Anti-Mimetic Communication

The space between stimulus and response.

The medium is the mimesis.

Most of us are price-takers in the market of communication. We don’t set the tone; we adopt one. Receive a passive aggressive email, send a passive aggressive email. See a bunch of snarky tweets in your feed, you tweet snark. Get emoji-filled text, send emoji-filled text.

In some ways, the mimesis is normal and healthy. I watched with amusement the uproar in the UK over Liam Payne’s post-Oscars interview about the Will Smith slap. People were very confused about his accent and ridiculed him endlessly.

“To tell you the truth,” Payne explained, “I was staying in a house with two German people, three people from Texas, one person from Liverpool and me.” He’s a ‘social chameleon,’ he said.

But aren’t we all? Humans are highly mimetic creatures. The only thing truly unnatural is not to pick up accents once we’ve been exposed to them for a while.

But even more than accents, we pick up modes and mediums of communication—including styles. We do that even when it stif…