Abstract
Ton van Haaften, Henrike Jansen, Jaap de Jong and William Koetsenruijter, Bending Opinion: Essays on Persuasion in the Public Domain, Leiden University Press: Leiden, 2011; 455 pp.: 59.95/£48.00
Public debate is central to democracy because it is through such debate that decisions are made concerning the organization of social and political life. That at least is the ideal. Many issues stream out from this, one of these being the conduct of public debate, and another being the art of persuasion in such debate: how to bend opinion to your view. Bending opinion is the topic of this collection of essays, and rhetoric, being central to bending opinion, is at the heart of their concern with effective political communication. Different sections look at the fundamentals of rhetoric, the rhetoric of verbal presentation, rhetoric and the media, rhetoric and politics and the rhetoric of topoi. The essays range from the relatively general to the relatively specific, as for instance with, on the one hand, Ineke Sluiter’s useful opening chapter on free speech, political deliberation and the ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor, and on the other, Susan Hogben’s piece on the exploitation of visual modality in claiming environmental ethos in UK adverts for automotive and energy companies. The breadth of topics covered is considerable, moving from melody and rhythm in ancient political discourse, through Dutch ministerial speeches, style and argument in the genre of the newspaper column, and the rhetorical construction of future problems, to the stereotypical images of victims and offenders. The book as a whole derives from the second Rhetoric in Society conference which took place in January 2009 at Leiden University in the Netherlands. It will be of interest not only to those who study rhetoric and rhetorical persuasion but also to students in communication and media studies who are concerned with the various ways in which information and opinion in public debate are put together, conveyed and processed by audiences.
Adrian Johns, Death of a Pirate: British Radio and the Making of the Information Age, WW Norton: New York and London, 2011; 305 pp.: £19.99
Media piracy today is usually associated with illegal downloads being made in teenagers’ bedrooms, or shady dealers with badly dubbed DVDs set out on an old towel in an open-air Saturday market. In the 1960s, the association was quite different. Media piracy then meant battered ships off the British coast with DJs sending rock music over the airwaves into the mainland in a challenge to the BBC’s monopoly over music broadcasting. Sixties pirate radio is the topic studied by Adrian Johns in this new book, and it starts grippingly with a murder being committed. The victim is Reg Calvert, a pirate-radio operator, shot in 1966 by Oliver Smedley, an ex-army man and business rival. Johns casts his eye back over early broadcasting history in Britain, and in particular the sternly patrician music policy that prevailed from Reith’s days at the helm of the BBC. Smedley had been strongly influenced by the views of Friedrich Hayek, and was a free-market ideologue. This was his main source of motivation in becoming involved with Radio Atlanta and pirate broadcasting. His involvement was a moral crusade against the postwar consensus that held the welfare state to be a beneficial turning-point in history. Johns regards Smedley’s commercial failure as a symbolic success in that the BBC’s monopoly came to an end after the pirate ships were closed down in 1968. Not only that. As a result of all his efforts, claims Johns, the economic philosophy of Hayek gained in credence and kudos, with one Margaret Thatcher becoming attuned to what it entailed. Maybe. But this way of accounting for social and cultural change is too individual-centred. The broader currents of social and cultural change swirling all around Smedley and his ilk were of far greater significance in what characterizes the period. This is nevertheless a well-told tale. Its narrative approach to history writing may strike some as rather old-fashioned, but that does not detract from an attractively presented account of an endlessly fascinating period of cultural history.
Seth Giddings with Martin Lister (eds), The New Media and Technocultures Reader, Routledge: London and New York, 2011; 514 pp.; £26.99
This is a wide-ranging collection which gathers together some of the most important writings of recent years on culture and technology, or rather on their convergence in technoculture. The book embraces so-called new media, a term which is already becoming awkward since it has been in use for quite some time, which raises the question as to how long their newness can last as such before becoming the opposite of this state. The editors of course use the term to refer to digital media or the digital transformation of existing communications, such as telephony, photography or television. This involves far more than the move from analogue to digital, for the move often spawns new features and capabilities, as for instance with the mobile phone. The editors intend their collection as a resource for exploring current changes and developments in the media and in everyday technologies. History is not ignored, the theme of the first section being genealogies. This is followed by sections dealing with the relations between technology, culture and society; theories of technocultural agency; texts, forms and codes; network culture; and technocultural practices in everyday life. Students will find this a useful reader in helping them become familiar with key issues and key authors in new media studies (including Donna Haraway, Sarah Kember, Lev Manovich and Mark Poster). The book nicely complements the earlier 2003 New Media: A Critical Introduction, co-written by Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant and Kieran Kelly, an updated edition of which has also recently appeared.
Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, Duke University Press: Durham, NC and London, 2011; 288 pp.: US$25.95
For Anne Balsamo, technology and culture go hand in hand, and this means that in thinking about technological innovation we need simultaneously to think about its consequences and implications for culture. Balsamo’s position on this is that cultural issues need to be at the forefront of any project concerned with technological innovation. Her purpose is to show how, through specific projects, this can be done. Balsamo also wants culture to be taken seriously in the design and development of innovative technologies. By ‘culture’ she means ‘a socially shared symbolic system of signs and meanings’ (p. 5), and she draws heavily on cultural studies in extending its analytical concerns and methods into those fields which are engaged in technological innovation. The first three chapters of the book examine examples in which the technological imagination has flourished, leading to new interactive digital experiences. The first chapter explores how the technological imagination may help the development of technologies towards more democratic social objectives, while the second describes cases where the future was imagined and acted out in the context of a professional research institution. The key focus here is an interactive museum exhibit called XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading. Balsamo’s third chapter takes this forward by discussing how the conditions can be created for optimizing technological innovation. A somewhat different approach is taken in the subsequent chapter as she considers the work involved in shifting paradigms so as to inspire culturally attuned technological innovation. In the final chapter Balsamo turns to the book and considers this as a technocultural form in its own right, offering specific communicative and expressive affordances, but with certain limits which can be illustrated by showing what other media forms can do which it can not. Balsamo draws on several multimedia collaborations in which she was involved as a designer or developer, as for example with the creation of an interactive documentary for the NGO Forum held in conjunction with the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. This is included as a DVD in a pocket on the inside back cover of the book. The argument pursued throughout the book is coherent and sustained. It makes a valuable intervention in thinking about design and design processes, technocultures and technological innovation. If you want a taster, try the website – http://designingculture.net.
Stijn Reijnders, Places of the Imagination: Media, Tourism, Culture, Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2011; 161 pp.: £50.00
Paying a visit to Culloden would seem quite straightforward and without need of justification, but visiting the Coronation Street set at Granada Studios in Manchester is surely somewhat bizarre. Making a television soap the site of a pilgrimage cannot equate with a battle site where many met their gruesome death. We may agree that they do not share the same historical significance, but media tourism has become increasingly common, and we have learned from Nick Couldry why people visit the studio set where Ena and Elsie engaged in their frequent slanging matches. Stijn Reijnders has been writing steadily about media tourists sites and rituals, including in this journal, and his book represents the culmination of his work so far on this fascinating topic. The places visited are places of the imagination just as much as they are physical places, and Reijnders is right to make this a key focus. Here he is extending Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire in developing his own concept of lieux d’imagination, which denotes material locations or reference points which serve a symbolic purpose for certain social groups. Reijnders gives us detailed studies of such lieux d’imagination as the television detective tours in Amsterdam, Oxford and Ystad, the James Bond trip to various worldwide locations and the Dracula tours in Transylvania. The book is hugely enjoyable, and provides a valuable account of the appeal of media tourism and its growing presence in contemporary popular culture. We have too few studies of this particular phenomenon. This is one of the best so far.
