The role of rhetoric and communication in shaping public opinion

¶ … communication and how it is best to define, classify and relate it to other fields, disciplines and definitions. Overall, it shows that communication is just too broad and complex to easily pigeon hole and define.

Paradigms of Speech -- Bruce Gronbeck

Gronbeck talks about the import of studying speech as a discipline, because of how rhetoric has become such a major part of present-day society. One has to analyze speeches not only phonetically and linguistically, but also psychologically and socially. What is the meaning behind the words? What is the intent? Who makes a speech for no reason whatsoever?

Today the U.S. is involved with a war in Iraq. Perhaps it was not only the horrors of 9-11 that brought about the follow-up movement into Iraq. Didn't many of the Americans' feelings and desires have to do with the motivational speeches that were delivered by President Bush? For example, in September of 2001, Mr. Bush's "Freedom from Fear" speech played on the concerns of the populace when he said, "I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat." How different was this from speeches in WWII about the yellow menace or the red scare during Viet Nam or the Cold War? It is important to look behind the words to see the intent involved.

Peters, J: Introduction: The Problem of Communication

If there is one word that describes the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, it is "communication." Communication is both the reason for human growth and development as well as its many problems.

COMMENT: Although Peters spends most of the article on politics and ethics, rather than personal communication, one has to wonder about the impact of today's Western world where communication appears to be the major problem that brings couples to psychologists for therapy, continues to present a huge difficulty between parents/guardians and children, and is increasingly becoming nonexistent between neighbors nationwide. If humans and communication are so closely linked, what happens when communication fails? Are these changes due to this miscommunication?

Peters J. Genealogical Notes on "The Field"

In this article, Peters wonders if instead of lamenting that communication is not one of the six social sciences on the 19th-century social science model, it may be more productive to consider another way of organizing information. In the world today, especially with the ever-increasing amounts of information being disseminated, it is very difficult to have clear-cut boundaries between areas of study. For example, scholars now are involved with the separate fields of psychology, social psychology, social anthropology, etc. etc.

QUESTION: Is it not better to be concerned about learning the information itself rather than how it is delineated? Does it matter how knowledge is categorized? The important thing is to gain the knowledge and use it in positive, productive ways.

Cohen, H: The Development of Research in Speech Communication: A historical perspective.

When speech communication scholars started thinking of themselves as a specific field of study, they were more "social scientists" than "research scientists" with a strong knowledge of empirical science. Because of this, an understanding of scientific reports and statistical methodology had to be learned. This led to problems as noted by Cohen that the human factor came second to truly finding answers.

COMMENT: Perhaps it may be best for speech communication scholars to backtrack a few feet and look again at the other possibilities that exist to reach valid conclusions and not lose the essence of human behavior. For example, social anthropology, another relatively recent social science often relies on observation and qualitative research. Also, like speech communication, social anthropology is also interested in determining human universals. The social scientists carry out original research that consists of ethnographic fieldwork with both interviews and participant-observation research. Isn't this an example of research that can be conducted by in speech communication?

Gordon. Symbols and Men

This author discusses the long-term importance of symbolism in the history of humankind. Many of the symbols from hundreds and thousands of years ago are just as essential, if not more essential, today as they first were centuries in the past. He stresses the fact that many of these symbols, such as artwork and literature, are viewed and read today, as they were in the past. They are not forgotten, anything but.

COMMENT: However, at the same time how far removed have we come from some symbols? When the cave dwellers drew symbols of hunters and animals on their walls, they were so much closer to the symbols as well as to what these symbols represented -- the nature and world around them. Either people drew about things that they witnessed firsthand or were directly talking with the individual who witnessed that event. Today, many of our symbols stand for things no one alive has ever seen firsthand. We are often very far removed from these events and only have the words of those in the past to provide information. How do we know if our knowledge about what these symbols represent is close to the truth or only as someone else perceived them?

Berger & Luckmann: Intro: The problem of the sociology of knowledge

Berger and Luckmann go a step further than Mead and put ideas into theory. They call it social constructionism, which has the goal of finding the ways that individuals and groups create their perceived reality. This theory focuses on how institutions and behaviors are described, not on an analysis of cause and effect. A reality that is socially constructed is a moving, dynamic process where people act and react to how they interpret what they is see in their external world. Berger and Luckmann state that both subjective and objective reality is described with social construction. No reality exists outside what is produced and reproduced in social interactions.

QUESTION: My question then arises, are the problems we are now having in our modern world of terrorism, war, and environmental concerns due to the fact that we are perceiving reality wrongly? Another question is whether or not individuals such as government leaders use social construction or social knowledge to influence policy decisions and thus the society? -- and, if so, for the right or wrong purposes? If reality is socially constructed, do decision-makers consciously or unconsciously base future actions on are their subjective definitions of truth?

Duncan: Axiomatic Propositions

If symbols are so important in a society, why is there not more understanding of them? This is the question posed by Duncan. He is concerned that as the social sciences increasingly becomes more quantified, they loffer less understanding into the concepts behind symbols. This is especially of concern, since symbols have played such an important role throughout history. Duncan gives examples of symbol misunderstandings such as: confusion of the symbolic and subjective, failure to study symbolic forms, and sociologists' inability to use non-mechanistic models. Even worse, there is no agreement between scholars on how to define the concept of symbol nor explain the ambiguity of symbols. Is this lack of definitive agreement the reason why people perceive reality differently? Does this lead to misunderstandings and a failure to communicate?

Berger and Luckmann. Social construction.

QUESTION: Berger and Luckman state that society is a human product. Can it also be the product of lower animals? Recently, it was shown that chimpanzees actually are capable of culture or the passing of knowledge from one generation to another. Could social construction be used to understand the chimpanzee behavior, as it is used to explain human actions? Do chimpanzees have institutions that are formed through their views of realty?

Wikipedia: social constructionism

QUESTION: Likewise, social constructionism involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized and made into tradition "by humans." So, can one extend this search for constructionism to other animal forms? Are humans distinctly different in this regard, or are the rudiments of social constructionism seen in other animals, more so the apes?

KENNETH BURKE

This section deals with the scholar Kenneth Burke, who has been receiving renewed attention since his death a few years ago.

Kenneth Burke and Dramatism: A Puzzling Figure in Literary Criticism Is Suddenly Central

Kenneth Burke first became known because of his poetry, fiction, and essays. Later, however, his literary analysis included the most far-reaching ideas about language, power, and identity. The Symbolic, for example, made a major impact on scholars. During the 1920's, Burke's earliest critical essays analyzed the formal qualities of creative works -- their imagery and the rhythms of their language. Yet throughout the Great Depression, he paid ever more attention to the rhetorical dimension of writing: How texts hold readers' interest, persuading them to see the world in a particular way.

In the next couple of decades, Burke worked out a general theory of how people use language -- and the way they use vocabularies to make sense of the world that dominates them.

However, the most major development concerned his unpublished works called a Symbolic of Motives. The third part of a trilogy, sometimes call the "Motivorum," it was supposed to be the culmination of the theoretical system he called "dramatism."

In his work Burke suggests that everything in life, including communication, is a drama. His number-one concern is with the speaker's ability to identify with an audience. If there is a perceived similarity between the speaker and the listener, the audience is more likely to believe that the speaker is "talking sense." This is the key to persuasive speaking.

He identifies five crucial elements of our human drama or what can be seen as communication. The act is what is being done by the communicator. The scene gives the context or background surrounding the act. The agent is the person who performs the act. The agency is the means that is used to "get the job done." The purpose is the stated or implied goal of the address. In order to better understand communication through Burke's dramatism, it is necessary to analyze the situation through all five elements. He further argues that all public speaking is an attempt to purge oneself from an ever-present sense of guilt. The speaker has just two choices: Either to purge guilt through self-blame or blame his or her problems on someone else.

QUESTION: Is Burke a pragmatist, such as Mead and Dewey? In most of his works he favorably mentions the others pragmatists such as Pierce, Dewey, and especially Mead. He also analyzes philosophies of thought that measure right and wrong, or values, on how much they conform to a model of perfection. During his whole lifetime, he showed how an endless number of symbolic possibilities exist behind all forms of language, especially those that claimed to be "neutral."

Payne: Dramatistic Criticism

Since Burke has been "rediscovered," many other social scientists involved with communication and rhetoric have