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 #######   ########   ########  ###########
   ###     ###   ##   ###   ##  #   ###   #   Interpersonal Computing and
   ###     ###   ##   ###   ##      ###               Technology:
   ###     ###   ##   ###           ###        An Electronic Journal for
   ###     ########   ###           ###            the 21st Century
   ###     ###        ###           ###
   ###     ###        ###   ##      ###             ISSN: 1064-4326
   ###     ###        ###   ##      ###              October, 1993
 #######   ###        ########      ###           Volume 1, Number 4
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   Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer
              Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
      Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing,
        The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802
 
      This article is archived as PHILLIPS IPCTV1N4 on LISTSERV@GUVM
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                  SPEECH 2001: A PROJECTION OF THE FUTURE
 
                       by Gerald M. Phillips, Ph.D.
 
(A written version of a videotaped address presented at the SCA
convention, 1993 at Miami, FL.  The remarks have been extended
from the oral remarks on the videotape.
 
                               INTRODUCTION
 
     It's a rough world and the millennium is coming. The menu at the
feast of world wonders is copious:  Wars and rumors of wars, floods
and famines, earthquakes and volcanos. Entrees: poverty, starvation,
overpopulation, depletion of the ozone layer, inability  to find a
place to store nuclear waste, and destruction of the rain forest, a la
carte.  And for dessert we have conflicts over nationality, race,
religion and gender.
 
     On the local fast food scene we have, among other things: social
isolation, racial disharmony, gender tension, religious bigotry, and
class war with side orders of anti-abortion and animal rights
activists, Klansmen and skinheads, racial wars, and fear of
international terrorism.  For dessert: the threat of financial ruin,
an erratic DOW, a declining GDP.
 
     The twin demons of civilization, religion and nationalism
poison our political and social lives.  Somehow, we don't seem to
be able to shake them.  And so people who look very much alike
kill each other in Sarajevo and confront each other over the
abortion clinic barricades.
 
     The fundamentalists shout "Repent, the Day of Judgment is at
hand! You will be judged by the Lord!"  But it is not that
simple.  The way the world is now, we judge each other. We have
to make our own judgments. The solutions to our problems rest in
human hands. And we humans are as stupid as we ever were.  We
have not been able to refute Freud's dire prophecy that our own
violent nature will destroy us.  Most humans, in fact, live under
dictatorial control, in poverty and misery, unable to do anything
on their own behalf.
 
     Various mavens offer communication as the antidote for that
poison. It is sort of a tradition to talk about "a failure to
communicate."  And now we have a menu of communication
"solutions," a computer menu.  We have fiber-optic interactive
video which will enable us to interact with our television sets
and even order our groceries as they are displayed on the screen.
We are witnessing the birth of the Internet, an electronic
superhighway of information which will link millions of people
asynchronously via computer and phone lines.  Add to this our
computer games, mind-altering virtual reality, robotics, and
artificial intelligence.  In addition to our regular menu of
troubles, we have nourishment for alienation and withdrawal.
Electronic communication is the antithesis of face-to-face human
talk.  Taken as a whole, communication can kill us or cure us.
 
     It is, thus, altogether proper to re-examine the nature of
the communication discipline and speculate on its present and
future mission.  We do it all the time, so why not now?
Antiquated antediluvians are preoccupied with it. We confess our
old errors in acts of self-abnegation; we weep and wail and tear
our hair about the wrongs we have done.  This decaying soul, in
retrospective, finds he hasn't budged an inch from where he
started.  After making the rounds of all the available means of
persuasion, he returns to the notion which attracted him to the
discipline in the first place, assuaging human misery by teaching
humans to participate in alleviating it.
 
     We do not know if the human species will survive into the
twenty-second century, but if it does, we can be certain of two
things.  One is that most of the survivors will be leading lives of
quiet desperation. The other is that they will be communicating, in
some fashion, with one another about those lives.  Communication, talk
and writing, is the only social link humans have with each other;
whether it is face-to-face or mediated by technology.  Keep in mind
that no one knows what you have in your mind until you express it.  If
you don't talk or write, the world sees you as sick or stupid!
Furthermore, if you don't speak up on your own behalf, no one will
speak for you.
 
