Email and Ethics

Style and Ethical Relations in Computer-Mediated Communications

Emma Rooksby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134457557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

E-mail and Ethics explores the ways in which interpersonal relations are affected by being conducted via computer-mediated communication.
The advent of this channel of communication has prompted a renewed investigation into the nature and value of forms of human association. Rooksby addresses these concerns in her rigorous investigation of the benefits, limitations and implications of computer-mediated communication.
With its depth of research and clarity of style, this book will be of essential interest to philosophers, scholars of communication, cultural and media studies, and all those interested in the importance and implications of computer-mediated communication.

1 Style and ethics

Why, Sir, I think every man whatever has a peculiar style, which may be discovered by nice examination and comparison with others: but a man must write a great deal to make his style obviously discernible. As logicians say, this appropriation of style is infinite in potestate, limited in actu.

Samuel Johnson (Boswell 1906: 202)

1.1 Introduction

This is a project about interpersonal understanding in the realm of computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC). The conclusion at which I arrive in this chapter is that the varieties of textual communication, including CMC, transform and in some cases¹ limit people’s understandings of one another.

I arrive at this conclusion by an examination of style as a general modifier of all human performances, and its relation to textual style, which can also be considered under the heading of ‘artistic style’, a self-consciously historical category including artefacts and art objects. Two important findings emerge from the examination of style in general, and two from the comparison of textual style and style in general.

An examination of style in general reveals the significance of style as an aspect of all human activity, expressive of both individual identity and of social belonging. Style is seen as invested in every performance of a person, so that every person could be described as having a ‘lifestyle’ consisting of the composite of all her or his styled performances. A person’s lifestyle, the ways in which they perform social practices, is as significant an aspect of their identity as what they profess to believe, the opinions they hold, or what actions they perform. Its particular significance derives in part from the fact that style is often less than chosen, and may express aspects of a person’s self that are not deliberately displayed. Knowing another person’s style is then argued to be as important for understanding them as is knowledge of their beliefs or their actions. At this point I introduce the ethical importance of attending to style as part of knowing other persons, a theme I take up again at the end of the chapter.

The comparison of textual style with style in general shows that textual style may be seen as one of the subsets of the totality of a person’s styled performances, expressing some though not all aspects of a person’s lifestyle. But textual style, like the styles of art objects more generally, may also be taken to consist of formal properties attaching to artefacts, without any reference to the performances of those artefacts’ creators. Drawing on the claim that textual style is a subset of a person’s style in general, I argue that the textual style of a person’s communicative inscriptions will often (though by no means always) be less than fully disclosive, even to an intended reader, of a person’s interests, attitudes, and intentions, and may lead to misunderstandings. As well as being less than wholly disclosive, textual style has a greatly increased importance as an aspect of a person’s self (and self-presentation) in textually mediated social relations such as CMC, in which all a person’s performances are textually mediated.

I take these last two claims together to support the conclusion that, while attending to the textual styles of others in CMC is necessary for understanding others as persons, textual style will sometimes be insufficiently disclosive of those others’ selves. In other words, the varieties of textual style, by being only a subset of all styled performances, transform the ways we understand others, and may limit that understanding.

The account of style developed in this chapter has ethical implications. Insofar as understanding other people is itself an important and necessary ethical project, part of all cooperative human endeavours, then transformations (particularly limitations) to a project of understanding another person will be of ethical significance. (If understanding a self requires attention to all aspects of a lifestyle, then the limitation of a social relationship to textual exchange may perhaps be problematic for establishing and maintaining understandings that encompass all aspects of persons’ selves.) Attention to these transformations may suggest new ways of reading and writing, and ways to avoid the interpretive pitfalls characteristic of textual communication. This chapter, having shown the transformative effects of textual style on textually-mediated social relations, leads on to discussions in subsequent chapters, of how empathy is possible in textually-mediated relationships, and of textually-mediated human agency.

1.2 An expressive theory of style

This chapter begins with a discussion of the nature of style in general. I develop the claim that style is best seen as those qualities of people’s performances of social practices that express their attitudes, interests and character, in short their selves, to other people. As human selves grow and develop in social worlds containing both socially normative and idiosyncratic conventions, so individual styles incorporate traits and practices that reflect social norms, and others that reflect individual interests and concerns. Styles are partly but not wholly at the command of individuals, expressive of self as unique and of self in relation to wider social categories. The intersubjectivity of style, like the intersubjectivity of language argued for by Ludwig Wittgenstein, is then a prompt to our attempting to attend to and understand how others perform and express themselves, as ‘a specific mode of attending, and caring which makes visible the persons’ investments in their expressive activity’ (Altieri 1987: 188).