Peter Lunenfeld, The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 2011; 219 pp.: £15.95
At the start of this book, Peter Lunenfeld notes that the computer can simulate any other communications technology. This is quite remarkable, yet because we use computers on a day-to-day basis, we are perhaps in danger of taking it for granted. The list is prodigious: video, radio and TV can all be relayed through computers; computers give us maps, route-finders, painting facilities, printing options; they can take us on virtual tours of galleries and museums; they can copy music and help us compose it; they enable the manipulation of photographs and other visual images; they can carry and deliver mail; and so on and so on. As Lunenfeld puts it, the computer is the first media machine that serves as the mode of production, means of distribution and site of reception. Yet immediately he suggests caution. The reason for this is what he calls the war between downloading and uploading, which are synonymous with passive consumption and active creation respectively. We should not be lulled into a false sense of celebration by the advent of widespread social media, for there remain a small minority who upload material and a great majority who download. This pattern mimics the hierarchical pyramid of cultural production and consumption in other media, as for example, over the past century, has been the case with television. Lunenfeld’s project is to make the case for moving from a consumption to a production model. The bulk of the book is devoted to this. Despite a penchant for histrionic claims and glib metaphors, Lunenfeld’s is a constructive argument, designed to make us think carefully about how best to shape our social and cultural uses of the ‘dream machine’ that is the computer. The book is interspersed with short sections which offer exemplary stories that throw an interesting tangential light on the theoretical and critical argument being developed. And it is worth developing, for the shallow optimism about electronic homesteading of 15 years or so ago has been shown, as evidenced by the steady evolution of the internet, far more in the mould of what already exists than in the dreams of what could, instead, come into existence. Time for radical rethinking; time for different choices: in this Lunenfeld provides a clear impetus.
Vincent Miller, Understanding Digital Culture, Sage: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington, DC, 2011; 254 pp.: £21.99
The sense that the internet has become enmeshed in the existing structures of society is Vincent Miller’s starting point in this new textbook. The fact that online media are now fully integrated into offline social life means that we can no longer confine our attention to internet content and forms when discussing digital culture. We have also to consider how it has spread and become taken up in the contexts of everyday life. This is Miller’s task. It involves examining the economic and social impact of information and computing technologies alongside the emerging and ever-changing cultural forms and uses of digital media that are part of broader media and consumer cultures. He tracks the key elements of digital media, the economic foundations of the ‘information age’, convergence and the contemporary media experience, digital divides, privacy and surveillance, cyber politics, subversion and warfare, identity and digital media, social media and the problem of community, and the body in relation to information technology. As this summary will suggest, the book is wide-ranging in scope, but just as importantly, it does a fine job in bringing together socioeconomic approaches to the ‘information society’ with cultural studies approaches to the use and consumption of digital media and multimedia. It also abounds in concrete examples and case studies, and is accessibly written and presented. Students will find this a fine introduction to digital culture.
Richard Lance Keeble, John Tulloch and Florian Zollmann (eds), Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution, Peter Lang: New York, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna and Oxford, 2010; 392 pp.: US$35.95
Peace journalism differs significantly from war journalism in giving a voice to all affected parties, focusing on the invisible damage done by wartime violence, attempting to counter official propaganda, promoting conflict resolution and being, in general, resolution-oriented. The shift is to an emphasis on non-violent responses to conflict. This edited collection builds on such an approach to reporting conflict while expanding into new fields. In the opening section, Clifford G Christians discusses non-violence in philosophical and media ethics; Oliver Boyd-Barrett re-examines the Chomsky/Herman propaganda model; Richard Lance Keeble argues for journalism as political practice rather than simply a professional activity; and Jake Lynch offers a critical synthesis of propaganda theories in examining the reporting of the NATO attacks on Kosovo in 1999 and the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. The second part of the book turns to peace journalism theory and practice in an international context. There are chapters on psychological responses to war journalism and to peace journalism; combining peace journalism and feminist theory; the global influence of indigenous media; the journalism of the American independent journalist, Dahr Jamail; the ethics and aesthetics of atrocity coverage; the remediation of war journalism by social networks like YouTube, Facebook and Flickr; building a peace journalists’ network in the Philippines; the London-based Peace News; and military uses of local radio in the Balkans and Afghanistan. The third and final section deals with the critique of mainstream journalism, along with its news values and professional shibboleths, which peace journalism offers. Chapters in this section cover press reporting of the 2008 election of a new president in the (Greek) republic of Cyprus and the subsequent moves to settle the ‘Cyprus problem’; peace journalism practices in Germany; press treatment of pacifists and conscientious objectors at the beginning of World War Two; the war journalism of the corporate media in Canada, the UK and the USA; and bringing a peace journalism curriculum into higher education. This is an important collection of essays on peace journalism by both well-known and more up-and-coming scholars, journalists and campaigners. There is a preface by John Pilger and an afterword by Jeffery Klaehn. In one way or another a wide range of media are covered. Keeble, Tulloch and Zollmann have put together a must-see book for anyone interested in war reporting and the need to develop alternative approaches to the mainstream promotion of the interests of governments and the military.