Hillel said it:
 
          If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if
     I am for myself alone, what am I?  And if not now, when?
 
     Most folks wobble along, looking for someone to take care of
them, to speak for them. Kings and dictators have always known
that humans could be controlled, if enough brute force or drugs
were applied.  But idealists believe, still, that free humans are
and should be able to make their own decisions, even in the face
of a universe of horrors.
 
     In the final crunch, we humans are reactive.  We solve the
problems that confront us and rarely are solutions offered to us
in multiple choice form.  We're lucky when we can phrase our
problems precisely enough so we can make sense when we talk about
them.  And our answers are always essays; hard to understand,
hard to grade.
 
     Most of us, in this country, profess belief in the Anglo
Saxon system of common laws and our Constitutional heritage. But
it's hard to believe that we can solve the problems we face.
Most of us flinch when we are asked to do something political.
We tremble when we are asked to speak in public.  Fear of public
speaking is America's number one fear.
 
      We think a savior will help us!  We lull ourselves into
believing that, some day, we will find a "father" who will tell
us all what is right for us.  Whether embodied in the King of
Kings, Wonder Woman, or a brown-shirted Perot, we long for
someone to make us feel safe, and we are ready give up our
freedom to the first person who offers us security, rather than
take responsibility for our own solutions.  As Louis Adorno
noted, in politics we seek our fathers and when we find a
politician on whom we can transfer, we put ourselves blindly in
his or her hands and hope for the best.
 
     People all over the world have surrendered individual
freedoms and human rights.  When the state in Africa freed
themselves from colonial yoke, they all had their chance at
democracy and the blew. The South American countries had their
revolutions and then sedately settled down into the laps of the
dictators.
 
     Democratic societies require a responsible electorate to
sustain them.  Countries often trade forms of totalitarianism:
the Shah of Iran for the ayotollahs; the communist party for the
Russian Mafia.  As Mencias told us, "Never rejoice when the
tyrant dies, for the next one may be worse."
 
     The day of Brave New World and Clockwork Orange is at hand.
Now!  The world is presently dividing into a small
technologically and financially competent minority which controls
a vast majority living a borderline existence in the poverty
class.  One could quibble make hopeful sounds about the
technological marvels that await us, but the simple facts are
that more than 2/3 of the world lives on the edge of starvation;
more than half is actually or functionally illiterate.
 
     Personal freedom is in jeopardy today as it never has been
before, because potential dictators now have the technological
tools necessary to intimidate and control whole populations.
Erich Fromm reminded us, humans have an unfortunate tendency to
trade the insecurity of freedom for the regularities of
dictatorship.  It is so easy to give in to technological wonders
and stop asking questions entirely. So we now have an economic
oligarchy that can control us with 500 cable channels and keeping
us apart from one another with virtual reality.
 
     Ethologists tell us that humans are best off when life is a
bit uncertain, although we may not know it, and uncertainly won't
admit it.  Uncertainty protects autonomy. It allows each person a
fair chance to make it or screw up.  Uncertainty allows us to
hope and dream.  And our hopes are easiest to realize when we
work with others to help them fulfil theirs.  In a totalitarian
state, the only road to success is obedience.  If you happen to
want what the boss is offering, you have a set of rules that sort
of ensures you get it. In a democratic society, you have to
bargain for what you get.  You also have to live with the notion
that no one gets everything, although almost everyone can get
something.
 
     This democratic ideal exists when people are free to make
choices by which they are then bound, and where the good of the
order is achieved by satisfying individual goals. Conversely,
individual goals can be best sought in a society that makes
decisions for the good of the order.
 
 
     But the democratic ideal demands self control to achieve.
As Freud noted in Civilization and Its Discontents, humans who
cannot control themselves must be controlled.  Only people who
are willing to submit to the laws they, themselves, make can call
themselves "civilized."  It is this notion of participation in
governance that makes the ability to speak so important.
 
     Papa Freud, in his famous letter to Einstein, Warum Krieg?
(Why War?) notes that it is natural for humans to solve their
problems through violence.  He offers as a partial solution,
education for "...an upper stratum of men with independent minds,
not open to intimidation and eager in the pursuit of truth..."
He goes on to note that the "executive power of the State and the
prohibition laid by the church upon freedom of thought are far
from propitious for the production of a class of this kind."  He
sums it up; "The ideal condition of things would be a community
of men who had subordinated their instinctual life to the
dictatorship of reason."  And, aside from the blatant sexism
characteristic of 19th century Vienna, he also neglected to tell
us how to produce these "happy few."  So this job is left to the
"educational system."
 
     That is our proper quest.  It has been the quest of
education since time immemorial.  The Trivium and Quadrivium were
devoted to producing the good men needed to govern.  They were
also taught to speak well.  Today, that latter portion of the
equation is not so well satisfied.
 
     The first months of the Clinton administration, for example,
shows us how difficult it is for people divided from one another
by race, religious, gender, and class war to legislate.  When
those people are further isolated by high tech equipment and
diverted from contemplation of their world by "virtual reality,"
they become alienated.  Alienated people tend to be docile.  They
are quiet, quiescent.  Until they are pushed too far.  They
submit to control -- until they turn violent.
 
     People become socially and politically involved only when
they can make a difference; thus, for a society to be truly
democratic, people must be able to participate. Rhetoric,
traditionally the tool of democracy, is what they use.  Our moral
imperative, as a discipline, is to teach people how to do
rhetoric, oral and written, in order to bring them up to the
level which Freud conceptualized.
 
     And it is done person by person.  As Kierkegaard noted, "the
group is a fiction, for it has no hands."  Each human has a
precious voice which must be taught to speak.
 
     People are judged only by their output.  What they know
remains concealed until they speak it or write it. Writing a
sentence or speaking it so that it can be understood by others,
represents the ultimate challenge to intellect. Everyone thinks
something.  The genius is distinguished from the imbecile because
he or she knows when to stop and report.  The ability to report
well, helps. No one would have comprehended Stephen Hawking's
genius had not technology provided him with a way to communicate
it. Who knows how many people lock the answers to knotty
questions in their minds because they are unable to "stop and
report."
 
     But our theorists seem to stop before they get to the
practical part. They do not discuss when to stop and how to
report. They freeze on content; they revel in analyzing it.
Performing it is an alien craft.  It would take them into the
world where there are consequences for failure.
 
     Communication theorists are commonly divided into social
scientists or rhetoricians, although neither may measure up to
the standards imposed in those epistemological orientations in
the first place.  But from these safe disciplinary havens, they
need only philosophize.  How far away from the practical reality
of Aristotle.  They give us nothing about how "an upper stratum
of men with independent minds, not open to intimidation and eager
in the pursuit of truth" might tell that truth.
 
       The field of speech has, traditionally, been an academic
supplicant.  The fathers of the field begged their betters to
give them identity.  Now they try to please their big brothers in
the liberal arts by imitating their disciplines.  They pretend to
the abilities of the professional sociologists, but they nowhere
near the capacity for abstruseness.  They aspire to the status of
literary critics but they are inept in the obfuscation and
sesquipedalianism characteristic of the arcane best of their
bigger brothers and sisters.  Speech Communication does not have its
Talcott Parsons or Stanley Fish!
 
     We know what the people Freud had in mind would talk about.
They would talk about poverty, alienation, war, disease, famine,
environment.  But how would they learn to talk?  How would they
learn what words to choose?  How would they learn to get people
to listen to them?  How would they learn to listen to each other?
How would they learn to know when they were doing well enough?
We do not know how many people qualified to comment are rendered
impotent by the simple inability to know when to stop and how to
report.
 
