂 Here I asked Heinz to spare several minutes to ask me a question or two. 🙂

Heinz: What is your feeling about the erotic side content and the presence desire? 

Teodora: It feels like the pleasure of text is that unique spark that might differentiate content from the tin-voiced picture-perfect, always optimistic, smart and eloquent AI bead game. A game of statistics that, if I am allowed to use an adjective Barthes uses, results in frigid texts. Texts that were not touched by desire.

And we know again from Barthes, that:

Your text must prove it desires me.

And I am saying that and quoting Barthes, fully aware of what I recently observe: being present, being passionate and truly desiring to connect at the level of text and thought is a personal endeavor. When it comes to content and content operations, that erotic side, the one revealed in the interplay between reader’s and writer’s intent, the one you cannot codify, is just a mirage.  How can one be erotic on a scale? 

But then again who am I to be able to conceive all the mysterious ways meaning, desire and the unpredictability of bliss (citing Barthes again) meander through our textual woods? 

What keeps me sane through these woods and the artificially built picture-perfect trees of GenAI-spit texts are some questions. My pleasures across a text-to-be:

Why would I read you? Where are your answers? What do you have in store for me? How are you going to entertain me? Which part of your content is designed to intrigue me and invite me to indulge in your writing?

The answers are what I am after when writing for the Web in a public communication context. 

Why? 

I can give you a bunch of theories on the empowered, yet overwhelming and attention-deprived user, their emotional memory which is where the brightest impressions are stored etc, but I won’t. I will give you the common sense answer: I can choose, and I have X billion of websites to choose from and only 24 hours. I really need shortcuts, and these days I want to take pleasure while taking them.

And there you go. Our chance to write a text that desires the person on the other, erotic side of content. 

Heinz: What is content strategy for you?

Teodora: It is Ariadne’s thread. The weaving of the thread on our side, and further its unweaving by Theseus, who tied it to the door of the labyrinth and unrolled it all the way to the Minotaur to be able to find  his way back to the entrance.

And it is knitted with Linked Data. 

Content strategy for me personally is about me, the greenhorn in content strategy, touting the ideas about content modeling being akin to data modeling, content models being akin to data models, and most importantly content ideation creation and distribution being akin to knowledge management.

In parallel to this evangelism,  I am also radical with writing for the Web and what I want to teach our students in the content strategy program is to stay alive, to be able to discern what is alive in them and in the moment they are creating texts and communication artifacts for. And from that perspective content strategy is that giant initiative with all its content operations and methodologies and approaches that is then supported by content that matters. And content that matters is created by people who care.

What is your take on AI? How is that affecting our sense-making lives?

[I don’t want  to sound anti- technical]. I I think what what we call now AI is very close to this let’s say individualistic conception of communication, where somehow in your brain in your conscience or in some kind of inner space you have a representation of the world. And the more you put in that  inner space, the better you can process it, the better your knowledge about the world gets. But that is fictitious! It is not like that in reality. There are many more elements involved, there are also objects involved and you have a certain representation of some things and then you have  certain situations. And the complexity of these often changing situations  cannot really be translated into representations of the word. It is also not possible to have let’s say one big encyclopedia summarizing everything to be known.

Because  knowledge starts from not knowing?

Yes. I would say knowledge starts from situations and it has to be redone and reworked,

I’m always feeling stupid talking about AI. I would like to be able to tell that in a better way but my feeling is that AI is not dialogic at all. You don’t have a dialogue,  with this AI – you get defined results. And as long as  it is not dialogical I wouldn’t even call it AI. It is simply a mass generator of symbol chains.

Instead of an epilogue

Heinz, what’s next for content strategy with all that AI craze?

I don’t think this is that the AI things are so important as they sound. I think the next thing must be must be more connected to the different kinds and layers of content and their interconnections. For instance: What is scientific content? What is the difference between the content of a scientific paper and let’s say the content of a summarizing review and the representation of the scientific content in a newspaper? What are the relationships between different kinds of content and different kinds of – so to say – truth, like the truth of a good journalistic article or the truth established by consensus about about political issues.

Different kinds of dialogues and conflicts, embedded in different practices, lead to different kinds or layers of reality. To say it very roughly – and this is more an intuition than something I am able to explain consistently: Hypertext formats lead to another reality than linear text formats. To understand all these different layers of meaning and their interrelations and to do research about that – I think that should be the next thing but maybe that is not content strategy.

If you enjoyed this Dialogue, dive in for more:

You can connect with Heinz mostly via his blog: https://wittenbrink.net/, as he is trying to stay true to the real nature of the Web.

And thank you for being here!