A routine university fire drill held today at a university in Melbourne failed abysmally, as some learning schools took over 3 hours to evacuate all their students, owing to overly wordy and complex emergency instructions from the teachers.
"It really didn't feel urgent," one Communications student commented afterwards. "Our lecturer just told us, 'for this drill to be effective, it is necessary to believe in the 'collective imagined emergency', a reality which must be embraced by the entire society of the university - remembering, of course, that this is a participatory form of communication, as distinct from interrogative, where an exchange of communication takes place. In this way, there are many contributions which together form the entirety of the so called 'fire drill'.' It seemed to me at the time a convoluted line of thought, which failed to provide any real insights into the fire drill."
Lecturer Griffythson held his ground. "Of course, I could have just read 'We are having a fire drill. You must all leave your books and materials in this room, and follow me to the assembly area'. But I felt it important to provide my students with a theoretical and academic commentary on the complex sociological interactions taking place. Remembering, of course," he added, "that the concept of a communicative entity or body, traversing a linear pathway of homogenous, vacuous time is highly relevant to such an example."
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