     Yet we ignore and evade the imperative to bring our students
up to a high standard of skill.  It is hard to do,  but it is
possible to teach performance skills to speakers and writers.
Academics, however, prefer to undertake the impossible job of
"pursuing truth," for they are not obligated to find it, and
there are no consequences, if they fail. In the English comp or
public speaking classroom,  the teacher's failure is evident to
all.  Wise move to leave it to the graduate students and then not
check on how well they are doing.
 
     The burden of teaching performance falls on the teacher of
public speaking and English composition.  Most of the instructors
assigned to teach these courses, however, are Ph.D. candidates,
unskilled in performance training and urgently involved with the
labyrinths of their doctoral research.  Their refuge is content.
They teach about communication, not how to do it; they take the
easy way out.  They teach about what it is to be a "good man."
As if they knew.
 
     Theorists justify themselves by declaring that we are
teaching students "how to think." What hubris!  What do we
suppose goes on in the rest of the academy.  It is the explicit
mission of the speech communication discipline to find and apply
ways of teaching students how to express what they think.  It is
time to assume the burden!
 
     What an arrogance to believe that we know how to identify a
"good man."  It makes much more sense to prepare some suasoriae
and controversiae and teach students to perform them well, and
then let them apply the techniques they learned to what they want
to talk about wherever they want to talk about it.
 
     We have no way of knowing what would happen, if everyone
was able to participate in making the decisions that affect their
lives.  Chaos Theory suggests that one human could make a
difference. The butterfly beats his wings in Kent and it is a
cold winter in Lancashire. So, too, the early rhetoricians
believed that individuals could influence outcomes; and that each
individual had his or her opportunity to help shape society.
 
     Thus, we adopted our rational concept of government:
majority rules.  A majority of the legislature passes the law.  A
majority of candidates elects the leader.  One vote can make
a difference.  One voice can shape consensus.  One idea well
expressed and heard can matter.  And there is the imperative for
teaching performance.  Whatever the merit of their ideas, mute
people influence no one.  Popular wisdom holds that given equal
expression, people will choose the right and good from its
alternatives. "Given equal expression" is the kicker.
 
       The alternative to decisions based on rhetoric well
performed is the imposition of laws based on scientific findings
or fiat (possibly both).  For example, those who would work a
computer had best know its grammar for a computer will not
perform unless the commands are given exactly as the computer
knows them.  Those who follow an ayotollah had best know how to
bend the body in prayer, or otherwise face execution as an
infidel.  Both are entirely proper and orderly.  The rules are
clear; success and failure easy to measure.  Goodness and virtue
would be measured by conformity, not merit.
 
     When we do not contribute we reject our humanity. The
capacity to speak, says Ernest Becker, is "all that is
specifically human."  And how that capacity differs from human to
human!  There are some who speak as geniuses; some who have the
mind to, but not the ability. There are those too shy to speak at
all.  Others speak with the voice of brutes; they display
themselves as incompetent and illiterate.
 
     Humans are literally graded by our listeners, every time we
speak.   We are judged by how we say what we say.
 
     Our record with the Penn State Reticence Program offers
convincing evidence that a method generally applied can alter
performance behavior significantly.  Students appear pleased with
the direction of the alteration. Furthermore, the record over
decades of actor training, proprietary schools of public speaking
like Dale Carnegie, and the anecdotal record of generations of
public speaking teachers offer evidence that salubrious changes
in performance behavior are possible for almost everyone.
 
     There has, however, been no concerted and controlled effort
to test effectiveness of performance pedagogies. Thus, most
argument is based on individual success stories. These are not
replicable or falsifiable.  Controlled double blind experiments
testing the effectiveness of various teaching methods are
absolutely essential.   We are reasonably certain, however, that
our theoretical speculations have done little to instruct
performance pedagogy.
 
     We have so far relied on the Ciceronian Canon which, phrased
in modern terms, specifies the following requirements for
effective discourse.
 
     1. Having a goal or reason for speaking or writing.
     2. Having something to say or write that will help achieve
        the goal.
     3. The ability to put that content in order suitable for
        discourse.
     4. The ability to select words appropriate to the discourse.
     5. The ability to utter the words in an intelligible manner
        and with sufficient emphasis to attract and hold the
        attention of the listener.
     6. The ability to judge listener response and adapt
        accordingly.
 
