One of my favourite scholarly articles in a piece written by organization theorist John Jermier back in 1985. In his “When the Sleeper Wakes” paper, Jermier uses a narrative approach to tell a story about the same situation in two slightly different ways, from two slightly different perspectives, to demonstrate key differences between two difficult theoretical concepts. The technique is strikingly effective, lauded by some (Jermier 1985) and emulated by others (Rhodes 2009, 2004, 2002, 2001).
Jermier's is a technique that I'd like to apply here, to recount an exchange I had with a gentleman on twitter just yesterday. The short version of the story is that he tweeted a a link to a New York Times article about the Qantas Flight 32 (QF32) incident, along with his interpretation of a particular part of the article. I recognised that his interpretation did not properly represent the text of the original article, or the facts of the situation. I took him to task. He didn't like being called on the misrepresentation and, well, became somewhat histrionic.
The gentleman has taken our exchange – he calls it “A bizarre exchange” – and turned it into a blog post about arguing on the Internet. It is the mark of a good scholar and, I presume, a good journalist that one will see interesting things in routine situations, and turn them into an interesting commentary on life, on society, or on something.
His is an interesting interpretation, though one that differs in some quite fundamental ways from the interpretation I have made. I think that if I tell the same story from my perspective, an astute reader will identify a few incongruities.
Jermier called his first narrative 'The Dream', so I suppose that makes mine:
The Nightmare
Believe it or not, I don't actually spend hours trawling twitter looking for bizarre misstatements of fact, they just seem to happen to me. Yesterday afternoon was one such situation. I had been doing some shopping, stopped for a break, whipped out my telephone and made a quick perusal of what had been happening in my world. I found this post:
There's a couple of things you should know about me. First, I know a thing or two about aeroplanes. I have a photo somewhere of me at about age six standing beside a fence looking at a Douglas DC-3 aircraft painted in Qantas colours. I've been standing beside metaphorical fences looking at aeroplanes ever since. A few snippets of information stuck.
Second, I don't like misinformation.
So when I read this tweet, and knowing as I do that the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) on QF32 had functioned precisely as designed, I smelled a rat. I checked the source, the NY Times article, and found that the article did not identify an equipment failure:
“Even the cockpit voice recorder did not work right, according to a report by Australian investigators. It failed to halt when the plane landed, and because it operated in a two-hour loop, the critical periods were recorded over.”
In fairness, the NY Times journalist got it pretty badly wrong too, but he does close his sentence with accuracy. Two minutes of fact-checking would have set the story straight. I called the author of the tweet on the error:
I then made another tweet to explain exactly what I was talking about (It can be tricky to get a message across in a single 140 character bite):
So why did I interpret the original post as 'malicious misinformation'? Well, Paul Sheehan put it pretty well today
when he said:
“But the Australian media is on a constant drip-feed of negative information about safety at Qantas as part of a union campaign against maintenance being outsourced overseas.”
The guy who wrote the original NY Times piece probably hasn't been on the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association's (ALAEA) mailing list so I'm happy to put his error down to the commercial necessity that sees journalists often writing about things they don't understand. My tweet partner is a member of the Australian media however, so the onus is a little higher for him.
In the days following the QF32 incident, the press has pretty much gone-to-town on Qantas. A visitor to our country could be excused for believing that Qantas bashing was our national sport. When it became clear that Qantas was not implicated in the failure, the disappointment felt by the Australian press was palpable. Still, the occasional jibe, like the one I took to task, surfaces.
While I was checking my facts and wording the detail about CVR functionality, my friend responded:
He was clearly offended by my choice of words. More on that later, save to say that at the time I felt that this was a good thing. As a teacher I know that comfort zones must be threatened before learning can take place. If I had challenged his view of his world, then I was on the right path. I pressed just a little bit harder:
Play semantics if you like, my friend decided that I'd accused him of lying:
That post gave me two new bones to pick. First, the claim that he'd merely re-tweeted a NY Times article when what he had really done was re-interpret the information and indulged in a quick spot of airframe-maker bashing rather than attend to his journalistic obligations:
and second, that he'd decided to make it personal:
I think that last one really sealed the deal. He took his bat and ball and went home:
The exchange must have weighed on his mind though (that or he'd been sitting at the keyboard with writer's block, and I gifted him with a routine situation that served to be turned into an interesting commentary) because just three hours later, he'd put his thoughts to 'paper':
I didn't actually see that tweet when it happened. Once he took his bat and ball, I went off and got on with my life (actually, I went to the airport and sat on the beach watching the comings and goings for a couple of hours).
