There's No Such Thing as a Pure Observer

"I've been in marketing now for all of my professional career, and at 51, the whole business seems pretty empty," a new reader writes.

I've no doubt that they are probably not alone in this thought. And you could probably insert your profession if marketing doesn't quite fit: journalism, advertising, public relations, finance....

Recently, a Googler stumbles onto a post and writes:

You, Ms. Rodriguez, appear to be an enemy. I teach philosophy and literature at various schools here in the South, and one of my principal difficulties is instructing young minds to be mindful of people in marketing, for such souls buy and sell the anima and animus of our cultures as if we ourselves were mere commodities... 

He continues and wonders aloud: A marketer with integrity though???? Possible?

Is it an oxymoron for marketers (I'll throw in PR too) to have integrity, meaning and a spark of life? I see flashes all around me (this is only a very small sampling), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Perhaps blogging isn't just humanizing big bad corporations but also putting a human face to marketing and public relations and other evil professions?

It's going to look like I'm shifting gears, but here's one angle (below) to this hefty topic. I'll try to weave the questions they've posed into more of my posts.

The idea for Leon Dash's first book, When Children Want Children: The Urban Crisis of Teenage Childbearing, came when he heard startling statistics from a colleague that 53 percent of all black children are born to single mothers, and that one-third of those single mothers were adolescent girls growing up in poverty. His next book, Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America, draws a portrait of what the Urban Institute calls the "underclass": "She was fifty-one, and addicted to heroin, when she was arrested in October 1987 for selling drugs to feed two of her grandchildren."

He tries hard to be an impartial reporter. For instance, he returns Christmas gifts because "he is working." While he honestly answers questions about his own life ("When you were a teenager, and you were about to start having sex, did you ask your father for condoms?"  asks a 15-year-old mother of two) but refuses to bear down his own opinions on their lives. At one point Rosa Lee asks him whether or not she should stop teaching her granddaughter to shoplift.

"If you have a judgmental reaction in your eyes during an interview, or a judgmental nuance as you pose a question, people will close down," Dash teaches his students. "You can't be a journalist if you are going to be judgmental." Being in the Peace Corps in Kenya informed him that white, middle class values aren't necessarily the norm and how our own upbringing clouds our ability to understand the lives of others. To get past the stereotypes, the myths, the public masks he tries hard to be an observer, the fly on the wall ("I wanted to step back as the anthropologist and write it in the third person"). An exchange with his editor informs him of the inherent impossibility of being a pure observer:

My editor argued that my very presence had an impact on the adolescents in When Children Want Children and on Rosa Lee. He said, "Even if you didn't give them a word of advice, your presence influenced those kids. Your presence had an impact on Rosa Lee. You can't get around that, as much as you want to be a pure reporter." So I just had to acknowledge that I am a participant-observer in the  story by introducing myself as a character. - Leon Dash, interview from The New New Journalism by Robert S. Boynton

We too are characters by our mere presence in the business world. And whether we admit it or not, like it or not, our presence probably impacts the broader business story. For myself, I feel we have the most (if subtle) influence when we take the nonjudgmental stance that comes from a desire to understand and allow our presence to speak for itself.

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There's No Such Thing as a Pure Observer - Crossroads Dispatches