Tech comm from outer space: More lessons from alien movies

TC Talk

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TC Talk opens its 2nd season with a special episode for the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival 2022. We took our own (very literal) spin on the Carnival theme “Rhetoric: Spaces and Places in and Beyond the Academy” and discuss the epic communication challenge of alien-to-human contact, as portrayed in film. From Arrival to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, sci-fi movies have a lot to teach us about technical communication, audiences, and empathy. Don’t forget your towel!

Sources and further reading

Adams, D. (1995). The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1st edition). Del Rey.
Arecibo Message. (23 Apr. 2018). SETI Institute. https://www.seti.org/arecibo-message
Blomkamp, N. (Director). (2009, August 14). District 9 [Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller]. TriStar Pictures, Block / Hanson, WingNut Films.
Columbus, C. (Director). (2015, July 24). Pixels [Action, Comedy, Fantasy]. Columbia Pictures, LStar Capital, China Film Group Corporation (CFGC).
Comrie, B. (n.d.). Language and Thought. Linguistic Society of America. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/language-and-thought
Drake equation. (2022). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Drake_equation&oldid=1101709374
Garland, A. (Director). (2018, February 23). Annihilation [Adventure, Drama, Horror]. Paramount Pictures, Skydance Media, Scott Rudin Productions.
Hill, T. (Director). (1999, July 14). Muppets from Space [Adventure, Comedy, Family]. Jim Henson Pictures.
Hood, G. (Director). (2013, November 1). Ender’s Game [Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi]. Summit Entertainment, MWM Studios, Chartoff Productions.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/
Jean, P. (Director). (2010, April 8). Pixels [Animation, Short, Action]. One More Production.
Mission to Zyxx. (n.d.). [Podcast]. Maximum Fun. https://www.missiontozyxx.space
Sagan, C. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. (1980). PBS.
Sagan, C. (1997). Contact. Simon and Schuster.
Spielberg, S. (Director). (1977, December 14). Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Drama, Sci-Fi]. Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips Productions, EMI Films.
Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2016, November 11). Arrival [Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi]. Lava Bear Films, FilmNation Entertainment, 21 Laps Entertainment.
Vuorensola, T. (Director). (2012, April 4). Iron Sky [Action, Adventure, Comedy]. Blind Spot Pictures Oy, 27 Films Production, New Holland Pictures.
Zemeckis, R. (Director). (1997, July 11). Contact [Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi]. Warner Bros., South Side Amusement Company.
Zimmerman, J. (2015, October 21). The Cocktail at the End of the Universe. Eater. https://www.eater.com/2015/10/21/9522151/pan-galactic-gargle-blaster-recipes-geek-bars

Transcript

B	[Carl Sagan voice] “There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a hundred billion stars. Think of how many stars, and planets, and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe.”
A	Welcome to the season premiere of TC talk, a tech comm podcast. My name is Abi.
B	I’m Benton.
A	I am a professor of rhetoric and technical communication,
B	and I’m not.
A	And because we have different backgrounds, we aim to talk about the scholarship of technical communication in an accessible way.
B	And ideally in a humorous way.
A	That was an epic pucker.
B	Alright, so what just made our faces implode?
A	We’re drinking Pan Galactic gargle blasters.
B	Ah, the effect of which is having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick.
A	At least according to Douglas Adams. Was that an accurate description of the effect?
B	Maybe a large gold coin, I don’t know. A large, a large gold brick would be substantial. Gold is freaking dense, man.
A	So it’s not having the intended effect, which is probably a good thing. But
B	Yes.
A	But I wasn’t able to follow the recipe exactly. I had to make some substitutions. For instance, we lack the tooth of an Algolian suntiger.
B	Yeah. They’re hard to come by this time of year.
A	Essentially, it’s Long Island iced tea-esque with some mint liqueur and lemon juice.
B	And no tea.
A	I don’t think there is tea in a Long Island iced tea.
B	What? You’ve never had one?
A	I have. But apparently the effect of the Long Island iced tea was such that I forgot its components. Anyway, I’ll fact check that later. Benton, why are we drinking Pan Galactic gargle blasters as our toast to first episode of season two?
B	It’s because we are talking about aliens.
A	That’s right. Tech comm from Outer Space. And this episode is special because it’s part of the Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival for 2022. And that is sponsored by the Big Rhetorical Podcast. And the idea is, get a bunch of rhetoric, composition, tech comm podcasters together to prepare an episode around a similar theme. They all get released around the same time. I think this is going to be, ah, August 22 to 25. I took notes. And the theme for this year is Rhetoric: Spaces and Places In and Beyond the Academy.
B	And what could be further beyond the academy than outer space, right?
