Let’s talk about text

Recently I was asked to answer the following question about content: “What’s the best piece of advice you would give someone looking to make their enterprise content more strategic?”

I looked at previous writings of mine, used some draft sentences from the book I am currently finishing (Being Dialogic), summoned my enterprise-grade wording and came up with a decent answer, saying:

“I would advise content people to understand, implement and be able to iterate the principles and practices of dialogic communication in order to make their content strategic. While content is a digital object for which we should definitely take care by consistently curating and tagging its metadata, it is also a social construct. It is the result of exchange, relationship building and collaborative sense-making. That said making content strategic would entail taking care of its aspects as a digital object – i.e. data and it’s aspect as a social construct – i.e. dialogic communication.”

And then it hit me.

Busy exploiting, we rarely explore.

Such an approach, to only bear fruits and not sow seeds, turns (marketing) communications into a boilerplate text. Add to this any AI-powered helper and web content becomes shiny, glossed, perfect and …. soulless.

That said, we need to talk.

About text.

Outside the ChatGPT craze. Inside the world of incalculable intangibles, where brand equity and consumer perception form to further start accruing in a person’s emotional memory.

What is Text?

A text is not simply a communicational apparatus. It is a device which questions the previous signifying systems, often renews them, and sometimes destroys them.  

Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Umberto Eco.

Text is the art of connecting.

A vehicle to convey meaning text is both an artifact (a physical or a digital object),  and a social construct, made of relationships, a result of communicative acts, a patchwork of semiotic activities.

A text is also a consensus. 

A consensus between what is said and what is left unsaid for the sake of clarity.  It is a secluded space, like those cloisters – the open spaces developed in the medieval ages by church architects, where one can afford to take a walk in the open air, sheltered from the public. Just like during the walk in these cloisters, working on a text in the privacy of the interaction within set boundaries one is able to write unburdened by all the possible connections you could make. Secludedness allows us to focus on that particular space where you will work on establishing a connection with another sense-making being – to communicate something or to open the door for understanding – your own or your sense-making partners’ one. A sort of a third layer, born in the interaction. Unimagined before as it could have only existed given you have made space for it.

A text is that dynamics of entering the secluded space of your inner dialogue to clarify the message and then exiting that space, to set the message free and let it bear its fruits in the interaction it will enter in public, meeting and connecting expected and unexpected ways with other such spaces of individual or collective understandings.

Metaphorically speaking, a text is a rotating mass of known and unknown relations  which we have in our mind and outside it. It is a combination of associations, parallels, knowledge, intuition. These connections happen at the level of text and in the writer’s mind and at the level of the reader’s perception. With codes in messages working at different levels the depth of a text reveals itself depending on the readers own connections and seekings and surroundings.

And a text is never alone. It always carries meanings and memories from other texts; these texts are either explicitly referenced or alluded to in some other ways in order to connect what is conveyed or sought to be understood with tangent seekings. 

Text can only be understood within context.

As linguist Steven Pinker, notes “The reader has to fill in the background – to read between the lines, to connect the dots – and if he doesn’t  know which background is applicable, he will be mystified”.

Mystified we are on the Web in many cases.

Text on the Web

On the web a piece of text can potentially enter infinite number of contexts. What once was a relatively secluded space is now an informational environment, an ecology with multiple portals to interpret meaning through.

Here’s an example.

I am a human.

I am not a robot.

Remember me!

How does that sound? 

Thus placed, without any context around them, these words lead to perceiving this as poetry, perhaps a cyberpunk vision of an AI wanting to finally get acknowledged as equal.

It takes just one layer of context to demystify that perception. And that layer is putting the words in the frame of a dialogue box, the one we see and are prompted to check in order to to verify that we are not a robot, but a human. 

A text is perceived and understood in the context of other systems and on the Web these other systems are not one or two sign systems, but a multitude. And they all add up to the meaning of the words on the electronic device – the situation, the device, the other signs around the communicative act, all they influence the understanding. 

As Barthes wrote, the situation towards which the related text is oriented, must be recognized as a full-fledged component of the structure of a text, because such situations determine the hierarchy of levels of the text.

On the Web, among increasingly connected words (and people), an increasingly saturated multi-layeredness of text, of spaces, and of the infrastructures of code and culture beneath them, we communicate, act and understand within a series of sign systems. Any text now does not have one, strictly fixed meaning, it builds up in the course of its happening and the interactions related to it. 

Marketing Text

To offer value on the Web and most importantly to be noticed in the first place, we need to understand marketing text in its multidimensionality as a social construct.

Advertisers, promotional text and consumers, as scholar Barbara Stern argues (ref  Textual Analysis in Advertising Research: Construction and Deconstruction of Meanings), are multidimensional participants in a complex interactive process. In Stern’s model, advertising created a network of texts as opposed to everyday speech. This network is created as a collective action (copywriter, sponsor) and presented to the user, who in turn interprets the layers of meaning embedded (consciously or not) in the message. This user is also interactive – they update the messages through various interpretive practices and in this sense can also be considered as a source. 

On the Web, this network of intended messages and interpretative practices sponsor-user interplays is expanding, just like the dimensions and modalities in the way we interact through text are.

With million paths, but no starting place, our marketing text, existing in a hypertext medium, straddles unseen before interpretative routes. Routes governed by user’s preferences, search behavior, media habits. Routes that we might suggested with our marketing communications but which might never be walked unless we have something really interesting, relevant and valuable to offer.

Interesting, relevant and valuable lie outside the X number of words, the N number of parsed sentences and Z number of co-occurrences in the text. This is way I am still reluctant to use AI when working on a text. It feels like “generating” a factory item, in which social strands and processes are limited, oprimized and in a way sanitized. The text is picture perfect yet the process of writing has been narrowed down to computational and statistical efforts, to the shallow presentation. The dialogue never happened, nothing new emerged, no two perspectives met.

Interesting, relevant and valuable text

Interesting, relevant and valuable lie where the intent the text was written with and the intent it has been read with meet. A place where “reader-constructed meaning is folded into a larger argument for infinitely open meanings brought about by the play of language itself.” (cit. Textual Analysis in Advertising Research: Construction and Deconstruction of Meanings)

Interesting and valuable texts I believe are born from interaction, from careful listening and from understanding other people’s needs and desires. For it is in the space emerging from the desire to connect where text happens.