Concepts

Dialogic Argument

In essence, a debate between two different positions. When presenting an argument, a dialogic argument acknowledges there is another point of view to contend with and attempts to deal with this through solid reasoning backed up with evidence. Combative argumentation refuses to acknowledge or accept the validity of another point of view; rather than actively wrestle with a contradicting point of view, it dismisses it, or more vulgarly, shouts it down.

Media

Modes of transferring/conveying something. A medium (plural media) is the vehicle that transfers the thing; a plane is the medium that transfered me from Richmond to Chicago in May. For our purposes, we're dealing mainly with mass media, or methods of conveying news and other information. BBC News, for instance, incorporates reporters on the ground who write, radio reports, on line content, and television reports --each is a medium. Although media is largely used as a stand-in for news, a song can be a medium, a sign, and advertisement, a film, or your own voice.

Plato's Three Kinds of Dialog

(from The Phaedrus)

Writing: Doesn't lead to truth because you can't question a piece of writing; it just says the same thing over and over.

Persuasive Speech: Better than writing, but someone who is trying to persuade you of something doesn't need to know a thing about the truth of the matter in order to convince you --and can in fact convince you to believe a falsehood. The only reason this is better than writing is that at least you have a live person whom maybe you could force an answer out of (if you can get past the spokesman and security detail).

Dialectic: A process of two or more people questioning each other about the nature of something in order to arrive at the truth of the issue. For Socrates, this is the only way to lead to truth; this doesn't mean that their questions will necessarily always lead to truth (you can imagine two people questioning the nature of a half-stegosaurus/half-Dr. Phil monster that eats nothing but cabbage, but that doesn't make it so). The truth, for Socrates, seems to be in the very act of questioning; in other words, it's the act, the experience, that's important, and when you give up questioning, you're giving up any claims to the truth of some matter. Plato obviously felt a bit different about these things than Socrates; after all, he wrote the dialogs, and according to Socrates writing is the worst way to find the truth of something. But maybe Plato got something Socrates didn't, that the act of reading leads one to have other questions they can go in search of answers for, and such acts can change our experience. Think: How well did you learn not to touch something hot, by being told or by actually feeling the pain from the heat? The point is experience can be the better teacher. Plato never steps in to say that reading/writing can lead to some truth; that would negate the point (and would be persuasive speech). A dialectic --or dialogic argumentation --allows one to go through the experience of arriving at some point, rather than being told to accept the point at face value.

Metaphor

From Greek, literally meaning a "carrying over a change" in meaning. What's being carried over? A metaphor makes a connection between two unlike things, and the sense of one thing is carried over to the other. "Coffee is my life's blood." No it's not. If you cut open your arm and look for mocha java roast, you're not going to find it. The sense that is carried over is that coffee helps make you feel alive and vital –it's just not as interesting to say it like this, and it isn't as powerful because the audience doesn't get to go through the experience of realizing the understanding themselves. In metaphor, the audience makes the connection, and by the very fact that the audience is more actively involved in that interpretation means that the audience experiences more of the dynamic, and thus will supposedly understand the meaning on a more complete level.

Irony

When there is a gap between the way something is presented and the reality of that situation, that gap is what is called irony . On the level of media, irony is a good thing to keep in the back of your head (call it a healthy skepticism) when judging the content and quality of information you're getting. Is the writer/presenter presenting the information in a way that neglects important aspects of an issue, or does the presentation raise questions that are not addressed? If so, is the writer/presenter doing this unintentionally or intentionally? Which brings us to:

Engaged Irony: When that gap between perception and reality of a situation is apprehended and explored or exploited. This is how a lot of good comedy works, by recognizing and exploring inconsistencies to raise our understanding of a subject (and to give us a chuckle). This can also be the case when someone intentionally neglects certain information in a presentation in order to exploit the audience's lack of knowledge. For instance, in 1938 Orson Welles produced a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' book The War of the Worlds, only when the show began, they did not tell the audience that it was a radio play. They adapted the text to sound like a contemporary radio news broadcast, and thousands of people from around the nation went into a panic thinking New Jersey was under attack by aliens. A more serious example may be the arguments used in the build-up to the war in Iraq that claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction he was set to use against the U.S. The July 23, 2002 Downing Street memo, a British defence and intelligence memo that was leaked to The Sunday Times (London) in May, 2005, states "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This was a month before the invasion began, and suggests that certain information was kept from the public in order to make the case for war.
Detached: Not recognizing that gap between perception and reality, and thus possibly getting caught within that gap. Think of the prisoners in Plato's cave, who just took what they saw at face value –the shadows were everything (when in fact they weren't). Hyper-sincerity can often lead one to believe too much without a second look. In the above War of the Worlds and Downing Street memo cases, the public who did not recognize they were not getting the truth, or who didn't think to take a second look, could be called 'ironically detached.'