A	Right. Not to mention, it’s got the word space in the theme, and we decided to interpret that quite literally. And here’s why we went this direction. We figured there might be some first-time TC Talk listeners out there. And so we wanted to plan an episode that was quintessentially TC Talk and build on what has been our most popular episode to date. Episode 2, from last September: “What can aliens teach us about technical communication?” So today we’re going to discuss some more lessons from alien movies.
B	I normally,
A	I’m sorry, this is disgusting.
B	Is it blasting your gargle?
A	Galactically.
B	So for this episode, I honestly have done more research than for any other episode.
A	Yes. We may have been on a break this summer, but we have been doing research all along,
B	watching alien movies
A	everything from Arrival to Muppets From Space.
B	Yes.
A	Basically any major alien movie we could think of, except ET. I didn’t want to revisit that childhood trauma. What else did we watch?
B	We kind of split it up a little bit. I watched a few you didn’t.
A	I think you just watched one that I didn’t, District 9 because I’ve seen it already and it was a little gritty for me.
B	Very juicy.
A	Ugh. But we watched Contact,
B	probably watched a few that were kind of non-starters. we watched pixels
A	starring Adam Sandler. I cannot believe I sat through that movie. That’s dedication. I would only do it for the purposes of research.
B	Yes. Enders game. Oh, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
A	And I have opinions about these movies, but I should note, I am not a movie critic. I am not sophisticated. I mean, I thought Drumline was a masterpiece. Still do for the record. I cried at Air Bud. So if you disagree with my opinions about Adam Sandler, for instance, don’t be mad at me. Maybe I just have bad taste and Adam Sandler is in fact a comedic genius, so. But to debate my taste in movies is not the point of this episode. It’s to talk about what does this teach us about technical communication. So all that to say. Why aliens and tech comm, Benton?
B	First of all, science fiction is the best genre out there. Hands down. No holds barred.
A	That is an opinion, not a fact.
B	That is an opinion, not a fact.
A	Not a bad opinion, but proceed.
B	But it is because science fiction has so much room. Like science fiction is kind of a shell of a genre. It’s a context really. You can take any other genre and put it in the context of science fiction, like a romantic comedy in space.
A	What’s the romantic comedy in space?
B	I don’t know if it’s a comedy. It’s the Space Between Us.
A	Oh, okay. What comes to mind for me is space Western.
B	Yes.
A	A la Joss Whedon’s Firefly. Although Joss Whedon has turned out to be problematic.
B	He’s let his creep flag fly.
A	Indeed. So you’d mentioned there’s like the action-based sci-fi or the military sci-fi?
B	Yes, that’s kind of where the science is not real, but it doesn’t matter because we’re blasting aliens.
A	And we ruled out several of those from our very sophisticated analysis here today. I’m also thinking of
B	We should have done Independence Day.
A	Really?
B	It edges over into that military sci-fi, but it’s actually got like technical communication going on in the movie.
A	Ah. So not necessarily the communication between humans and aliens, but perhaps by humans to humans about aliens.
B	Right. You know, the one that we kind of watched and then probably threw out of our analysis was Annihilation,
A	which I don’t know that I would well, it’s not a perfect fit, but I have a lot of opinions about it that I want to talk about.
B	Okay.
A	Because what the fuck? Anyway, in case we don’t find a way to fit it with our theme. Let’s just give a little synopsis now. Natalie Portman et al, go into a giant soap bubble where alligators and bears can imitate people. And it’s a bad drug trip and there’s no plot.
B	Yeah, so inside this bubble, there’s an alien artifact that has created the bubble where mutations and evolution are off the chain.
A	And I will say that aspect of it was cool. And in fact, you picked up on the fact that Natalie Portman’s character at one point was reading the book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
B	Yes.
A	So there was some scientific basis for what was going on. It’s a movie I wanted to like. But I, again, I’m, I’m boring. I like to have my loose ends tied up. But you know your point about Independence Day having good examples of tech comm. I think that one other reason that aliens is an interesting subject for tech comm, is that SETI, the search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence
B	Yes.
A	Is a real thing.
B	Yes, it is.
A	Benton, do you believe in aliens?
B	I believe that there are almost certainly extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations
A	Just because of the sheer magnitude of the universe,
B	because of the magnitude of the universe. What we know of the Drake equation, it’s a famous equation that represents all of the variables in what is the probability that there is alien life out there that is intelligent enough that we could communicate with. You start with the number of stars or
A	So there is a likelihood.
B	There is a likelihood. And because of the just mind-boggling number of stars and therefore planets that exist in only our galaxy. It’s almost gotta be the case that there is somewhere.
A	Yes. And I have heard arguments that earth represents this Goldilocks of like, perfect temperature, perfect water content, oxygen content, what, what have you to support life, but might there be other forms of life that evolved in their distinct contexts and what would that look like?
