{"id":61,"date":"2025-08-13T15:06:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T15:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.talkframework.com\/?page_id=61"},"modified":"2025-08-19T16:54:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T16:54:13","slug":"communication","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.talkframework.com\/?page_id=61","title":{"rendered":"Communication"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Home<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
The model<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
The book<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
The author<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Communication <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even within the same ethnic culture, there are different subcultures, each with their own characteristic communication styles. Brits can tell your social class by what you call your evening meal \u2013 \u201ctea\u201d if you\u2019re working class, \u201cdinner\u201d if you\u2019re middle class, \u201csupper\u201d if you\u2019re upper class. But there are other, subtler differences: working class Brits tend to be more direct, middle class less so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are also gender-related speech norms \u2013 even in our egalitarian WEIRD<\/a> societies in the West, male- and female-dominated groups, for example, can operate very differently, with different rules for how direct or indirect to be, or how to deal with conflict. This applies to online spaces too. Disagree with someone on female-dominated Mumsnet, and you will want to validate her point before raising yours as an alternative possibility. On a male-dominated crypto subreddit, you\u2019d probably just tell your antagonist he\u2019s wrong, and maybe an idiot too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Different subsections of society also use different technologies to communicate. This can be stratified by age: my Boomer parents use Facebook; I catch up with my Gen X friends on Instagram, and keep an eye on politics and news on X\/Twitter; my kids use Tiktok and Snapchat. The way people communicate on each of these is different too. If you\u2019re planning a public information campaign, for example trying to persuade people to get vaccinated, you\u2019re not going to recycle the same content across all of those platforms, because it won\u2019t work. On Facebook, you can go longform, using a carousel ad with different slides detailing the benefits of vaccination, dispelling myths, and offering testimonials from healthcare professionals. On Instagram, you might use Stories or Reels with images of heroic healthcare workers vaccinating people, and use influencers to create compelling content about how they checked the facts and overcame their own concerns to vaccinate their kids. On Tiktok, you\u2019d inevitably somehow turn it into a dance routine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There may also be different speech norms around how you negotiate agreements: in the Arab world, for example, it is important to begin by building rapport, having a so-called spiral conversations, before asking for a favour. Societies that operate on the basis of kinship trust their kinship network more, and strangers less. They may expect some kind of relationship to be in place before agreeing to a request. Within this understanding, the idea that you might offer someone a gift before doing business can look less sinister than it does in the West, where we view it as corrupt: you are showing them hospitality to forge that trusting connection. If you try to connect to an Arab group with the aim of influencing its opinions and behaviour, you may need to take more time to get to know its members, finding out about their families and then asking regularly about how they\u2019re doing in order to build relationships and trust. Cultures with kinship networks tend to think less as \u201cI\u201d and more as \u201cwe\u201d, which ultra-individualist Brits can forget. You may need to win over the whole network, not just a single individual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How and where influence is held within hierarchies and networks matters. In\u00a0The Square and the Tower<\/a><\/em>, historian Niall Ferguson describes two ways in which power and communication operate. The city market-Square is decentralised. There are lots of different networks with lots of different actors, all of whom are communicating with one another \u2013 lots of overlapping links. It is much harder to control a narrative in the Square, because you don\u2019t have any one single gatekeeper. The city Tower is hierarchical. It has an explicit power structure and chain of command: the people at the top make decisions and disseminate them down the chain. This is not to say that people in the Square, or lower down the Tower, don\u2019t have power or influence. The successes of DEI initiatives across American culture has, in part, been put in place by relatively junior young people working in departments like HR, where these practices can have the greatest reach and impact. Twitter cancellation campaigns are usually whipped up by people who may not be conventionally famous or successful, but who have cultivated a lot of followers with similar interests. In each case, networks can wield considerable power \u2013 and sometimes this power can be wielded against a hierarchy in which the network operates.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s important to think about the gatekeepers. Whether their power is hierarchical power or networked power, some people will be more effective at spreading a narrative than others. Historical influence campaigns have used this in creative ways. In the American Revolution, leaders disseminated anti-British ideas through local town leaders, who were mini-nodes within their communities, and through networked merchants, who had extensive local and international connections due to trading routes. Note here how it isn\u2019t necessarily the most powerful or most networked individual that is best placed to change an audience, it may be the one that subtly sits in the middle of many sub-networks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2022, Ukraine invited mothers of Russian prisoners of war to come and collect them from Kyiv as an opportunity to see that they had been treated well \u2013 in contrast to Russian troops\u2019 brutality against their captives. There was hope that Russian mothers might become a collective force of resistance against their sons being conscripted. Putin, too, understood this, and responded by holding a meeting with carefully vetted mothers of military personnel at the Kremlin. In both cases, rival actors understood the power of mothers as a network. Putin\u2019s advantage as an authoritarian ruler lay in being able to suppress dissenting voices: there may be groups of mothers who want to end the war, but their ability to mobilise on Russian social media is limited. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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