When you think you’re forging a new path through old ideas, it’s both annoying and exciting to find a whole bunch of people ahead of you. It’s annoying because it means your path wasn’t new at all (paths rarely are). It’s exciting because it means you can learn from smarter people, rather than hacking through the issues all by yourself.<\/p>\n
Those conflicting feelings hit me when I first read John Dewey’s 1930s treatise, Art as Experience<\/a><\/i>, a book that was and is a thousand steps ahead of my current understanding of what art is<\/i> and what art is not<\/i>. Those same feelings are hitting me again as I dig into ”Sense-Making” theory from the sociology world.<\/p>\n Sense-Making as a discipline (advanced by Brenda Dervin at Ohio State<\/a>, among others, and summarized here<\/a>) focuses primarily on public communication campaigns (efforts to engage the public in health and safety issues, civic agendas, or community and cultural activities) and the flawed assumptions that tend to drive those campaigns. It may not seem, at first, relevant to cultural management and marketing, but stick with me…it’s extraordinarily relevant.<\/p>\n The sense-making approach counters the common understanding of public communication as the ”delivery of truth” — a one-way effort to inform, educate, and entice into action an uninformed public (wear your seatbelt, cast your vote, volunteer, give blood, support your local symphony, practice safe sex, keep the arts in schools, and so on). Instead of communication as something delivered and received, sense-making suggests that communication is always a co-construction of sender and receiver, that it’s in the process of engaging and contextualizing received information that meaning and action are formed.<\/p>\n One harmful byproduct of the pervasive ”communication as transmission” model is that it sets up a disconnect between the sender and the audience. Says Brenda Dervin in a chapter on the subject (from Public Communication Campaigns<\/i>, Second Edition, Sage Publications, 1989):<\/p>\n Sound familiar?<\/p>\n Following the sense-making approach to connecting our arts organizations to our audiences (current and potential) would suggest that we can’t just figure out the best ways to get our<\/i> message into their<\/i> heads. Instead, we need to explore how our audience makes meaning in their world, how they connect what we do with their daily lives (or how they don’t), and how we might use this knowledge to help meet each other half way. This kind of audience research in the arts is only just beginning, with the wonderful Values Study<\/a><\/i> from 2004 (available for download here<\/a>), and similar projects now underway.<\/p>\n I’m also just beginning my journey into the sense-making methodology and how we might apply it to arts marketing, management, and what we now call ”advocacy,” but it’s already been a fascinating trip. I’ll keep you posted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When you think you’re forging a new path through old ideas, it’s both annoying and exciting to find a whole bunch of people ahead of you. It’s annoying because it means your path wasn’t new at all (paths rarely are). It’s exciting because it means you can learn from smarter people, rather than hacking through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-826","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe most obvious impact of these models is casting the audience as “bad guys” who are hard to reach, obstinate, and recalcitrant. Audience members get most of their information from friends and neighbors even though expert advice is available. They like entertainment more than information. They watch too much television. Some subsegments of the population are simply unreachable. These conceptions about audiences are pervasive in society. The context of communication campaigns merely crystallizes the use of these conceptions as explanation for the failure of messages to reach targeted audiences. Yet, the application of the alternative information-as-construction and communication-as-dialogue models directs us to ask if it is our systems and messages that are inaccessible and irrelevant.
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