B	Yes.
A	I think it’s fascinating and frankly, I hope they are out there.
B	One of the fun things that planetary radio, the host, Matt Kaplan talks about regularly with some of his xenobiology or astrobiology guests, is looking for life as we don’t know it. For example, life that could be in the oceans, the sub-ice oceans of Europa, or any of the other icy moons. Europa is a moon of Jupiter. It is one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter. Galileo could see those four with his puny little telescope.
A	Thinking of this as a legitimate enterprise, that raises an epic technical communication problem, which is, if we’re going to seek to contact aliens, what message would we send? Would humanity send? And we kind of have an answer to that with the Arecibo message of 1974.
B	So this is from SETI.org about the Arecibo.
A	Is it Arecibo or Arecibo?
B	I mean, I know I’ve pronounced it Arcibo in the past, but that is wrong. They say that “it consists, among other things, of the Arecibo telescope, our solar system, DNA, a stick figure of a human, and some of the biochemicals of earthly life. Although it’s unlikely that this sort of inquiry will ever prompt a reply, the experiment was useful in getting us to think a bit about the difficulties of communicating across space, time, and a presumably wide culture gap.”
A	Yeah, that sums up kind of why I wanted to theme the episode around this. It also has lists of prime numbers. Is that right?
B	I have no idea.
A	I think it did.
B	You are thinking about Contact.
A	I might be. I mean, it might have been both because Carl Sagan consulted on that message.
B	That’s true. He is the connection.
A	But what’s interesting to me about that is just the contrast between the hard mathematical side of it, and then a stick figure of a human representing the extent of the humanness about the message. That kind of speaks to two differing, sometimes competing approaches to communicating with aliens in these fictional scenarios is do we go with a more personal approach or do we go with a more “these are the facts” kind of approach? So why don’t you jump in here with Contact because we watched the movie. You are now reading the book.
B	The book was written by Carl Sagan.
A	And Carl Sagan is known for the Cosmos.
B	Cosmos is his most well-known public communication.
A	We could’ve been drinking a Cosmo right now.
B	We could have. Book was published in 1985, which is still Soviet Union era. I know that that is one way the movie is different. The movie was done in 1997, 12 years later. Starring Jodie Foster,
A	and Matthew McConaughey, in the worst role ever. Like one of the reasons I’m glad you’re reading the book is because I want you to tell me that the Michael McConnell, hey, wait, is that his name? Matthew McConaughey character is not in the book. He’s a priest in the movie. And he’s like this smarmy know at all.
B	So Joss Palmer. That’s McConaughey’s character, right?
A	Yep. Can you believe we’ve discussed two people named Joss on this podcast so far. What are the odds?
B	Wow, it’s Joss mind-boggling. Put a drum hit in there for me. He definitely has a more multi-dimensional character in the book.
A	Okay, because let me tell you listeners what happens in the movie. Jodie Foster wants to go to space and she is blocked from doing so in part because this Joss Palmer guy fell in love with her and didn’t want her to go away. Which, that’s maddening. Like. That is not love.
B	It’s control.
A	its control. Thank you. And I don’t like the way that the movie presented it as like this romantic moment where we’re supposed to go. He’s so sweet. No, he dashed her dreams. I mean, ultimately, she does get to go to space. So it works out. End rant.
B	End rant. So the Arecibo message went out in 1974, which is by my calculations 38 years after what was identified by the aliens in Contact as the first message we sent out, which was Hitler welcoming everyone to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
A	Did they actually send that out into space?
B	They explain this in the book that you don’t send things out into space. When you broadcast them, they’re out. They’re going.
A	Got it, got it.
B	They’re leaving this earth at the speed of light.
A	So it’s kind of happenstance what might get picked up by intelligent life, right?
B	Right.
A	And the Hitler message would be sadly, a pretty accurate portrayal of humanity.
B	I wouldn’t disagree. Although it was relatively benign because it was just a three-minute clip welcoming and
A	Okay. That’s fair.
B	If anybody is listening to all this shit we put out and if they’re listening hard enough, Hitler is gonna be the first thing they hear.
A	Why would Hitler be the first thing they hear? Because it was the first thing ever broadcast that way?
B	That was the first thing that was ever broadcast at enough intensity to get beyond our Van Allen radiation belts, which we didn’t know about at the time. But the Van Allen radiation belts make it possible for us to get transmissions that bounce off of the atmosphere.
A	So what did the intelligent life in Contact do in response?
B	So they recorded it. And then they, the aliens broadcast prime numbers super loud at us. Basically like amplitude pulses that made for tally marks. So there would be like two pulses, three pulses, five, and so on and so forth. It was their way of being like, Hey yo, listen, because the sequence of prime numbers doesn’t happen in nature. It’s a very, very hard to miss indicator of artificialness.