My approach to style could be couched in terms of the common approaches to style. In a book on the evolution of written style in eighteenth-century England, Carey McIntosh describes prevailing approaches to style studies by dividing them into three schools, each treating of one major aspect of style (McIntosh 1998: 225). The groups consist of relations between pairs: between text and writer, between text and reader, between text and world. My focus on style in textual CMC could be classed as the study of style under the aspect of the relation between writer and reader corresponding in text, an approach that necessarily draws on all three relational pairs discussed by McIntosh, and must draw comparisons between textual style and style in social relations more generally.

An expressive sense of style, which takes the social self as the object to which style pertains, is spontaneously expressive to surrounding others of the being, both individual and social, of particular people. This sense of style is not strictly aesthetic but ethical, since both having style and understanding style are activities that occur in the sphere of human relations, and which may lead to either strife or communion. Someone’s style, that is, the ways in which they go about their activities in general, is expressive of their particular interests, attitudes, character – it can be seen as individually theirs. Yet their interests, attitudes and character are shared with, and influenced by, many other people; the social practices that they take up are learned from and shared with many other people. Any individual style is neither wholly unique nor wholly independent in its development.

The expressive aspect of style is mirrored in people’s everyday grasp of others’ styles. We attend to other people’s styles as part of understanding them as persons. As all performances are styled, so all attending to other people involves a grasp of their style (or styles) of performance. Further, each individual’s style is grasped by others who may have substantially different styles, not to mention different characters, interests, or cultural backgrounds. Differences in style may be productive of new understanding, but may also be significant obstacles to it. This section gives an outline of an expressive theory of style in terms of the expressively styled activities of individuals. The following section outlines the role, and some of the ethical responsibilities, of the interpreter in an expressive theory of style.

The association of style with expressions of self or character has a long history, primarily associated with traditions of rhetoric rather than of writing. Classical discussions of style discuss public oration and focus on excellence of expression and the achievement of desired effects through employment of recognised style, in the form of rhetorical techniques, including manner of delivery.² At the same time, style is treated, notoriously by Socrates, as a dangerous tool that can be used as easily for a bad cause as a good. Maud Gleason draws attention to the importance of physiognomic and performance analysis as means of discriminating ‘real men’ from pretenders in second century BC Greece.³ A similar attitude can be seen in the ‘copious’ written Erasmian style of the early Renaissance, in which fullness of expression betokened both erudition and virtue, and afforded the most convivial of literary correspondences.⁴ Enlightenment attitudes to style, especially in France and Hanoverian England, associate particular styles of speech and writing with polite society; rigidification of class barriers was accompanied in eighteenth-century Western Europe by prescription in both grammar and style.⁵ The same period saw a proliferation of novels in letters, such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose self-conscious stylistic variety allow writers to alternate several authorial voices in single literary productions.⁶

Some more recent approaches to style, such as that of Jacques Derrida, also used by Gregory Ulmer and Tom Conley, and that of writers on rhetoric influenced by Marshall McLuhan, such as David Jay Bolter and Richard Lanham,⁷ argue for the ubiquity of style within all (linguistic) discourse without claiming for it the ethical normativity of Classical approaches. Richard Lanham in particular attends to the question of the relation of good literary style⁸ and moral goodness, concluding that it is the purpose to which style is put, rather than style itself, that is amenable to moral judgement.⁹ Berel Lang, who has made particularly detailed explorations of philosophical style, is attentive to the ways in which stylistic genres both enable and channel a writer’s intentionality, thus illustrating the historical and cultural embeddedness of many styles of writing.¹⁰ While modern writers are ambivalent about the virtue of any particular style per se, there is a general recognition that style, whatever else it is, may be powerfully expressive of character, interests, and intentionality.

Aesthetic expressive theories of style, as in a formulation by Jenefer Robinson in terms of literary works, also treat style as expressive of individual attitudes or feelings. Under Robinson’s expressive theory of style, for example, different styles used by the same person are seen as the various attitudes or voices of that person. In ‘Style and personality in the literary work’, Robinson treats style as ‘a way of doing things’ in the context of writing a novel, and glosses such things as ‘describing character, commenting on the action, and manipulating the plot’ (Robinson 1985). Robinson illustrates that we cannot explain why some formal properties count as stylistically important for one literary work, and not for another, unless style refers to something besides formal properties, and then argues that it is the expression of the various attitudes of author (or an authorial voice) that invests formal properties with particular style.

There are some important objections to expressive theories of style, particularly in the expression-of-individual-feeling model. Two important features of style, present both in literary works, and in social comportment generally, that cannot be accounted for by expressive theories, suggest that style is not solely a writer or performer’s expression of attitudes and feelings, and that an intersubjective-expressive account of style is necessary. The troubling features are the variety of styles used by individuals, and the relative insignificance, in some social performances, of the author (as opposed to either an authorial voice or the author’s subject matter).

