Champlain College Publishing Initiative

Mind and Body, Information and Action

By Tim Brookes

Here’s an issue that I’ve been trying to sort out for several months now–the question of the difference between information and action, especially in the context of social networking and online communications.
This is crucial to publishing, in several respects. First, every publisher is now busy trying to incorporate social networking strategies in order to reach more people. Second, publishers are shifting from print to electronic publishing for a whole raft of reasons. But what if people—we, that is—react in profoundly different ways to what we see and ingest online?
One way of looking at this is by examining the difference between what happens when we use digital communications to let people know something and what happens when we use digital communications to try to get people to do something.
We think of communication as a prelude to action, and as such we tend to assume that if we send out bags of emails, tweets, Facebook messages and so on, we’re helping to make things happen.
In fact, what becomes clear quite soon, though we tend to try not to acknowledge it, is that people tend to draw a fairly clear distinction between information and action. In other words, just because we know about something doesn’t mean we do anything about it. And that may not change with the amount that we know. Busting out an all-points bulletin about one’s latest book, then, may not make the slightest difference in how people react to the information that reaches them.
The most vivid and insistent illustration of this is the perennial issue of how to commodify or monetize web activity and web product.
Getting people to come to my web site and read what I write turns out to be not that hard. Getting them to respond is also not that hard–in fact, I get far more response to my online postings than I did for the vast majority of my essays on NPR. My guess is that this a great example, in fact, of the web making it far easier to jump from the stimulus to the response. When you hear something on the radio, responding to the author takes a whole staircase of steps involving multiple media and some information-finding.
So far, so good.
But getting people then to order a copy of my new book Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment turns out to be much, much harder, even though the web once again makes the sideways step about as easy as possible. Information is one thing, action is something entirely different–especially where money is concerned. Even the people who write and tell me they love my writing don’t necessarily (or often) make the extra three clicks that would buy them a copy of the book.
This actually is something of a relief, when you think about it (though not to my bank balance). If we were less suspicious of a product or service readily available online, we’d all go on buying sprees, we’d all go broke, and we’d all be conned time and again by shysters and charlatans. It’s probably a valuable and necessary quality to be wary of committing time and/or money simply on the basis of an anonymous flow of electrons.
Here’s another way of looking at it. I recently did a reading in Middlebury and, as an experiment, used all kinds of social networking tactics to get the word out. Well, I certainly got the word out, but the difference between information and action was crisply clear: everyone who came to the reading either already knew me or knew my work or knew something who had personally recommended me. Not a single person came on the basis of all my social networking. Information did not precipitate action.
Since then, I’ve been looking hard at this clear, if subliminal, distinction between people’s web behaviors: people use the web to drink up information with a thirst never known on this planet; but people only use the web to dictate physical actions (especially the spending of money) if the web activity is a close facsimile of circumstances under which they would have acted or spent anyway.
For example, buying a book online is not that different from buying a book in a store, in the sense that the need and the outcome are the same. It’s only the process that changes. Going out to do something in town is very, very different from staying at home reading about what’s going on in town. Need and outcome–utterly different.
Tom Kitchen, at Montclair State University, recently drew a teacherly distinction (on timbrookesinc.com) between the value of the email question-and-answer and the personal meeting. They fulfill very different needs and purposes, he said, and some students seem to sense this, because they email him asking for a personal meeting.
I found myself thinking of another element that neatly splits (or perhaps combines) the difference between the two: Skyping. This semester I’ve Skyped three times with students abroad, and it’s fascinating how different an experience that was from exchanging emails. All those human qualities–seeing how they looked, picking up inferences from background and body language, hearing the tone of their voices–filled out all kinds of unnumbered dimensions that are missing from email, twitter, blog postings, and so on. It was information, yes, but somehow it incorporated some of the qualities of action. My wife, a therapist, even holds sessions by Skype when no other means is available, and her clients report well of the process.
All this also has something to do with Descartes, with the difference between mind and body. We feel that distinction in all kinds of ways, and once we start getting a handle on how people feel about, understand and respond to each dimension of these new media, I think our current use of electronic communication is going to seem like the digital equivalent of the Stone Age.