A	That this is not random, yeah.
B	This is not random. Pay attention. In the book carl Sagan explains that this broadcast was a multilayered thing. So we could see, we could see very easily the amplitude rise and fall. So we can see that without any confusion. Interlaced into that was another level of information which he described as a palimpsest.
A	Palimpsest, a manuscript that has been overlaid with another manuscript. English major coming through here. The point being it was a message layered upon a message.
B	When they figured out the specifics of how that was encoded, they saw, Oh, that’s Hitler. What the fuck is Hitler doing in space? What’s going on here? And then they finally figured out that, oh, this is the first thing they heard, Oh, they must be saying hi. Let’s say hi back.
A	Which is a thoughtful interpretation that they came to versus hmm, sending us a message of someone who is universally, should be universally reviled among humans. I can see people interpreting that as a threat. Like why are you sending this genocidal dictator back to us? Which I mean, I think we can move away from Contact at this point. But that matter of interpretation is really essential here because the humans on Earth in Contact avoided what could have been a cosmic misunderstanding. That points to the precariousness of communication oftentimes, and the importance of being slow and thoughtful. Okay, and I can’t believe I’m trying to make this relevant. But in Pixels starring Adam Sandler, the gist of it is that they broadcast video of like a 1982 arcade game championship out into space. And
B	This actually went on a satellite that was apparently discovered by these aliens.
A	And how did the aliens interpret it?
B	They interpreted it as a declaration of war.
A	And that’s where we get people needing to defeat Pac-Man in real life, etc.
B	With Cooper minis, of course.
A	Mini Coopers. Cooper Minis. That’s cute. Long story short. It’s a movie where creepy nerdy guys get to be the hero and women are literally objectified.
B	Yep. Was it like ten years old or?
A	I want to say 2011? It was based on a short film that’s like two minutes long. And everything that was cool about the movie you can experience in that two minutes. Go check it out on YouTube.
B	No need to watch the feature film.
A	Right. So be intentional about your messages and your interpretation. And I think the movie Arrival explores this a little more in-depth. Can you give me like a 20-second synopsis before we talk about Arrival?
B	Okay.
A	I’m asking you to do live technical communication because you have to summarize something complex, alright? In a way that highlights only the information that’s relevant for the analysis that we’re going to give. Go for it.
B	Okay, so in Arrival, without announcement, 12 alien ships descend over various points on the earth and just sit there waiting. We discover that there are ways to get up in there. They have a way to communicate to us through like, okay, I tried.
A	Amy Adams, plays a linguist, Louise Banks, who is tapped to translate the aliens’ messages. The part that’s of use to our discussion here, so there are folks trying to translate around the world. And one of the translations they get is an answer to the question, What is your purpose here? And the aliens supposedly responded, Offer weapon.
B	Offer weapon. Like are you offering me a weapon by pointing it in my face? Are you offering me a weapon with which to destroy my geopolitical adversaries? Are you asking me to offer a weapon to you? Are you saying come at me, bro?
A	Right. And the way that most governments, I guess interpreted it, was as a threat. So they were gearing up to attack. And this linguist is seemingly the only one who’s like, Let’s wait a second here. Do we know that weapon is an accurate interpretation in the first place? Could it not mean tool or technology?
B	Yes. So I’ve got a quote here from the movie Arrival. Louise Banks: “Let’s say that I taught them chess instead of English. Every conversation would be a game. Every idea expressed through opposition, victory, defeat. You see the problem. If all I ever gave you was a hammer…” Colonel Weber: “Everything is a nail.” Speaking of the affordances of the medium. The Chinese group was playing mahjong with the aliens.
A	Basically she’s saying, the kind of framework you bring to a communication situation really constrains your interpretations.
B	Yeah, you know, if you look at certain places in the world, they have they have multiple words for something that in other places they only have one word for. In
A	Are you getting at the Sapir Whorf hypothesis? Because she does talk about it in the movie, but I think she treats it as maybe more accepted than it actually is.
B	Like in Scandinavian countries, there are multiple words for snow, multiple words for different kinds of like hills and mountains. In English we have hills and mountains. So, based on the geography of where you’re from, what you experience, you want to be able to distinguish it. If you’re from an alien species that’s collectivist. They have never experienced war. How would they know what the difference between weapon and tool is?
A	Exactly. The idea here is that, I should say the question behind the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is, to what extent does language determine thought? So does it shape how you think or is it more thought shapes your language? Not a settled question, but
B	I mean, it sounds very chicken and egg. But in this case, there’s certainly room for both to be happening at the same time where language forms your thoughts and thoughts from your language.