On the variety of styles open to any individual, Berel Lang observes that autobiographical narrative, letters, and other textual testimonies have much in common with fiction, in that they may employ a textual style, or a variety of textual styles, that are not recognisably like the social style of their writers.¹¹ The theatre is the arena par exemple of variety of voices, and one in which we can by no means treat all styled performances as expressing the attitudes of a single playwright to her or his creations. Individual performances, in life as well as art, may express attitudes and feelings not those of the performer, or those whose significance is that they are shared by the performer with other people, and so on. This observation renders impracticable the expressivist treatment of all style as expressive of a single unitary self, and suggests a profound modality to individual performances, in the arena of art in particular.¹²

In social life generally, people have a variety of ways of acting available to them, and these may be sufficiently differentiated for any individual to constitute separate roles. We do not usually approach other people as profoundly unique others, but in certain capacities, structured by social rules and possibilities, and as we appear in various capacities, we may have a variety of roles. A person may be said to have a variety of styles of speaking, or of negotiating, or of walking, so that it becomes difficult to treat people as having single, unitary and wholly consistent styles of acting, expressive of singular consistent attitudes.¹³ Psychologist Deborah Tannen’s observation that impersonation and dramatisation are important and common strategies in ordinary speech and social activity (Tannen 1989; see also Tannen and Lakoff 1994) also makes difficulties for pure expressivist theories of style. Impersonation and dramatisation constitute imitation of others’ styles and cannot be said to embody the performer’s attitude in any simple way. Certainly their audience may attend to the style of such performances not simply to appreciate the style or character of the performer, but to learn of or laugh at the style of the person imitated.

This last remark is closely related to a second feature of style troublesome to an expressive account. This is that in many cases someone’s style in acting or in speaking may be directed toward illuminating some subject matter other than the performing self; as the style of travel writing can sum up the qualities of a place rather than the attitudes of the traveller; as the style of a dramatic performance can capture the character being played rather than the attitude of the actor; that in some cases a performance can express an abstract quality such as lightness or agility rather than an attitude or feeling.¹⁴

Even the most individual stylistic voice may be so closely attuned, so familiar, with its subject matter that the subject matter becomes more real in the performance than the subject. And then an audience may feel the subject matter come alive for themselves too, as a good mimic can summon her or his subject to an audience. The submergence of subject is particularly evident in some artistic disciplines, such as abstract art, and music, the art at once most abstract and with the greatest corporeal impact. Expressive style in music is only contingently connected with particular emotions, and music itself almost never takes intentional objects (though its lyrics and programmes may do so).

Nelson Goodman’s objectivist version of the expressive account of style addresses this limitation, by treating style, as any features of the symbolic functioning of a given performance or object that serve to mark it uniquely.¹⁵ This approach fixes on objective properties of a performance or object as the terms in which its unique style is available to any investigator; it eschews any reference to the emotional or affective qualities of a performance, or to the intentionality of a performer. By not discriminating between expressive voices it avoids the subjectivist troubles of requiring a single expressive authorial voice. However, such an objectivist approach relies on there being a consistent body of features that can be observed in a performance. Yet as Goodman observes, the choice of which objective stylistic features an observer seeks out is coloured by their prior perception of the style of a performance, so that different observers may attribute different styles.¹⁶ Nor can some properties of performances and objects (or indeed of symbols) be satisfactorily explained or accounted for without reference to their affective power or emotional import.¹⁷ Goodman emphasises the multiple symbolic functions of performances and objects in an attempt to get away from a theory of style in which style expresses only the emotions and attitudes of a single creator.¹⁸ But in making good his escape, he severs symbols from the social world in which they gain and change their significance, which significance cannot be considered merely formal.

The alternative to choosing either subjectivist or objectivist expressivism is to admit that style can incorporate both subjectivist and objectivist traits, just as it encompasses actors and bystanders (or, more properly, groups of people interacting), as well as the objects and texts that often mediate between them. This stance would require relinquishing any pretensions to be able to provide a singular typology of styles (the goal of the objectivist theories), and would cloud the explanatory elegance of singular authorial expression that is the basis of the subjectivist theories. But the expressive aspect of style, and its association with the person who expresses it, rest at the core of style, even if they cannot be given systematic or reductive ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Style and ethics
• 2: Empathy in computer-mediated communication
• 3: Affect and action in CMC
• 4: Technical constraints on CMC
• 5: Computer-mediated friendship
• 6: Politics and CMC
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography