Lippmann, like McGee, held that the public was a fantasy, called falsely into being in order to deliberate on national crises that could not be decided by a formal government. Lippmann had faith in the rationality of governing bodies rather than the public, believing that most of government was a complex, formal business best left up to the experts -- the bureaucrats. "The public" could have no reasoned opinion on the vast majority of governmental affairs and could not possibly be polled through direct democracy on every single thing, like highway funding or rezoning regulations, and therefore found it ridiculous that the mass media does ask this phantom public to weigh in on a bevy of government issues that doesn't directly concern it. Government policy should only come with a public that is actually affected by the policy in question, so Lippmann felt the media should stay out of government except when the entire nation really was effected, like when presidents had to be elected, or in specifically local matters, where a public actually existed. Otherwise, our representatives are the only people who can really decide whether or not Texas wants to tax the lottery. Even though we elected them, we can't do much from a distance about the machinations in Congress other than send lobbyists, and media coverage of all government activity only encourages restiveness, particularly because the public has little hope of understanding most of the legislative process.
John Dewey, on the other hand, believed that if a person could come to understand a car, then he or she could comfortably come to understand a law. Dewey did not believe in the essential stupidity of the crowd, unlike most other rhetoricians, though he agreed with Lippmann that a public is created when a body of people is affected by something; it doesn't exist all the time, waiting to react. Dewey believed that rather than attempting to inform the public objectively, which never works, new journalists should throw off the shackles of staid debate and embrace pathos and other persuasive techniques as a form of information. Objectivity was an outdated illusion which was holding journalists back, doing the public a disservice, and too easy to manipulate. The new journalism had the benefit of an obvious spin, allowing an emotionally intelligent public to more easily decide whether and how to engage with it. As long as individual publics, created by issues, could be coerced into engaging with the media, asking questions, and truly deliberating on the information, a nonobjective media could inspire people to action, interest them in being informed, and be a lot more fun to write.
Dewey touched on it briefly, but Lippmann barely considered the role of pathos in the public at all (except to confound discourse), so I found it interesting that Smith and Hyde took an almost conservative view of the public as a big emotional body feeding on itself and the rhetor, the difference between a crowd and a group of people. Usually when the public is constructed as the crowd or the hoi polloi, rhetoricians focus more on the animal nature of the irrational body than its emotional sensitivity. Speakers fear calling up the darkest sides of human nature, inciting riots or mass violence or looting, but generally do not connect these uncontrollable states to emotions unless they mention anger or the "carnival atmosphere" that can accompany insurrection. Running under this construction is the belief that crowds and people are basically animalian, not that they're basically responsive to emotional appeals.
Especially with what we've learned about mirror neurons, Smith and Hyde's article is an extremely compelling explanation of the public. I wish they had spent a little more time describing how a crowd processes an emotion; after they talked about how emotions can fire back and forth it seemed like they slipped into a fairly straightforward pathetic dissection of John Edwards, and except for a few lines about how audience members could transfer pity for each other into identification into fear for themselves, they didn't talk about how the emotions were being reflected around the room. I wonder of mob mentalities develop because of this reflection process -- if crowds get out of hand because as emotions are reflected around the room, they may magnify as well as transfer.
Thanks for bringing Lippmann and Dewey into the discussion. I share Lippmann's reservations about media coverage of the electorate. There truly is a "gap" between the average person and the legislative process created mostly by the average person's lack of knowledge. I recall in class we were discussing this notion (Dewey's) that if the average person could understand the series of systems that make up a car, they could probably understand the legislative process and the results of public policy choices. I remarked, somewhat casually, that I had concerns about the public being able to understand a car. Admittedly, cars have become considerably more complex in the last 20 years, and with globalization/the internet, lawmaking has become more complex as well. I'm of the impression that the average person now knows quite little of either. Hence, we have politicians to specialize in public policy (who perhaps sometimes take advantage of the public's lack of knowledge in this field) and we have auto mechanics to specialize in auto repair/maintenance(and perhaps sometimes take advantage of the public's lack of knowledge in that field). My point, I guess, is that while the public is ill equipped to deal with public policy, politicians may be little better. The same might apply to cars. And consequently, I trust my own (lack of) knowledge about cars more than I trust an able, but suspect mechanic.
ReplyDeleteI like Dewey's advocacy of biased media. At least, when there's a bias, most people are aware of it and *filter* their perceptions accordingly. What seems more dangerous, in a free society, is a media that pretends to be unbiased, for this is rarely true. And, what's more, a transparent biased media provides the emotions that charge our decision making (as individuals and more so as a "public") so we don't suffer under the illusions of strict rationality.
I find your distinction between a crowd and a group of people very striking. Emotions seem to be both individual experiences and those that are shared among and result from others, each of the two relating to the other. In one sense, it is as though two kinds of identities exist in an audience: one possessed by each individual him/herself and the other that is held by the crowd. Each individual has an emotional set of responses as does the crowd, which is the aggregate of all the personal identities. The personal emotional identities together form a new emotional identity of the crowd to which the speaker can appeal in order to influence the individual emotional experience of each member of the crowd. Thus, the speaker has two kinds of interlocutors: the individual and the crowd, and the way he responds to each will affect the other.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, an effective speaker is one who is able to relate to each person individually and then is able to create a "least common denominator" of sorts among the crowd, forming the individuals into a kind of "public" which has its own emotional responses. As the speaker relates to this "public and the various individuals as a part of it, he or she then is able to influence the emotional responses of each individual. It seems then that the issue comes to the construction of audience, since the orator must effectively create a crowd or public identity (or identify one that already exists) and then use it to create an emotional experience in each and every individual.