After wasting a good many hours a couple of weeks ago attempting to engage a writer who chose to shut the 'debate' down just as soon as he'd collected a suitable number of sympathetic comments on his blog, I had resolved to check the 'credentials' of any prospective partner in debate before I got in too deep. That's exactly what I was doing this morning when I found the response. When the sleeper woke.
Reprise
One ought to give as full an account of a situation as possible so as to avoid self-authorising interpretations (Wray-Bliss 2003) and to permit the reader to make their own interpretation of the data (Clegg 1975). On that basis I have presented the entire exchange, not just the parts that suit my argument. I need the entire exchange anyway, for there are several points I wish to make. Each of these issues warrants a thousand or two words in its own right. For now, I shall make them brief.
On winning:
I find it quite remarkable that the exchange on twitter was re-characterised a few hours later not only as an argument, but as an argument that had a winner, and an argument which I have, apparently, lost!
The new article is posted in apparent evidential support for a previous article about etiquette in online communications. The problem as I see it is that our exchange on twitter doesn't support the article on etiquette, it's really so far off the mark in that regard that 'non sequitur' is, I think, an apt description of the 'polite victory' article.
In any case, if the exchange on twitter was an argument and if arguments must have winners and losers, then the admission on the part of my friend that he was wrong part-way down the page seems to be at odds with the almost-assertion that I was the 'loser'. Winners do get to re-write history on their terms however, and so my friend's status as a published journalist means that more eyes will see his version than mine.
On rudeness:
Sorry, mate, that wasn't rude. That was an earned and tempered rebuke for a pretty poor re-interpretation of another work and of the facts of the situation.
It is in the nature of the 'new' media (more on 'new' in a moment) that stronger words will be chosen, and even stronger interpretations will be made, than in other contexts. The lack of non-verbal signals is something that experienced participants learn to deal with pretty quickly, in part by re-inserting signals into textual communications (Rheingold 1994) and in part by making an effort to understand the medium (Hine 2000).
The inherent nature of this so-called 'new' media is that it is rude. If one gets ones undergarments irretrievably tangled at the suggestion that a piece constituted deliberate and malicious misinformation (particularly when, in this local context, the suggestion is a fair one) then one ought to get out of the fire. Debate on the public Internet is no place for the meek or the timid.
On taking offense:
I sense a great discomfort, particularly among politicians and journalists, with the 'new' media. Those who have become very used to, and very comfortable with, operating as thought leaders in contexts where critique is difficult, impossible or easy to ignore seem to struggle in a context where anyone can call anyone to account.
Joe Hockey and Paul Howes are two, of many, who have taken issue with the way that the proletariat can now engage in debate. Their particular issue is with the banal, often abusive and apparently anonymous criticism that public figures receive so often and that many of 'the great unwashed' do earn that title tells me that there's a point. I cannot help but wonder, however, what it takes to be labeled an “anonymous troll”, and whether an application of that label is an easy out for someone who's struggling with the medium. I'll address this one, in detail, another day.
On lying:
That's twice this month that I've had a melodramatic “YOU CALLED ME A LIAR!!!” yelled in my face. That's a bit of a logical leap, I think, but in any case, what's the big deal?
The claim that “the Qantas A380 voice recorder didn't work properly” was wrong. For the NY Times journalist it was a foolish and lazy misstatement of fact. For an Australian journalist, someone who has a professional obligation to be aware of the context they're operating in, someone who ought be very well aware of the interests that “drip feed” anti-Qantas propaganda to the press, it's a lie.
I'd have thought that the easy way out here would be “don't lie”. But that's just me.
On etiquette:
Last week on twitter I offered the point that the spelling flame, not sarcasm, is the lowest form of wit. Today I have another to offer.
