Using Culture Mapping Data Visualization (click on this link to go to interactive visualization dashboard) to analyze the tweets of @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS in the first 100 Days of Donald Trump’s presidency.
We live in times that provide a deluge of signals. As anthropologists and semioticians we are trained to interpret these signals. And, as the signals multiply, we can sense that something is not quite right. We are experiencing an immune response of sorts in reaction to change we can’t process yet. The question is having an understanding of how to read these frenetic signals and develop new narrative opportunities in culture.
“history is a vast early warning system” — Norman Cousins
“Many critics have focused on isolated speech acts or narrative events,” says Aria Razfar, professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, Literacy, Language, and Culture. “From the elimination of Spanish websites to California’s passage of Proposition 58, the United States has come to a critical crossroads in how it understands the nature, function, and purpose of language toward constructing our national identity.”
No better manifestation of the global condition can be found than in President Donald Trump. Trump not only provides a warning signal for political engagement but for how we imagine and create better futures in every aspect of society. Yet, says Razfar, “The use of language to construct ideological frames has been largely absent.”
It is critical to read this political phenomenon as a mirror of our own culture so we can learn, adapt and evolve. At Semiofest 2017, in Toronto, I am presenting a talk titled “Cultural Dissociation and the Semiotics of Trump” where I will be revealing some of the analysis we have been doing of how Trump tweets and what his tweets can tell us about our culture and where it needs to go next.
Buzz Aldrin was recently invited to the White House to witness Donald Trump sign an executive order re-establishing the National Space Council. Aldrin’s gesture and expression at the side of President Trump were the perfect metaphors for our cultural condition. We are experiencing a type of cultural dissociation. Dissociative disorders are a coping method in which a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity. That is where we are.
We are coping, and have become disjointed as a society. We are seeing the expression of this disconnect between people and power. Buzz Aldrin’s look of confusion is us. But, Trump also is us. We must reflect on how we can regain synchronization as a society to fix this dissociative state.
Trump’s words and gestures embody this. And the coupling of this condition with the intimacy of our technology amplifies the effect. Marshall McLuhan said “Man becomes the sex organs of the machine world.” Our technology has found the perfect appendage in Trump’s thumbs. We see a multiplication and amplification of form in how Trump tweets and communicates. The medium supplants the message. Messages become created for the greatest ability to spread more than to be reflected upon.
A study done by New York University shows that moral-emotional words are more likely to go viral. Our technology feeds echo-chambers of highly emotional signification. The most tweeted messages oscillate from excitement to anger. The greater the emotion of the message the more likely it is to spread. And sadly this means we consume emotionally charged memes far more readily than we consume ideas. This keeps our civic engagement in a state of cognitive dissonance. We are drawn that which is least likely to nourish us.
Semiofest is an annual conference on how to apply semiotics to solve social and commercial problems. The conference champions how we can use semiotics effectively to structure and analyze the expressions of culture to better analyze how things are working and not working. We can focus in on nuances that show more clearly the roots of the problem.
“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” -Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller brilliantly frames our world as a tension between weaponry and livingry. By livingry Fuller means that which supports and evolves human life as opposed to weaponry which destroys it. A trap of technological invention is when we allow the object to define the behavior based on its inherent grammar rather than have it designed to the greater potential of human creativity. Weaponry is the object defining purpose upon humans while livingry is our imagination defining the potential of object in union with human beings.
We leverage our method of Culture Mapping to structure language and society as a system of meaning creation. The healthiest of societies are those that express a adaptive and participatory exchange of expression. We can study these phenomena as words and visuals people use in their communication. More of that communication lives publicly in view and is coded with cultural and ideological significance and we can learn the ways it is migrating and shaping patterns in culture.
The concept of res publica frames a semiotic relationship between the individual and the state. The meaning of res publica is layered over time in its use and reference, but it essentially means the public affair or commonwealth. It represents the critical framework of civic engagement between rights and laws, activism and policy.
In the Culture Mapping framework we can visualize these social relationships and how they migrate through culture as language. Important patterns are essential to how this framework functions. The patterns of dissent and aspiration are critical in how society works in retaining its biological health. The more you try to control society the more it responds to regain the balance. It is wired into us for our own survival. New meaning is constantly being formed at the individual and community level. The question for politics is how well it integrates and adapts to these realities.
The tweets of @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS reveal an unsustainable pattern of expression. We analyzed these accounts over President Trump’s first 100 days in office. That is 858 tweets and 19,314 words with a smattering of interesting uses of emojis and hyperbolic punctuation. We used computational linguistics to identify key signifiers within the body of language. Signifiers are recurring uses of language that reveal a broader connotation across subjects discussed. Patterns emerge in these signifiers and codes of language emerge that reveal archetypes of expression. Trump’s tweets can be classified into four key archetypes: The Philosopher, The Protestor, The Publicist and The Policy Maker. The weight of trump’s tweets cluster around The Protestor and The Publicist His language is weaponized for the greatest response for the least effort. He guns the engine of language with little nuance or concern for accuracy or future action. We mapped the emotional range of his tweets across these archetypes and it is those two key archetypes that are most volatile in emotional range. The other two neglected archetypes essentially flatline.
Another key aspect of Trump’s language is how much it leaves for interpretation. While it is high on the emotional and ideological scale, it also is quite vague. It is pure semiotics. The meaning is in its interpretation and how it connects with this current cultural dysfunction. Language can be weaponized by leaving open to reframing and re-contextualizing. The concept of a dog whistle. Trump’s “wall” narrative best encapsulates this idea. It is an abstract narrative that allows for other fear narratives to creep in and be reused it for their own purpose.
Trump in his tweets (and rallies) has mastered the use of disembodied extreme rituals. Extreme rituals are nothing new — they are just not recognized for what they are. They seem harmless but propel dissociation. The Ice Bucket Challenge, for example, was a technology-driven extreme ritual. We are forgiving in the Ice Bucket case because the outcome had a certain upside. It raised money — but the ritual continues void of understanding and empathy. We should be more skeptical about how technology is used to manipulate behavior. It drives an expectation of passivity over actual civic engagement.
The potential nightmare scenarios is seeing how easily society can accept a machine-driven representation of the res publica. In fact, it is frequently preferred over a living and tested process of ideological dissent and social aspiration cycling into policy and laws that impact our daily lives. Some would argue that the results of our last election were behaviorally manipulated. Are we experiencing the potential primer for an artificial state? We need to gain literacy if we are to leverage a healthy relationship between machines and humans as artificial intelligence gains broader adoption.
A healthy and adaptable society requires greater literacy. Awareness of how language is used in relationship to technology will better foster a balance driven by human potential over the potential of the machine. To that end, we’ve been collaborating on layering narrative methodologies with Aria Razfar. Our collective goal is to help people see. Stay tuned for more on that.
