All That You Don’t See in Messaging
On pages 34-38 Elam presents all the codes that happen in any performance and communicative activity. This includes:
- Systemic codes such as gesture and movement, expression
- Spatial conventions
- Vestimentary (dress codes) and what they communicate
- Cosmetic codes
- Scenic codes
- Musicality (rhythms, rhyme, tones, pitch, beat etc) in expression
- Positioning norms
- Accepted cultural rules of presentation (semantics and grammar)
- Presenter-audience rules
- Conventions of interpretation
- Rhetorical rules, pronunciation and delivery
- Voice projections, articulation, and intonation
- Localized rules of engagement
- Syntactical codes
- Parallel texts, aesthetic texts
- Cultural typologies
- Language and text competence
- Mimmetic principles eg. mirroring, resonances
- Formal and informal principles of presentation
- Discourse and discourse conventions, hidden cultural story
- Signs and symbol, myth and narrative conventions
- Expectations of cause and effect
- Behavioural and historical codes
- Socio-economic order
In most forms of communication all these codes and cultural conventions are hidden. We learn from early childhood all of the heuristics associated with presenting, performing and communication. 95% of all communication is unconscious. Overt messaging is such a small aspect of any communication activity. Indeed, in most risk and safety messaging I have observed most over messaging is contradicted by covert and unseen messages.
Unconscious messaging is found in the medium NOT the outcome (https://safetyrisk.net/the-medium-is-the-message/). Most creation of meaning between persons is unconscious (https://safetyrisk.net/semiotics-and-unconscious-communication-in-safety/). The message of fake care packaged in the Discourse of zero has the key message of brutalism. It doesn’t matter what tokenistic words leave your mouth, the key message is numbers, metrics and objects, humans come last.
All of the dynamics listed by Elam above are enculturated over time in a population. Most of what we know is hidden in communication is heuristical and intuitive. We rarely stop to focus on what is really communicated especially in safety, where attitudes to communication are profoundly naïve and behavioural.
It is an indictment of the safety industry that there is no section or chapter in the AIHS BoK on Communication nor anything in the OHS curriculum that has a focus on communication. About the best that comes out of the OHS curriculum is some junk on how to run meetings. This is safety. Dozens of chapters in the AIHS BoK on hazards but nothing on how to listen to people. This is because listeing is not a safety activity, safety is a telling activity and telling is not communication.
In SPoR we conduct a module called Communicating to the Unconscious (https://cllr.com.au/product/communicating-unconscious-risk-unit-11/). It is here where we confront all that is hidden in messaging. The idea that communication is about sender, receiver and message is naïve in the extreme.
When we read a book like Elam’s then we walk away from naïve safety and start to realize why much of the messaging in safety doesn’t work. This is why rubbish like Meerkats, Mum’s for Safety, Hazardman etc work AGAINST messaging in safety. The unconscious in messaging is much more powerful than a list of words as Elam highlights and maybe one day safety might pay attention to it.
Prof. Robert Long
Latest posts by Prof. Robert Long (see all)
- Sloganeering, Indoctrination and Propaganda in Safety - October 17, 2026
- What No Blame Enculturates - October 17, 2026
- Book Launch: Following-Leading in Risk, A Supplement - October 16, 2026
- Fragility in Risk and Blame as a Wicked Problem - October 13, 2026
- Ultra-Safety is Un-Safety - October 12, 2026
The grand mythology of SWMS is that people actually ‘use’ them. Most risk assessments are cosmetic and put on for the Safety mentalitie that thinks they resemble reality. Workers do NOT use SWMS to make decisions. 95% of all decision making on site are made by heuristics.
Glenda Jackson made a fascinating comment about cosmetics and remarked…”I don’t see the point of putting on make up when you have to take it off”.
The same analogy could be applied to Safe Work Method Statements.
When one looks at the enactment of safety as a performance and theatre then one envisions a host of things safety orthodoxy is completely blind to and wants to be. Elam is certainly not on the reading list of the AIHS BoK, OHS curriculum or science-engineering reading list. Ineresting that most of visionaries come from outside of these disciplines. The replication of materialism, consumerism and behaviourism is NOT visionary.
Another fascinating post which left me reading about one of my favourite actors, Glenda Jackson, who was a visionary and was born in my home town:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenda_Jackson