The NYT Sunday Magazine recently featured an essay on social media trends, coded expressions, and “our postmodern state of interpretive paranoia, in which everything can be taken to mean something else.” It generated over a hundred comments and it’s worthy of a read for anyone who works in professional communications.
Coded expressions are words or phrases or presentations with hidden meanings and/or associations. The tendency to deploy them, for good or ill, is actually a hallmark of human communication through the ages. For example, people have been using individual words to signal meaning beyond mere definition since the days of the Old Testament. And words can mean more than one thing or become associated with other words as a matter of course in every language. Heck, there’s even an entire philosophical and scientific discipline devoted to studying the phenomena.
Cultures rise and fall, language evolves, meanings change — there is nothing new or even particularly postmodern about that.
But the purported prevalence of coded expression seems to have intensified lately with ambiguous hidden meanings that can turn on a dime. Perhaps social media and the rest of our sweeping technological adaptation has played a role in regard to speed, scope, and extremity of interpretive association: Everything seems coded to people because everything is coded in the digital universe — ultimately reduced by the binary limitations of our computational tools to either 0 or 1, A or B, this or that.
Nixed messages
Human beings are not algorithms, but we are most definitely influenced by them; and they are increasingly used to automatically drive human decision-making. Use the “wrong” word and your resume never reaches HR, or your project’s funding is summarily cut.
And so it goes that a new level of coding chaos has arrived at the communications party. Some of it is merely a byproduct of the way new technologies use historical data to function. But some of it reflects strategic human-directed initiatives to swing zeitgeist and broadly redirect positioning.
Where word meanings and associations have always changed organically over the course of time, you can now successfully alter word use, association, and coding quickfast with a targeted messaging campaign. Do you recall ever coming across the word “woke” in any official White House communications before the pandemic? It now appears in the proposed federal budget 34 times, and Google will spit out 12 pages of “woke” results (all pejorative) from a basic search of whitehouse.gov.
Whether words and phrases have generally negative or positive coding is likewise subject to flux. A colleague recently mentioned hearing “cleantech” referred to as “over” at an investor event she attended. This didn’t mean that an entire industry category has ceased to exist. It meant that a particular term is no longer favored among Silicon Valley investors. Ditto with “green” or “climate change.” Within the same circles, however, you’ll find “energy transition,” “self-reliance,” and “efficiency” all over positive conversations about the exact same technologies, companies, and business propositions that were tagged “cleantech” mere months ago. The coding has shifted and the preferred keywords have changed, but the industry category remains the same. (In his recent congressional address, even old ecowarrior King Charles said “collapse of critical natural systems” instead of “climate change,” which itself is a rebrand of “global warming.”)
You may be saying the same thing you’ve always said, just using different words to deliver the message and reach your audience. If you hope to elicit a positive response, you have to read the room. Any skilled communicator knows that.
Catch my drift?
Of course, we all have to acknowledge that the room is now the whole internet, crammed with countless codes and bursting with boosting and botification. It can be a struggle to communicate anything in an automated and capricious atmosphere where too many words have become too loaded with too many codes for too many different things.
More than ever, it is imperative for communicators to stay focused on saying what you mean clearly. In public relations, this means that:
All communications should reflect your organization’s core messaging —“who we are, what we do, why we do it.”
You do have to pay attention to language coding trends, particularly among your target audiences, because they can help you better understand what your audience currently values. That might indicate where it is wise to update your terminology in ongoing outreach.
But that should not change your core messaging.
Take a closer look at that King Charles address for a masterclass in adapting to coding without diluting meaning:
“We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems, in other words, nature’s own economy, provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.”
He employs perfectly clear but less-coded terminology to describe what he has always valued (natural systems), and ties it directly to the terminology currently favored for what is valued by his congressional audience (economy, prosperity, national security). He’s choosing language to avoid triggering negative association and/or immediate dismissal, but he’s still an old ecowarrior, and he’s still saying what he means.
In other words, he’s actually trying to communicate. And that’s the job, regardless of whether you’re attempting to influence international relations, attract investors, or just trying to sell some pizzas.
The trick is to resist becoming so attuned to shifting codes that your communications get reduced to vague signals, winks, and hints. All kinds of hidden messages are indeed being exchanged all around us, we’re even sending some of them. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and that matters.
Because the real danger in seeing everything as coded, whether calculated or reflexive, is that it stokes confusion and ends in absurdity. If nothing really is what it is or means what it means, it’s only a matter of time before we’re all 6-7 for skibidi.
To reach back to those days of the Old Testament, anyone recall what befell the people of Babel?
—Deirdre Blake, Sr Content Director
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FAQ
What is core messaging?
In professional communications, core messaging is the most basic definition of an organization’s identity and reason for existing: Who you are, what you do, why you do it. Core messaging forms the foundation for establishing a unified messaging framework that is consistent and clear across communications for all purposes (public relations, sales and marketing, recruitment and internal communications, partner and investment outreach, etc.). A robust unified messaging framework will address specific target audiences, value propositions, proof points and differentiation, desired tone, positioning statements and key messages, among many other elements. But all should be grounded in and firmly tied to core messaging.
What is a targeted messaging campaign?
A targeted messaging campaign is a data-based communications effort that involves segmenting audiences by select demographics and/or shared behaviors and persistently personalizing persuasive messages to align with each segment’s interests, desires, frustrations/fears, and priorities across the channels where those groups are most active and/or engaged.
What is boosting?
Boosting is a form of social media advertising in which an organization pays a platform to show a social post to people who do not already follow the organization’s social accounts.
What is botification?
“Botification” initially referred to human discourse on social media becoming robot-like (automated, performative, and manipulated by algorithms) producing oversimplified, extreme, and polarized interaction. It is now also used to describe platforms driven by “bots” (automated software applications) and the proliferation of automated programs/agents designed to simulate humans. See Ars Technica for an interesting conversation with Petter Törnberg, Associate Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam, who studies the phenomena.