A	Mm-hmm. The lesson we can take from this, I think, is that words are not just words. Language is not just ideas, but it has real material effects in the world. Like are we going to go to war or not? This hinges on a, on a word, an interpretation of a word. And that’s of course an extreme example. But I do think it is still easy for people to brush off language as just language or just on the Internet or it just, sticks and stones can’t hurt me. Or how does that go?
B	Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.
A	Which is BS. And we’ve talked about this in past episodes to about conspiracy theory and weaponized rhetoric and such. But is there anything else? Oh, I also think that Arrival does display that kind of tension between the humanistic side and the mathematical side because she’s brought in with this physicist. They have very different ideas about how to initially approach the aliens. So he says, “priority one, what do they want and where are they from? And beyond that, how did they get here? Are they capable of faster than light travel? I’ve prepared a list of questions to go over, starting with a series of handshake binary sequences.” And Louise Banks says How about we just talk to them before we start throwing math problems at them. So again, emphasizing that not everything can be effectively boiled down to prime numbers or binary sequences, right?
B	Or a game of mahjong.
A	Yep. And in fact, what she does shocks the other scientists when they’re in the spaceship or the giant floating seed, what have you, she takes off what do you call it, bio?
B	She’s wearing what you would wear when you’re going into like a level four hot zone because you never know what kind of germs the aliens might have. But she’s like, Ah, the hell with it.
A	And she says they need to see me. In fact, when the military initially proposes the idea of her coming to help translate, they bring her an audio recording of the alien speech and she says, Sorry, this is an alien language. I have absolutely nothing to go off of. I can’t translate from a recording. I need to interact with them. I think that’s a, a great picture of the importance of interacting with your audience to learn about them versus making assumptions about them from limited data. It’s also a picture of the importance of gaining trust with an audience and how that requires vulnerability. Am I digging a little bit too deep here for the connections?
B	I don’t think so.
A	Here’s why I see the topic of aliens a relevant subject for technical communication. I see tech comm as communicating complex technical information to audiences that need it in the way that they need it. And one central facet of tech comm and rhetoric is that it’s audience-centered. It’s not about the writer and proving you know something or showing off or expressing yourself, not that those are bad things. Ultimately, it’s about how your audience understands that communication in order to accomplish some task or solve some problem. And it can often be hard for students or any writer to imagine audiences that aren’t just like them.
B	Yes.
A	Tech comm instructors listening might be familiar with a common exercise used in tech comm classrooms, which is to write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for an alien who has just landed on Earth. A graduate teaching intern introduced this to me, actually and employed it in class to great effect. And I think that’s a great exercise for thinking through the audience knowledge you take for granted. The fun part is imagining all the ways it can go wrong, right? And I’ve even heard of some instructors taking it the extra step and usability testing instructions and like deliberately misinterpreting them to show the lack of clarity.
B	Give it the Amelia Bedelia treatment.
A	Precisely. Like if you say put this piece of bread on top of the other piece of bread. Well, did you specify that the jelly should be facing in and not out? Or are you supposed to stack it vertically on top of the other piece of bread or what?
B	Like dominoes.
A	Yeah. Like I said, that’s a good intro activity just to make that point, that often you have to spell out more than you think you have to. However, I think there’s a definite limitation to this exercise in that in real technical communication situations, you don’t want to assume zero knowledge on the part of your audience because that’s not true, and it’s insulting to them. So I think it’s possible to go too far in the other direction as well. Assuming others are like you is one thing. But it’s also problematic to assume others are fully unlike you. Treating your audience as foreign or other in ways that are alienating. That’s a telling word choice.
B	How about that. I mean, know your audience is really the thing. And my experience navigating or attempting to navigate military specifications for design things is. It’s very hard to write for a wide range. So I was a mechanical engineer designing generators, electrical generators, in part for the US military. The military has a specification for materials, the metallurgy of materials. They have a specification for which way and what strength, you know, a bolt needs to have to be mil spec of this. And so you end up having references that end up being meaningless because there’s so many of them that are tangentially possibly relevant that you don’t know in which way your audience will be uninformed.
A	And you also have to imagine the user experience of poring through pages of references or a glossary or something.
B	Oh yeah. It’s definitely not Wikipedia. It isn’t hyperlinks from one mil spec to the one it’s referring to. You gotta go through a clunky system to try and download them, to look at them, you gotta scroll through and know how to read the damn things.
A	The genre of military specifications, you’re saying is one that both assumes too much and too little knowledge on the part of its readers in its efforts to be universal?
B	Yes. There were times when I was looking at a mil spec for a conductive wire and its insulation that like being a mechanical engineer looking for that sort of thing, I felt like there were some bits of knowledge that I didn’t have that were assumed. An electrician looking at the same document would be like, this is so overexplanatory, it’s ridiculous. But that is the tension of over and under explaining things.
A	What can technical communicators do about that tension?
B	It’s kind of tricky. If you’re making something that will last in perpetuity. The odds are that it will be seen by someone who weren’t expecting to see it. If you’re creating a presentation or discussion, you will know your audience and it will not exist after you deliver it. With something that’s permanent, something that someone puts
A	Something that has to cross space and time. Like, like the aliens getting hold of the Hitler tape.
B	Something that you have no control of after it is out.
A	Like the aliens getting hold of the Hitler tape which didn’t really happen. I’m not advocating a conspiracy theory here.
B	For more on Nazis in space though. Iron Sky, it’s an awesome farce.
A	That’s not pro-Nazi. Am I right?
B	It is not pro-Nazi. But you did Not-see it. Whereas I did. Another drum hit, please. Thanks. Nice try.
A	I don’t have my crash cymbal conveniently positioned in front of me. Sorry.
B	That’s true. So yeah, creating permanent technical communication rather than ephemeral communication.
A	It’s going to live beyond the immediate context and you need to account for that. And that’s where the idea of secondary, tertiary audiences can come into play. And The thing about giving a presentation is the people are in the room. You know who they are. They can ask questions if they really don’t know something. Actually we have a whole episode on audience where we talk more about that. But I think the solution is aiming for something that’s in-between this communication is only for the people in this room and this communication is for everyone, right?
B	Right.
A	And that’s where putting out multiple versions of essentially the same message can be useful. And how do you know what kind of level of background knowledge to aim for in these different versions?
B	True.
A	That’s not a rhetorical question.
B	Oh. I think that NASA does this sort of thing fairly well,
A	which we talked about in our episode on the movie, Don’t Look Up.
B	Yeah. And it’s because as part of their institution, they have a focus on outreach. They’re not just no offense, they’re not just academics. They’re public outreach and public education oriented. Like it is part of the culture of NASA. And so they have press releases that they put out about missions. They do, they do that multilevel, or even the IPCC reports, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They have a short version that is for lawmakers because they want to have an effect. And then there’s the long version that gets into the details of how they calculated what they did.
A	for people who want to know that the science is real.
B	Mm-hmm. Side-note, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is intergovernmental. That means all of the governments agree to this. They had to all sign off on it.
A	I had a student write a paper about it.
B	Cool. And so as a result, what Sweden wants to say about climate change has to be in agreement with what Saudi Arabia wants to say about climate change. And so it is inherently conservative, not in a political sense, but it is deeply baked in that they are not alarmist.
A	Interesting. But even so, their message is pretty alarming, which is saying something.
B	Yeah. Just thought I’d put that in there as a PSA.
A	Okay. My answer to this tension is to get as close to the specific audience as possible. Well, that’d be a little creepy. As is required for the communication task. And I think what that amounts to is largely empathy. And I don’t want to say empathy is like the be-all, end-all of good technical communication. It’s certainly, it’s certainly been manipulated in ways that I want to explore in a future podcast. But for purposes of our talk today, empathy is really an important key for relating with these literally alien audiences. Empathy is best fostered through listening.
B	I’m sorry, what was that?
A	Not funny.
B	I had to try anyway.
A	Through interacting, through engaging and that’s how you learn who it is you’re communicating with. I think a couple of the movies exhibit this well. One of them is Enders Game, 2013 movie based on the 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card. And I haven’t read that book since college. And my memory is very bad for details.
B	In typical Abi fashion.
A	So I don’t know how closely the movie matched the book, but what is sort of unexpected about it is that you initially think it’s gonna be one of these military sci-fi films. Because I mean it is literally that. They are training kids to go to war against these Formics, which are an alien species that tried to annihilate Earth?
B	Yeah.
A	But you see quickly that it’s more a critique of that conquest culture, if you will, more so than a glorification of it. As in a movie like, what would you say is another quintessential military sci-fi? Independence Day?
B	It kind of is.
A	Edge of Tomorrow?
B	Yes.
A	I did really like it though.
B	It was fun
A	because of the Groundhog Day dynamic, which ironically, I never get tired of.
B	You get the drum hit this time.
A	And so it presents like the propaganda around this war against the Formics and sort of this search for a singular savior and Ender this child, this boy, gets slotted into that position. What do you remember about empathy coming into play here? And spoiler alert. But what ultimately ends up happening with ender?
B	Ender has an older brother and an older sister, both of whom were put through the screening for this program. His brother washed out because he was too violent, he was too cruel. His sister washed out because she was too empathetic. It is kind of presented as different ends of a spectrum, but
A	And that Ender represents the happy medium or something?
B	So in the end, after all of this training, the trainer presents them as their last training mission what is, in actuality, the final battle in the real world. They didn’t realize that it was actually happening, they thought was a simulation. Over the course of his training, Ender’s empathy, they say, has given him some insight into the Formics because there’s a queen that secretly was hidden near his training base. And it was communicating to him through like this. This app, through his dreams.
A	Like a mind game thing, yeah.
B	Yes. So he develops some empathy through that. He’s infuriated when he finds out he was tricked into committing genocide on these Formics.
A	Hate when that happens.
B	You know they say the first genocide is the hardest.
A	Yikes.
B	That’s a line from that mission to ZYXX podcast that I listened to for awhile. It’s like a sci-fi improv. Pretty, pretty zany podcast.
A	We’ll link to it. So I’m going to interject here with a quote I took down from the film. Ender is emphasizing throughout this training that we don’t really understand our enemy. Ender says, I know the Formics better than any living soul. I stole their future from them. Now I must make amends. What that suggests to me is that his deep knowledge of these aliens is in part what allowed him to destroy them successfully, but also what is leading him to aim to protect the queen, right?
B	Right.
A	Now, that’s not a lesson that we want to take into technical communication. Develop empathy so that you can destroy your enemy. And this is, I mean, this is a situation where the humans are the bad guys.
B	Aren’t we usually?
A	Yeah. But that’s a different dynamic than in like the movie Alien, where the aliens are so thoroughly awful
B	Parasitic
A	you’re not meant to empathize with them. You’re meant to empathize with the humans, namely Sigourney Weaver. And what was the name of her, her little pal in Aliens plural?
B	Jonesy?
A	Not the cat. It’s a little girl.
B	Oh the girl they find? Yeah. I don’t remember. Do not remember.
A	Right. So you root for them. Not like you’re rooting for the Formics in this movie. But you can see that there’s more going on than the message that the government is putting out. It’s very polarized. Us versus them. The movie District Nine, I think it really literalizes the need for empathy.
B	Definitely the context of it is apartheid.
A	It takes place in South Africa.
B	Yes so it’s like an obvious, this is talking about apartheid.
A	Allegory.
B	Instead of Arrival’s 12 alien ships, this is just one, shows up and comes to a stop over Johannesburg and nothing happens for months
A	They’re essentially refugees.
B	because they, for whatever reason they can’t get their ship to go home. They can’t figure out who the leadership is. They’re living in squalor aboard the ship
A	And initially the, the humans that find them have a humanitarian impulse towards them.
B	They have empathy towards them. They want to help these aliens out.
A	I wouldn’t even call it empathy though. I would call it white saviorism isn’t quite the right word in this context.
B	It kind of works though. Human supremacist.
A	Sort of a patronizing relationship.
B	Yeah, how egocentric of us. We’re just sitting here on our planet. We don’t have spaceships that can go anywhere impressive. They show up, sure they can’t run their ships anymore, but they fucking got here from who knows where
A	So to presume they are somehow less intelligence is very telling.
B	Just because they don’t have the infrastructure that they had when they left home. Initially, it was like a humanitarian We’re doing this out of the goodness or because it’s the right thing to do. Providing a no-cost, a place to be and food.
A	Until they start to inconvenience us. And withhold technology that we want in order to be a stronger military power.
B	Mm-hmm. District Nine is where the aliens live. And so the idea was to create a district ten, which is in the middle of nowhere. That isn’t ripe for abuse.
A	It amounts to a concentration camp.
B	it amounts to a concentration camp which eventually is admitted by Wikus, this government person who’s been put in charge of the process of issuing eviction notices to these aliens and getting them to agree to it.
A	Just the, just the different universes they’re operating on. Like the human universe with its bureaucracy and capitalism and xenophobia.
B	we exploit them as much as we can. And then Wikus discovers their technology liquid, they just call it the liquid, whatever. And unwittingly, like the bumbling government bureaucrat that I’m sure he was meant to portray, exposes himself to it. And it begins to
A	Spoiler alert.
B	It begins to change him into one of them. That creates like such, such a ripe field for character development in Wikus.
A	Turning point.
B	And so literally being put into their shoes. Fun bit of body horror as he has the transition from human to prawn physiology. And Christopher Johnson, which is the comically English name that was given to this very intelligent prawn sees what’s happening and to him and he says, I know what’s happening to you. I can help you. The character dynamics between Wikus and Christopher Johnson are, they start out at odds completely and they kind of, they work their way into being on the same side,
A	Friends.
B	against the same system that just wants to chew them both up.
A	What does it say though, that he needs to literally turn into this other species to gain any compassion for them?
B	It’s kind of a commentary on the mindset of the powerful.
A	Yeah, if this is an allegory for racism, is there not enough actual racism in the world? What do you think is the point of like creating a new kind of racism?
B	One of the great things about science fiction is that it disarms us. You aren’t expecting a movie about aliens to be a movie about racism. It stealth modes in there. You get emotionally involved in the characters before they spring the point on you. And you have to agree. That’s the idea. It keeps you from labeling immediately and then just being like, oh, I know which side of the label I’m on. They put you in the situation so you can feel the situation and reevaluate.
A	So it’s almost shocking you out of your understanding of the status of the status quo. So you can kind of see the ridiculousness that you’ve become blind to in the real world.
B	Absolutely
A	Alright, what movies have we not talked about yet?
B	Close encounters.
A	That was hard for me to get through. We had to watch it in like five separate chunks because it was made in the seventies and movies were very long. No, I shouldn’t put it that way. My attention span is very short.
B	The pacing of movies back then was not what it is now.
A	Yeah. Okay. I honestly, when I picked up this movie, I thought it was a comedy. I thought it was supposed to be a comedy. And when we started it, I kept waiting for it to get funny. So I think it was also an expectation problem. But what can we learn from that movie about technical communication?
B	Did you write any notes down?
A	That the mode of communication matters. Yeah, it’s about this everyday dude who comes into close contact with a flying saucer. And then he becomes obsessed with these aliens. And it turns out that the aliens are communicating through like a shared vision, right? Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, which is where their landing place is gonna be. And so these people are like creating artwork and sculptures of Devil’s Tower out of anything they can find. Like Richard Dreyfuss’ character creates a giant mound in the middle of his kitchen.
B	Yep.
A	I mean, it was an interesting movie. I’m, I’m glad I watched it. Honestly seeing the actual aliens at the end of the movie made it worse.
B	It tends to.
A	I mean, there’s something about the unknown that
B	Exactly.
A	I don’t know. Like you don’t need to answer every question in a movie. Sometimes things can just be a mystery. Here I am saying this right after I was like, I wish annihilation had a point. Okay, so I’m contradicting myself. I guess the other interesting piece from that movie is, I mean, again, these aliens are much more intelligent than humans. And so they have to find a way to get through to the humans that humans will understand. And that might come in the form of like a mashed potato mound or
B	Space music
A	a dollop of shaving cream or, yes.
B	Space tubas.
A	Space tubas. Yeah, like they were all about the brass in this one, but it was really cute actually. The aliens played this like five-note ditty by John Williams.
B	Doo doo doo doo doo.
A	Thank you. At Devil’s Tower, the military has set up camp in preparation for this arrival and I mean, it was notable that they were not prepared to blow the aliens out of the sky, right? Which I was expecting because there was this whole kind of subplot of like military cover up and. But they mostly just had like scientific equipment around and I thought this was adorable, a dude at a synthesizer. And all he could do was play the five notes. It’s like you don’t even, I mean, how do you know your grammar is right?
B	No joke. It’s like meowing back to my cat.
A	So I guess the idea there is moving beyond language to communicate, that in this case, it happened through music.
B	Which in fact, brings me to the last movie Muppets in Space.
A	I didn’t intend that we would seriously discuss that one, but go on.
B	They could talk to us through our alphabet cereral.
A	Or a sandwich.
B	Yes, or a talking sandwich. Go ahead and eat me. You’ll need the energy later.
A	No, but in all seriousness, what am I missing from Close Encounters of the Third Kind? By the way, what is a close encounter of the first kind or second kind? I don’t understand the title.
B	It isn’t clear to me either.
A	The movie does do a good job of portraying that sense of wonder at something new and different from you. Which is not a reaction that everyone has to something different.
B	Carl Sagan in Contact the book described, there’s wonder in a religious sense and then there’s wonder in a secular sense and in the brain it looks the same. So marveling at the size and vastness of our universe, it looks the same on your brain as having like a mountain top religious experience. He uses the word numinous. That awe, wonder, excitement, kind of emotion. You want to have a word for it when it’s something like aliens contacting us and it isn’t to say what’s the best way to prepare you for dinner. A way to express what Bill Nye calls the PB and J of space exploration. The passion, beauty, and joy.
A	And this is the second reference to PB and J in this podcast, what are the odds?
B	Oh my goodness.
A	That seems like a nice note to end on. Just to kind of sum up, I think with alien movies serving as almost case examples of communication challenges, it reminds us not to universalize our experience to the point that we think everyone is like us, nor do we want to alienate others to the point that we insult them or condescend to them, or discriminate against them. And those are things that don’t always happen on purpose. Technical communicators don’t need to be deliberately villainous to do harm with their work and the assumptions they make about the communities they’re writing for. Where possible, engage, interact, empathize.
B	Agreed.
A	If you’ve gotten this far, listener, thanks for sticking around. And if you want more, our website is faculty.mnsu.edu/TCTalk. That’s where you can find transcripts and show notes for all of our episodes. And we’re also on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, etc.
B	So long and thanks for all the fish.