My wife and I attended a piano concert this week. Before the pianist would play a piece, he would give some background on the composer and the meaning behind the composition.
It was amazing how knowing the background of Debussy’s General Lavine made it more meaningful. Otherwise, I would have simply considered it a pretty arrangement of notes. Especially since I barely knew who Debussy was, let alone General Lavine (a popular turn of 20th century American juggler).
A big part of communicating effectively is in conveying context. But we tend to do one of two things:
1. Assume everyone knows the context.
2. Communicate context in static, drawn out, boring, and generally uninteresting ways.
If people do know the context, then reiterating it in a creative way will only reinforce your message.
Though context surrounds your message, do not marginalize it.
4 Responses to “Context”
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The Casual Fridays blog is about business in blue jeans. It's about doing the REAL hard work of today. Pausing, thinking and asking the questions others won't ask.
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Michael Wagner
November 17th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
We use to have a saying when we did classical Greek or ancient Hebrew translation work into English.
“A text, without a context, is but a pretext.”
Context is essential to discovery of meaning and significance.
Good post Dusin!
DUST!N
November 20th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Thanks Michael. I’ll have a follow-through post this week. New verse, same song.
Scott
November 21st, 2006 at 12:04 am
The best copywriting advice I’ve read, from Herschell Gordon Lewis, was to get inside your target’s “experential” background. You create context that way; you attempt to become significant to them within their context, not your own. You forget what you know; you ask questions; you filter out jargon and corporate-speak that they don’t care about at all.
I’ve decided that it’s nearly a Zen thing. You drop all pretense of knowledge and consciously forget what you know to inhabit someone else’s point of view. If you get that right, you get the message right.
DUST!N
November 27th, 2006 at 11:50 am
“A Zen thing” is a really good way to capture it.
In my amateur theater experience we exercise something called 10 minutes before. We imagine what happens the 10 minutes before what occurs on stage. No event is isolated and many times it helped to acknowledge the “context” in order to understand how to best portray the scene.
If we can imagine the 10 minutes before someone engages with our marketing, then context becomes intuitive.