Enunciative power asymmetry still obligates speakers to give attention to get attention

Evidence

What John Beck and Thomas Davenport state as a law of marketing (but which was invalidated a long time ago with the industrialization of our media apparatuses) fully applies in the classroom: ‘if you want to get any attention, you’ve got to give attention’. Masterly speech will be better accepted the more the teacher endeavours to be sensitive to the feedback he can read on the faces of his listeners (surprised looks, frowns, sighs, yawns). Even if this feedback is more difficult to grasp and interpret in a lecture hall of five hundred students than in the intimacy of an Oxford tutorial, the work of any discourser also consists in cultivating what Michael Goldhaber called an ‘illusory attention […] that helps create an apparent equality of attention’. The advantage of ‘personalized’ teaching situations, like those permitted by Oxford’s traditions (and wealth), comes from the fact that ‘to get a person to pay attention to your information, the information has to be about that person’. The illusion that the teacher must aim at producing is rooted in the ideally symmetrical model of conversation: ‘turning’ to each listener as though the words were personally addressed to them. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 265

Categorization

• XREF: This reciprocity-of-attention law connects to ‘The Social Control of Impersonal Trust’ themes and to media-platform attention economics the reader is bridging toward. — connects to: Power operates partly through perception rather than explicit verbal communication; The ambiguity of speech emerges only for the listener, not the speaker; Joint attention depends on bidirectional attention circulation, not equality — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 248 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Joint attention depends on bidirectional attention circulation, not equality #corroborates (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 248
• Power operates partly through perception rather than explicit verbal communication #complicates (0.80)
• The ambiguity of speech emerges only for the listener, not the speaker #expands (0.75)