It is hardly surprising that my friend has an opinion on what constitutes etiquette on the Internet. A great many people do. Anyone with some knowledge of anthropology will understand that etiquette is very much a social construction that is tied to a particular social context. It will come as no surprise that I disagree with many attempts to impose 'real life' etiquettes on on-line situations.
Where I come from, shutting down an argument when you're losing is poor form. Yelling “your plonked” (or saying “From there conversation doesn’t go far and I end up blocking the guy so I can no longer see his twitter posts.”) and walking away is, with the possible exception of an invocation of Godwin's, is in the poorest of taste. Proper etiquette dictates that if you're going to put someone in your killfile, you do it quietly. Going all “look at me, look at me” means that “
your a looser”.
On 'new' media:
Folks, the new media isn't new. Sure, Everett Rogers' (1995) definition of an 'innovation' applies here, but the 'new' media isn't new. In a author bio piece somewhere I wrote that I got mixed up in this Internet malarkey here in Australia at a time before Australia had a live connection to the Internet. That was twenty years ago. I've been here debating with various people on line all this time.
The 'new' media isn't new, it's merely presenting some challenges for some people who aren't used to the challenges of genuinely open communication. Those people have labeled it 'new'.
On 'black' boxes:
The Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), devices collectively referred to as “the black boxes” aren't black. They're actually, typically, painted fluorescent orange. The FDR and CVR were invented by an Australian, David Warren AO (who died aged 85 just a few months ago) and employed as a recording medium the technology of the day: magnetic tape. Technological imperatives meant that early devices recorded for just thirty minutes before they over-wrote the beginning of the recording again. Think of it as a 'loop' tape that is thirty minutes long.
Now, solid state memories are used that have the capacity, in the case of the FDR, to record parameters for the whole flight. The CVR is now designed to record for two hours. It doesn't use magnetic tape any more, but it still functions as a 'loop'. The reasons for the two hour limit are many, storage capacity and workplace privacy are examples. Fundamentally though, the CVR is a last-ditch record of a catastrophic event for situations where the people who might otherwise tell the story have been killed.
It is a matter of routine that incidents that carry on for more than two hours won't be recorded, in toto, on the CVR. At risk of providing more ammunition for the Qantas bashers, I'll say that exactly the same thing happened with Flight 30 (QF30), the flight that suffered a sudden decompression en-route from Hong Kong to Melbourne. By the time the flight had landed safely in Manila, the CVR recording of the beginning of the incident had been overwritten. It doesn't matter that the QF30 and QF32 CVR recordings are incomplete, because both Captain Bartels and Captain de Crespigny and their respective crews are with us to tell their stories.
They say:
There are three sides to every story. Now that I've offered mine, you have two. The third is left as an exercise for the reader.
Works Cited
Clegg, S 1975, Power, Rule, and Domination: A Critical and Empirical Understanding of Power, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Hine, C 2000, Virtual Ethnography, SAGE, London.
Jermier, JM 1985, “'When the Sleeper Wakes': A Short Story Extending Themes in Radical Organization Theory..” Journal of Management, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 67.
Rheingold, H 1994, The Virtual Community: Finding Connection in a Computerized World, Secker & Warburg, London.
Rhodes, C 2009, “"All I want to do is get that check and get drunk": Testifying to Resistance in Charles Bukowski’s Factotum.” The Journal of Organizational Change Management.
Rhodes, C 2002, “Coffee and the Business of Pleasure: The Case of Harbucks vs. Mr. Tweek.” Culture and Organization, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 293-306.
Rhodes, C 2001, “D'Oh The Simpsons, Popular Culture, and the Organizational Carnival.” Journal of Management Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 374–83.
Rhodes, C 2004, “Utopia in Popular Management Writing and the Music of Bruce Springsteen: Do You Believe in the Promised Land?.” Consumption, Markets and Culture, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-20.
Rogers, E 1995, Diffusion of Innovations, 4th Ed, Free Press, NY.
Wray-Bliss, E 2003, “Research Subjects/Research Subjections: Exploring the Ethics and Politics of Critical Research.” Organization, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 307-326.
