Perception Management

I’ve been thinking about this phrase a lot, trying to cobble together enough concepts/links for a meatier post. (It takes me hours to write things. Hours. Each sentence comes only after many many minutes of web consumption, window gazing, book reading, etc.)

Then Carles went and coined “The Perception Economy” and now I feel a little pressure to put this forth. It’s a bit disorganized, and I apologize for that.

A lot of people call themselves Designers now. Perhaps its because we all pirated Photoshop as teenagers, or maybe there are broader influences at work. Graphic Design and Typography have always been about perception, comprehension: make this document legible, make this massive data set digestible, make this book a pleasure to read. (The course at my high school in which students screen printed t-shirts and studied magazine ads was called Communication Arts, if I recall correctly.)

A few weeks ago I linked an article an article heralding “a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization.” The gist was that all this blogging is doing wonders for our writing skills:

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world.

So now that we are all constantly spraying our formerly-inner monologue into the void, we’re thinking more about how those banalities will be received. More people are calling themselves designers (or journalists or bloggers, but curiously not writers) because the internet is (thus far) mostly visual/written and provides a much larger and more demanding audience than previously available. Computers have all but eliminated the costs of production and publication, and we’re all duly obsessed with the perception of our efforts. Addicted, really.

It has to go further back than that though. Maybe the sea change came when marketers started selling lifestyles instead of products. “Buy this car so everyone sees you for the rebel you are,” and “Wear these jeans so people won’t mistake you for some tourist from a flyover state.” Consumption has been a form of perception management since long before TCP/IP came along.

People have been playing out these ridiculous waltzes since we climbed down from the trees.

And now I’m sitting here trying to ponder meaning. I always Icarus this shit up. Anyone know a good primer on semiotics?

But my initial idea was actually just this: a high school or college class, like Home Economics, teaching kids to stop selling themselves short with bathroom mirror self-portraits. Perception Management 101.