Andrea Volpini on Being Dialogic
Being Dialogic. The time is now. If you are involved in content or data marketing, this book is a must-read. It is a transformative compass that will inspire you to create meaningful relationships within and outside your organization.
Teodora will guide you through this maze; whether you are a stakeholder, a marketer, a creator, a free spirit, or simply all of these things together, you are, like most of us, in the Cretan labyrinth of infinite options. You need a thread; you need to kill the minotaur and head back like Theseus with something new you learned, something that will expand your horizons and challenge your perspectives.
Dialogue is the ultimate human-first experience in the digital age. It is not a back-and-forth with a statistical machine (or large language model) that parrots back sentences like Weizenbaum’s Eliza’s on steroids. It is a genuine connection, a way to grow your understanding of the World. The Homo Dialogicus is a sentient being that weaves and intersects linked data technology and social relationships. It is an entity that engages in Habermas’ public sphere with a clear heart and can construct new meanings, pose new questions, and craft new relationships.
Dialogue starts when your mind rests. Its serendipitous nature is almost like a state of consciousness. Following quantum physicist David Bohm’s theory, Teodora explains that “dialogue is a special form of a conversation, a stream of meaning flowing among, through, and between us.” For Bohm, reality and consciousness are coherent wholes that are never static or complete. Bohm is considered among the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century. He firmly opposed the Cartesian model of reality, with its mental and physical separation, and introduced a more holistic view of reality. For Bohm, dialogue is how to overcome societal fragmentation and create shared new meanings.
Dialogue is a space. Most of the book takes place (or should) in Cyberia, a metaphorical space representing the digital world of content marketing. Cyberia was the first Internet Cafe, founded in London in September 1994 for those of you who might not know it. Besides being a venue, it is a symbolic place where artists like David Bowie and his Bowienet would celebrate the greatness of the early days on the Web. In this space that we call Cyberia – meanings are not pre-encoded. Intelligence cannot be just about memorization. It should instead prioritize adaptability and interpretability. Meanings, in other words, are not tokens in a distributional space; they are produced along the paths between people and machines. We don’t train a neural network to learn how to converse. We can, but this is not the space we’re in. Whether we are a Martian, a human, or a machine – in dialogue, we find the quintessential nature of human intelligence, and we all want to be there to flourish and thrive.
Dialogue is ethics. We need to take a step back. Before the Internet, marketing was deceptive. Whether we like it or not (as marketers, we tend to reject it), the tobacco industry’s marketing practices have set a standard for over half a century, downplaying the health risks of smoking to increase profits. We don’t need to go that far. Today’s tech platforms drive metrics by serving us more content (think of the power of the “infinite scroll”). When Wansink, Painter, and North conducted the first self-refilling soup experiment and showed that a bottomless bowl enticed people to consume 73% more soup than regular bowls, they probably didn’t expect the impact of their findings in today’s attention economy. Marketing has historically been, and still is, unfortunately, a deceptive practice. However, in the digital world we live in, in our Cyberia, the focus has shifted to data that helps stakeholders make more informed decisions for themselves. Teodora, you and I praise and follow the advice of the advertising icon David Ogilvy, who reminded us as far back as 1955 that:
“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume that a mere slogan and a few vapid adjectives will persuade her to buy anything. She wants all the information you can give her.”
The Internet is data: Marketing is no longer about deception; it is about managing knowledge and creating semantic capital.
Dialogue is capital. Creating value, according to Luciano Floridi, an Italian and British contemporary philosopher who directs (among other things) the Digital Ethics Center at Yale University, is about creating any content that can enhance someone’s power to give meaning to and make sense of something. He often uses the expression semanticise reality, which means giving meaning to reality. Digital technologies and platforms in general, can both enrich and impoverish our semantic capital. According to Teodora, we can protect and cultivate semantic capital to support ethical and constructive interactions in the digital age with dialogue. We depend on dialogue “to give meaning to, and make sense of, our own existence and the world surrounding us, to define who we are, and to develop our individual and social life.” Dialogue is not tied to language; it can exist between a human and a computer program, a human and a program synthesis, or a knowledge graph. The capital we’re creating using dialogue, as Teodora intends it, is an incredibly efficient learning engine.
I have wanted this book for many years. Teodora Petkova is a dear cyberfriend and the modern-day philosopher of our times. She has been weaving together the threads of content marketing, semantic technology, and graph intelligence. Teodora is a force to be reckoned with in the world of digital communication and metacognition. Her work reminds us that at the heart of every semantic triple is a human story waiting to be told.
Now that you are reading her book, we are following the same Ariadne’s thread. We both want the Web to be a better place. Our goal is to create a Semantic Web because it is a shared resource, and through this, we are shaping the intelligence of the future.
