Class – I am deeply sorry for getting this up so late. In my defense I thought I had posted this on Thursday from work and when I went to go check the discussion today I see that nothing posted. So I rushed back into work today to pull the saved version from my work computer. The only thing I can think of is that it had something to do with Government security on my work computer. Once again – terribly sorry.
“Ideally the public sphere denotes a social space wherein private citizens gather as a public body with the rights to assembly, association, and expression in order to form public opinion”, Jurgen Habermas. In this article, Public Screen, the authors talk about how we can no longer limit ourselves to just the Public Sphere due to how the Internet and Television has changed out culture. He introduces the Public Screen as a new metaphor to thinking about places of politics.
In the article the authors say, that the ideal public sphere is seen as the seat of civic life, participatory democracy, through the marketplace of ideas such as coffee houses and salons, town meetings, where anyone can say his or her piece, the public sphere is imagined as a place of embodied voices, of people talking to each other, of conversation. Now, in this day in age, I believe we have the means to have these conversations in a broader landscape. Facebook, twitter, myspace, blogs posts, you tube, and many other networking sites gives us the possibility to a more conducive public sphere.
The authors go on to discuss the public screen. The public screen starts from the premise of dissemination. Communication is characterized by dissemination. The public sphere is said to be limiting and is simply a guiding metaphor for social theory. Using the “public screen” as a metaphor for thinking about the places of politics and the possibilities of citizenship. The public screen recognizes that the most important public discussions take place via “screens”, television, computer, and newspapers. The public screen takes technology seriously.
Television and the Internet has transformed the way our society acts and perceives things. The authors hit on TV and newspapers as a form of public screen but I am going to stick with the Internet. “They physically shrink the world while simultaneously mentally expanding it, producing a vast expansion of geographical consciousness”. This quote really stuck out to me. It is so true about how the internet has made things so much more accessible to us and how easy it is to jump on the internet and read todays news, or get in on a political debate, or send a facebook message. Something this is personal to me that really made an impact on my life is the ability to send an email to someone 7000 miles away or even skype with someone that far away. When I was deployed to Iraq the Internet was a life saver. It allowed me to communicate with my loved ones at home instantly and in a sense helped keep me going everyday. It has given us the capability to do so much making every day life easier and at times more difficult. However I think right now the good out-weigh the bad.
The author goes on to discuss how the public screen as made a shift in public opinion. In the public sphere, public opinion is designed to criticize and control the power of the state. It shifts public opinion by forcing not only criticizing and controlling the power of the state but also of the corporations. Corporations are forced to maintain a positive public opinion to protect their public image.
The public screen is a constant current of images and words, a ceaseless circulation of technologies of television, film, photography, and the Internet. It can be characterized as a “distraction”. Real life is becoming indistinguishable form the movies” (pg 135). Do you agree that the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film…? A German social theorist recognized this as a new mode of perception. The theorists understand distraction not as a lack of attention but as a necessary form of perception. I find this idea very interesting. The authors state that this theory suggests that they be read not morally but analytically as signs of the emergence of a new space for discourse, the public screen, that entails different forms of intelligence and knowledge.
“They physically shrink the world while simultaneously mentally expanding it, producing a vast expansion of geographical consciousness” This is an interesting quote because the internet does create a vast wealthy of knowledge and personal views conveyed on a computer screen. I think it is interesting to compare television and film with the internet. The internet is a venue in which everyone is free to post their knowledge and beliefs. Television and film do not facilitate this freedom. I think the phrase mainstream comes to mind when I think of "distraction". Mainstream simply means most readily available and most popular. Television facilitates spoon fed information (that is widely understood as credible), while blogs and independent news sources offer more opinions and deliberation that often lack credibility and thus this encourages free thought.
ReplyDeleteAt my house back in Warsaw I have something like eight news channels available to me owned by three different conglomerates. What I perceive as truth from these channels is vastly different from the "truth" I receive here in my apartment in Fort Wayne with 0 news channels. I have a much more self-formed opinion of the news because I receive it from the internet and my friends. If I still lived at home I'd be much more reluctant to join in a "did you hear what happened today" conversation because I feel that I already know what happened because I watched the news this morning. Now if I here someone talk about current events I am more likely to listen because I most likely haven't heard the story. I will also research the story more because I heard it from a less credible source.
My point is mainstream media is often assumed to be a factual portrayal of global existence.
I agree, i think the internet allows for more free expression than Television does.
ReplyDeleteI really loved your last paragraph, Bonny, and I think that the "distractions" have become so pertinent to our way of life and how we rhetorically determine our world, essentially becoming their own distinguishable sphere of reality. In a world where everything from news, connecting with our friends and family, television, and movies are all brought to us via the screen, we are beginning to evolve with the technology around us. The overabundance of screen time has given this "necessary mode of perception" a rhetorical construct that brings about a new space for discourse, thought, and subjective truth. If this is truly the case, do you all think it's time to include things such as semiotics, mise en scene, and visual representation into the discussion of rhetoric?
ReplyDeleteWho knows, maybe this new idea focused on the public screen and mediated rhetoric is truly an evolutionary adaptation, or maybe it's just a quick hiccup in the rhetorical world. Does hypermediacy change us so much that we literally shift our ways of thinking and interpreting the information around us? Has the rhetorical world changed forever, or can Plato, the sophists, Aristotle, Cicero, et. al still teach us all we need to know about rhetoric in the modern world?
Nik, I think semiotics and visual rhetoric have a place in discussions about rhetoric; while they should retain their prominence in rhetoric, classic interpretations and methods of rhetorical criticism and analysis are limiting, provided they remain our go-to framework for rhetorical inquiry. We stick with Aristotelian constructs because they work across time and text, but I would argue that several texts are not situated in ways that allow for satisfactory exploration of only audience analysis and locating artistic proofs. We can learn a lot of what we need to know from classic treatises as they provide a sound framework for our understanding of the art and how it operates, but I think making sense of hypermedia and communicative spaces on the public screen requires a reapplication and adaptation of classic rhetoric, which should be coupled with the concepts you mentioned for a thorough, representative analysis. Warnick (1998) calls for similar practices when she suggests that online discourse be studied as systems of texts in order to identify rhetoric at work in less tangible spaces.
ReplyDeleteThe Public Screen as a model for understanding deliberative and participatory interactions with media may be a hiccup in the rhetorical world, but I think your insights speak to the evolutionary character of rhetorical analysis as media continue to offer new points of speculation as they change and emerge as "new" venues for communication.
- In your post you talked about how Television, Film and Internet have transformed the way society acts and perceives things with your main focus being on the internet. And in the response section it was mentioned that: “The internet is a venue in which everyone is free to post their knowledge and beliefs. Television and film do not facilitate this freedom.” While I agree that Film does not afford this freedom I do think that Television is becoming more integrated with the Internet. While it is true that the Television does not allow you to directly post anything more and more Televisions are being designed as a complete home media center where you can access the internet, Netflix, and other digital media programs through it. And on Facebook many of the TV shows that I “like” encourage Facebook users to participate in discussions during the show allowing the average person to become more interactive during the program. Maybe it is possible that Television is becoming more dependent on the Internet as a facilitating tool. I could be interpreting the discussion incorrectly and I apologize if I am, this was just my interpretation.
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