CCST 2110: Rhetoric and Communication

1
CCST 2110 Rhetoric and Communication

• (finishing the political)
• Mediation

2
Todays route de marche

• Finish discussion of deliberative democracy
• Introduce modes of public deliberation
  (contrasted with focus groups)
• Discuss mediated rhetoric
• Consider the public/counter-public distinction

3
Deliberative Democracy

• Political decision making is legitimate insofar
  as its policies are produced in a process of
  public discussion and debate in which citizens
  and their representatives, going beyond mere
  self-interest, deliberate on their common good.
• This presupposes that we all have the same terms
  and would recognise the same ground rules for
  debate and rhetoric, that we have a notion of
  public good

4
Disagreements about how to deliberate

• Were not in Athens any longer Toto
• Representative democracy (aggregate individual
  expressions of belief)
• Consensus conferences, citizens juries
• New media deliberation (problem institutional
  advice)

5
The spin-offs of deliberation

• Publics and counterpublics (activism)
• Identification of an increasing number of social
  risks the so-called Risk Society
• Media Panics
• Questions about what can be deliberated and what
  cant
• Disagreements about ground rules (again)

6
The case of adbusters

• Production of publics/counterpublics (a dissloi
  logoi of address)
• Advertising addresses us as consumers
• Adbusters buy nothing day
• Using the rhetoric of advertising against itself
• Assignment go to www.adbusters.org

7
The Media Carta

• We the undersigned , are troubled by the way
  information flows and the way meaning is produced
  in our society.We have lost confidence in what we
  are seeing, hearing and readingWe have lost
  faith in the institutions of the mass media. A
  handful of corporations now control more than
  half the information networks around the world

8
Media carta continued

• We have lost hope that our national media
  regulators will act in the public interest.
  Essential rules limiting media ownership and
  concentration are being scrapped, while rules
  protecting local content and access are diluted.
  We have lost patience waiting for reform.We
  imagine a different system a media democracy.
  We see great promise in the open communications
  of the internet and want that openness expanded
  into every form of media. We envision a global
  system of communications that has as its
  foundation the direct, democratic participation
  of citizens.

9
So

• Claim that rhetoric flourishes in particular
  democratic forms
• What are these?
• Claim that without the dissoi logoi, youve got
  propaganda, not rhetoric
• Examples?
• Rhetoric produces modes of address, not just
  persuasive words