Amusing Ourselves in the Age of Television
The emergence of a new “science” of mass persuasion in the 1920s was followed by one communication “revolution” after another. First radio, and then television vastly expanded the reach and impact of mass media, and with each new technology came optimistic predictions of a democratic revival. Like most new technologies, for example, television was at one time hailed as a magical new tool of civic deliberation—a technology that could inform and inspire the citizenry with news and “public interest” programming and even provide a way for citizens to “talk back” to their leaders. Instead, of course, it quickly became a “vast wasteland,” in the famous words of former FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow (2009, p. 347)—a landscape dominated by mindless entertainment with little serious attention to news and public affairs.
Neil Postman’s critique of television exposed the fallacy underlying the early optimism about television’s democratic possibilities. In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman argued that the problem was not that there was too much “junk” on the tube; rather, it was that television, as a medium, was inherently incapable of hosting serious discussion and debate. According to Postman, television was “at its most trivial” and “most dangerous” when its aspirations were high—that is, when it pretended to be “a carrier of important cultural conversations” (p. 16). On television, any attempt at “serious” speech was destined to fail, for “sustained, complex talk” simply did not “play well on television” (p. 92). As a visual medium, television was better suited to conveying images than arguments, and it implied a different epistemology—and a different “philosophy of rhetoric”—than print. Under the “governance of television,” the “generally coherent, serious and rational” discourse of the print culture inevitably became “shriveled and absurd,” reducing public deliberation to “dangerous nonsense” (pp. 16–17).
Rhetorical scholars have elaborated on Postman’s critique by illuminating how television has truncated and trivialized our public discourse. Noting that “dramatic, digestive, [and] visual moments” have largely supplanted “memorable words” in our political consciousness, Jamieson (1988) argues that television redefined “eloquence” itself by elevating a more intimate, even “effeminate” style of speech over the “manly” and rational oratory of the golden age. “Unmoored from our own great literature and from the lessons of history” (p. 241), Jamieson argued, we now deem “eloquent” those speakers who are adept at relating personal stories or dramatic vignettes. Rather than marshaling arguments and evidence, today’s most celebrated speakers talk in sound bites and anecdotes, wearing their emotions on their sleeves and exploiting the intimacy of television with personal stories. Ronald Reagan paved the way for this transition to a more emotional and “intimate” style of public discourse, as Jamieson noted. Since Reagan, however, this style has become the norm, depriving citizens of the substantive discourse they need to form sound political judgments.
Put simply, television has “dumbed down” American politics. And the result, as Al Gore argued in his campus best-seller, The Assault on Reason (2007), is clearly evident in our political discourse. As Gore wrote, it “simply is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse” (p. 3). The proliferation of “superficial, emotional, and manipulative appeals” (p. 104)—not just on television but throughout our public sphere—points to a “systematic decay of the public forum” (p. 10), and that bodes ill for the future of our democracy. Robert D. Putnam (2000) agrees, pointing to evidence that fewer and fewer Americans are participating in the “everyday deliberations that constitute grassroots democracy” (p. 43) and labeling the decline of civic engagement and public deliberation in America a “tremendous civic plague” (Putnam, 1997, p. 35). Fortunately, this “plague” has not gone unnoticed by scholars, educators, philanthropists, and others concerned with the health and vitality of our democracy. In the conclusion to this chapter, I will touch on some of the ways the deliberative democracy movement is fighting back, and I will suggest how scholars of rhetoric and persuasion might be part of that effort.
Conclusion: Rhetoric, Persuasion, and the Revival of American Civic Culture
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The study of persuasion has a long and illustrious history in the rhetorical tradition. Born of the need to educate for citizenship, rhetoric traditionally has been concerned with the techniques and ethics of civic persuasion—with an emphasis on the responsibilities that accompany the right of free speech in a democracy. Today we have a pressing need to revive the spirit of that classical tradition, particularly its emphasis on the responsibilities of citizenship and the ethics of speech. As more and more citizens have become spectators rather than participants in civic life (National Commission on Civic Renewal, 1998), our public discourse has been hijacked by professionally managed advocacy groups employing appeals shaped by polling and focus groups. Special interests now take precedence over the “common good.” In other words, we now live in a “diminished democracy,” as Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol (2003) has argued, with ordinary citizens squeezed out of the public sphere by partisan ideologues and professional propagandists.