Just a note: We're always living with a certain level of irony; even at the level of language, there's always a gap between the presentation of something and its reality. The cup of stuff I drink each day in class can be coffee, or kafe, or кофе, or kávécserje, or

Which is the right representation of the stuff people drink in class? All and none --they're only related to the stuff people drink because of anassumed social agreement that "coffee" represents that stuff, and not

There's a gap here between the presentation of the thing "coffee" and the reality of the stuff I drink.

So, we're always already dealing with some level of irony even as we speak and write. Recognizing this can only help us pay a little closer attention to how we use language and form arguments.

The Medium is the Message

MEDIUM	is the		MESSAGE

		The means for conveying information takes precedence over the actual information presented
A means for conveying information			The information conveyed

Marshall McLuhan's claim that the real message of media is not the content conveyed, but the very fact that technology is conveying information. Whenever some new medium is designed to convey information, McLuhan argues, it sparks a new form of social organization, and that's the important thing to note. Take for instance the printing press; this allowed manuscripts to be mass produced and spread among a wider audience, and makes the mass production of knowledge possible. Or take the television, which made it possible for people in separate geographical locations to receive the same information at the same moment in time, and at a much more rapid rate than could be achieved by a printing press. Today we have the Internet and the various media that constitute it; you may use a messenger program where you can talk with various friends from around the world at the same time, some you may have never met; you may lurk on blogs, discussing various issues with people you may never meet --the Internet is yet another form of media that has instantiated new forms of social organization that we deal with every day. (If this makes you think of the term "global village," it might be because McLuhan coined that term in his research of mass media.)

An example of this: Say you're getting information about the recent clash between UK troops and Iraqi police in Basra, Iraq. You have these options:

Daily newspapers

Dedicated pages on the Internet

Blogs

Newspapers on the Internet

Mobile Phone

Magazines, which come out monthly or weekly, but tend to have more in-depth information and are glossier

A monthly journal, which tends to be not flashy at all, but is written by policy analysts and scholars

Television

Public radio (BBC, NPR, CBC, etc.)

Commercial news radio (Fox News Radio, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Air America )

Which forum do you choose and why? One way to think about this is that the reason you choose one medium over another suggests something about the chosen medium communicates to you in a way the others do not, and that's the message. In other words, the potentialities that a medium contains is a medium's message (a printing press contains the potential to mass produce any number of texts, from chemistry books to ad labels, etc.; a lightbulb contains the potential to allow you to read at night, see the street when you're driving in the dark, burn your fingers changing it, etc.; a radio contains the potential to drive you batty with treacly top 40 pop and annoying hyperactive DJ's, bring you news about the world, play cool jazz, or make you rage in your car while stuck in traffic listening to AM talk radio, etc.)

Hot and Cold Media

Another Marshall McLuhan idea; a hot medium provides a lot of information for you to be able to easily apprehend the content (i.e. it's content-rich); a cold medium requires the audience bring a prior understanding to the medium in order to understand the content (i.e. it's content-poor). This is a bit different for us today than it was for McLuhan back in the 1960's; he didn't have laptops and cell phones and instant messenger and the Internet. Can something that is content-rich for one person be content-poor for another? Does the same hold for news information?

Enthymematic Argument

Placing two distinct concepts next to each other in an argument to hint or suggest that the things are really connected, when in fact they're not. This is a sneaky sort of argumentation. Think ads that suggest if you use this deodorant you'll be sexy or successful not by telling you so, but by showing sexy and successful people happily putting on deodorant. On a larger political level, think of a politician who might claim something like "cutting education funding is anti-American" and later that "my opponent wants to cut education funding," but refuses to say the opponent is anti-American; it doesn't need to be said, the audience will make the connection. (By the way, this is how a warrant operates --it's an assumption you hope your audience shares.) The largest and continuing example of this today would be that Iraq was involved in the 9.11 attacks; the 9.11 Commission, which was bi-partisan, made up of all parties in government, researched all the intelligence and evidence that they had, much the public will never see, and officially concluded that Iraq was not involved in the 9.11 attacks, yet this claim is still made on a regular basis through enthymatic argumentation. (i.e. While we're fighting terrorism in Iraq , we need to remember the attacks of September 11…)