     All of these are skills that can be taught.
 
     The generalizations we really need are about how humans
learn to speak.  How much is simple imitation?  Is genetic
propensity a factor?  What forms of behavior modification work?
Many students may have to be untrained.  We will need to be more
precise in defining teachable competencies.  This enterprise is
not without problems.
 
     There are ethical questions. After all, no one wants to take
credit for instructing Hitler in platform technique.  On the
other hand, faith in the democratic process demands that all be
trained so all can be heard.
 
     The unique contribution of the field of speech is the
ability to improve skills.  It is, essentially, a service, as
rhetoric is a service to all the disciplines.  Even though most
graduate programs depend on the basic performance course to
provide work opportunities for graduate students, the task they
perform is essentially ignored both as an object of study or
research.
 
     We must separate and reward those people who can teach
skills.  We must provide incentive for people to study how skills
can be taught. A return to emphasis on training in public
speaking should produce a research enterprise which explores oral
discourse in all its forms; on the  platform, in groups, and in
interpersonal situations.
 
     But we cannot confine ourselves, as we have for so long a
time, to training in behavior on the public platform.  Humans are
deficient in delivery in their normal and ordinary lives and
especially troubled by inability to participate with others in
decision-making.  They are also ineffective at listening.
 
     Part of our imperative is to help people deal with the
problems of loneliness and alienation from which they suffer now
and which will grow more severe in a virtual reality society.
That means more than learning about how people relate to one
another, it means teaching them how to relate to one another.
 
     People must be trained to fight the frustration and
loneliness that dominates most of their lives.  We all need help
in forming and sustaining close relationships.
 
     There is the apocryphal story about a famous newsman who
supposedly said that sincerity is the essence of being an anchor
person and once you learn to fake that, the rest is easy.
Suppose listening was defined as an important element in caring?
Can we find ways to teach people how to listen?  Can we find ways
to teach them how to look like they are listening?
 
     In discussion, participants must learn how to follow an
orderly agenda, how to take turns, and how to assume leadership
roles when necessary. And how to talk to the point so others
understand.  Democracy depends on good bargaining.
 
     Finally, since speech is irrelevant without an audience, we
must, where necessary, teach people to listen.  There may be many
who are willing to receive new information, but simply do not
know how.
 
       In the next century, we will think globally and act
locally.  It may be committees and town meetings that will face
the great problems tomorrow brings.
 
       The concept, "educated incapacity," popularized by Hermann
Kahn, is terribly important.  Right now, we teach people but we
do not train them. We educate them to be incapable of expressing
their ideas.  We educate them to submit to those who can talk
louder and longer.  We do not even try to teach them to fight
back.  We work on only the "good man" part of the equation.  We
do not teach them to speak well.
 
     To review:
 
1. Humans are evaluated based on how they speak.  Only if they
   speak well do we consider what they say.
 
2. We do not train students to speak well.  Not on the public
   platform, not in groups, not in social situations. And we do
   not teach them to listen.  We give lipservice to fundamentals
   courses in speaking and (incidentally) in writing.
 
3. The whole communication curriculum is up for grabs.  We have
   been unsuccessful as original scholars.  Perhaps it is time to
   return to the prime directive.  The MLA has already made a
   good start at emphasizing the teaching of written rhetoric.
 
 
4. A successful future demands instruction in performance.  We
   have the theoretical justification from Burke. We have the
   methods from Stanislavski and others.
 
     No one questions the right of the "scholars" to continue
their quest.  But the time has come for a new quest, or the
unapologetic return to an old one.  Teaching speech performance
is an essential mission in a democracy.  It confronts us with a
challenge we dare not reject.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:
 
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the
21st Century
 
Copyright 1993 Georgetown University.  Copyright of individual
articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors.
Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown
University.  It is asked that any republication of this article state
that the article was first published in IPCT-J.
 
Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA
style to: Gerald Phillips, Editor IPCT-J  GMP3@PSUVM.PSU.EDU