How can we fight back? We can begin by reminding our students and fellow citizens of the critical role that speech, argumentation, and persuasion play in the politics and policy-making processes of our democracy. We also can revive the classical tradition’s emphasis on the habits and skills of engaged citizenship, teaching our students what it means to be a good citizen and an ethical communicator. Additionally, we can continue to write about the rights and responsibilities of free speech in America, and we can contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations about hate speech, fear appeals, and other techniques routinely employed by demagogues and propagandists. Finally, we can recapture the public spirit of both the classical tradition and the land-grant movement of the 19th century, recommitting ourselves to educating for citizenship and promoting what Garsten (2006) has called a healthy “politics of persuasion” (p. 14).
A healthy politics of persuasion is one in which ideas are tested in public discourse. In a healthy politics of persuasion, reasoned argument prevails over appeals to fears or prejudices, and diverse perspectives and opinions are encouraged and respected. In a healthy politics of persuasion, public advocates aspire neither to manipulate nor to pander to public opinion, and those who refuse to deliberate in good faith are relegated to the fringes. In a healthy politics of persuasion, citizens are educated to listen carefully, think critically, and communicate responsibly. In a healthy politics of persuasion, citizens have a sense of civic duty, but they also choose to participate because they know their voice matters.
A healthy politics of persuasion is not just a relic of the ancient rhetorical tradition. It is also the vision of today’s “deliberative democracy movement”—a loose coalition of scholars and practitioners aspiring to a “deliberative renaissance” not just in the U.S. but around the world (Gastil & Keith, 2005, pp. 14–18). Bridging disciplinary divides, the deliberative democracy movement has inspired an explosion of scholarship over the past two decades, including theoretical reflections on democratic deliberation (e.g., Bohman, 1996), historical studies of particular eras (e.g., Mattson, 1998), and studies of deliberation in specific contexts, like school boards (Tracy, 2010) and town hall meetings (Zimmerman, 1989). Deliberative democracy scholars have championed “deliberative polling” (Fishkin, 1991) and “deliberative elections” (Gastil, 2000), and Ackerman and Fishkin (2004) have even proposed a new national holiday—Deliberation Day—for citizens to come together to discuss “the choices facing the nation” (p. 3). Within the deliberative democracy movement, there is considerable enthusiasm for a return to “a more local, popular democracy, reminiscent of the New England town meeting” (Keith, 2002, p. 219), and there is at least “cautious optimism” about the potential for new technologies to promote engaged citizenship and more robust deliberation (Anderson, 2003). In the final anal
ysis, however, a healthy deliberative democracy—a healthy “politics of persuasion”—rests on the same foundation that it always has: an educated citizenry with the habits and skills of engaged citizenship.
For the deliberative democracy movement, the democratic crisis in America is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge lies in reviving the spirit of the classical rhetorical tradition—particularly its emphasis on the ethics of speech and the responsibilities of citizenship—in a culturally diverse and technologically advanced society. The opportunity lies in the collaborative possibilities; not only has the deliberative democracy movement brought together humanistic and scientific scholars in communication studies, but it also has inspired collaborations between communication scholars and historians, philosophers, political scientists, legal scholars, and information technologists. Civic literacy, which Milner (2002) defines as the knowledge and skills citizens need “to make sense of their political world” (p. 1), is not within the domain of any one discipline, nor is the broader mission of the deliberative democracy movement. Rebuilding our deliberative democracy requires contributions from across the academy, and it should be part of the mission of every college and university, particularly public and land-grant institutions. As the great 19th-century philosopher William James (1982) said, the “civic genius” of a people is demonstrated “day by day” in their speaking, writing, voting, and “good temper,” in their refusal to tolerate corruption or be persuaded by the demagoguery of “rabid partisans or empty quacks” (p. 73). With all due respect to Stanley Fish (2008) and others who urge us to avoid all things political, we have an obligation to help our fellow citizens reclaim their democracy. Students of rhetoric and persuasion have an important—indeed, a crucial—role to play in that effort.
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