Robert C Ostergren and Mathias Le Bossé, The Europeans, The Guilford Press: New York and London, 2011; 432 pp.: £43.95
The first edition of this book was published in 2004, and seven years on its successor has been updated to include such events as the accession of countries like Bulgaria and Romania into the EU, and expanded within individual chapters to give greater coverage to particular topics. There are new photographs and maps. Further additions are 21 topical vignettes focusing on interaction with the physical environment, cultural self-definition and everyday life. Examples include climate change in Europe, food and diet in premodern Europe, the Roma, abortion, transport, the Eurovision song contest and ethno-nationalism and the break-up of Yugoslavia. The four main sections of the book cover people and environment, culture and identity, towns and cities, work and leisure. The breadth of the book’s embrace is impressive. Students will find it an authoritative and accessible introduction to European regional geography.
Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane and Martin J Power (eds), Morrissey, Intellect: Bristol and Chicago, IL, 2011; 342 pp.: £29.95
A collection of essays on the Moz – oh, such delight! And it deepens, for the book is not solely devoted to discussion of the solo career of one Steven Patrick Morrissey. It is organized around the themes of fandom, representations and identities, and while examining this famous figure of transnational popular culture, it seeks to explore the wider issues and implications any consideration of him and his work inevitably throws up. These include the issues of nationalism and cultural heritage, ventriloquism and persona, gender and identity, stardom and fandom. Morrissey’s songs and singing naturally figure in all this, with some close readings of words and music being given, but the book also engages with why he is celebrated and why he has gained global iconic status. If you missed the two symposia on Morrissey at the University of Limerick, this worthwhile collection offers welcome recompense.
Alexander G Nikolaev (ed.), Ethical Issues in International Communication, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2011; 277 pp.: £55.00
This book is concerned with the moral frameworks in which international communication is conducted, and the ethical issues bound up in communication across multiple cultural borders. How is it possible for such communication to be successful given the different ethical standards from one culture to another? Attempting to answer this difficult question means negotiating the debate between absolutists and relativists, or as it is put in the introduction to the book, between universalists and internationalists. Alexander Nikolaev gives a useful outline of this debate, summarizing it as being ‘between people who want to protect and respect every culture in the world and those who want to claim the high moral ground exclusively for themselves’ (p. 16). Fittingly, an international bunch of scholars contribute to the book. In the first section, Clifford Christians attempts to develop universalist theories that avoid being imperialistic, and Stephen Croucher examines the ethical problems involved in situations of conflict between Christians and Muslims in Europe. The second section focuses on the ethics of international political rhetoric, with Gerard Elfstrom discussing the rhetoric of democracy and Anna Kasafi Perkins the theological grounding of rhetorical discourse of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in American foreign policy. The third part covers ethical issues in international journalism, with Iman Roushdy-Hammady looking at how Arabs are represented in western media, Élisabeth Le at how Le Monde deals with problems of journalism ethics and national identity and Richard Keeble at the ethical dilemmas of war and peace reporting in the UK. International PR and public communication are covered in the next section. Terry Rentner and Lara Lengel explore ethical issues in social marketing health campaigns, Cornelius Pratt and Wole Adamolekun the ethical issues encountered by three global corporations in Africa (Exxon Mobil, Shell and Pfizer), Katerina Tsetsura the problem of media non-transparency in international media relations and Melissa Johnson and Eileen Searson the question of visual ethics in relation to Latin American government websites. In the final part of the book, Svetlana Sablina and Bella Struminskaya argue that students can be shown how to find mutually acceptable ethical premises, while Alexander Nikolaev rounds things off with a chapter that brings together the range of issues, problems and points of view dealt with in the book as a whole. This is a valuable set of discussions on global communication ethics. It makes an important contribution to the existing literature on this topic and all it entails, and will be of interest to students in a range of different areas, including international relations, media studies and journalism as well as ethical philosophy itself.
Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allen (eds), Journalism after September 11, Routledge: London and New York, 2011; 342 pp.: £20.89
In a famous statement following 9/11, Tony Blair declared that the ‘kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux’. The World Trade Center has now been absent from the Manhattan skyline for over 10 years, during which time we have lived in the shadow of what Art Spiegelman has called the shadow of no towers. One can only speculate how long it will take to fully assimilate the events of 9/11 and their subsequent consequences – the pieces of memory remain in flux – but the second edition of this book, first published in 2002, will certainly help in this process. It includes four new chapters and a new afterward by Phillip Knightley. In these new chapters, Roger Silverstone writes briefly on the media politics of ‘othering’ in a piece that first appeared in 2002 in Dossiers de l’audiovisual, Carolyn Kitch examines the ways in which US news weeklies reported the events of 9/11, Noha Mellor explores Arab perspectives on the events as revealed in four pan-Aran newspapers and Marie Gillespie reports on findings from a study of TV audience responses to 9/11 news coverage. The remaining chapters were included in the first edition. The book’s expansion makes it even more of a significant set of treatments of various aspects of 9/11 and its aftermath in relation to news journalism and what is involved in being a journalist. Both journalism and the role of journalists have been affected by the catastrophe, with some of its implications changing as time has gone on. This new edition provides an opportunity to consider them. The collection represents one of the best studies of the relationship between 9/11 and the media.
Colum Kenny, The Power of Silence: Silent Communication in Daily Life, Karnac Books: London, 2011; 304 pp.: £20.99
If you are conducting a research interview, you may well fall silent as a way of encouraging your interviewee to open up and speak at length in response to the question you have asked. That would be a sensible way to proceed in order to create the appropriate space in which your interviewee can speak at reasonable length, but imagine if, following your question, the interviewee started speaking and then lapsed into prolonged silence. The interview would have become a dismal failure. The example illustrates the way in which silence can be either beneficial or disastrous. It is a protean state, being able to take on many forms and have many meanings. It is these which are explored by Colum Kenny. In Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, a woman lights a burner on the stove and offers the narrator a pipe, saying ‘I thought you’d never say hello – you look like the silent type’. Silent types are where Kenny kicks off, exploring the variety involved, and the kind of person denoted, from the cunning to the culpable, the modest to the wise, the dull to the dumbfounded. Kenny then turns to the ways in which silence can speak and be an integral aspect of communication, though in different ways in different cultures, before examining theories of silence and how they can enrich our understanding of particular instances of it. Further chapters attend to the uses of silence in the arts, and in film, television and music; silence as a constraint or imposition; the occurrence of silence in therapy; sacred silence and its spiritual observances; and finally, divine silence. Kenny has written an absorbing book, one that explores its subject matter far and wide. There are occasional stretches of the book which take the pattern of a patchwork quilt of quotations, with only sparse commentary stitching them together. There is clearly a colossal amount that has been written on the phenomena of silence, and it may be that Kenny has tried to include too much of his avidly collected material between two covers. While extensions of his own discussion and analysis would at times have given a better balance to the book, it is not as if though his own thinking on the diverse features of silent phenomena is absent. Much of it is considered and astute, in what is above all a learned book. Silence has many faces, and Kenny reads them well. This is a book you can either dip into or read contentedly from chapter to chapter. Either way it proves instructive and informative.
Shawn J Parry-Giles and J Michael Hogan (eds), The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, Wiley-Blackwell: Malden, MA and Oxford, 2010; 478 pp.: £125.00
Rhetoric and the arts of public address have long been central to the ways in which politicians court us, win us over and earn our votes, but how have they changed over the years, how have they been affected by new communications technologies and how do politicians nowadays address us as a public? This volume seeks answers to questions such as these, and is intended as a major reconsideration of what eloquence means and what implications eloquence has as an alluring element of public speaking. It is so also in light of changes and developments in the field of study devoted to public address, being meant as a means of stimulating reflection among public address scholars on the state of their art in the early 21st century. There are five sections in the book. The first of these has essays on the academic history of the field, on the achievements made and challenges faced and the role of method in rhetorical criticism. The second part focuses on some of the basic issues in research on rhetoric and public address, covering such areas as textual recovery, textual authentication and archival research, while the third section moves on to look at the key characteristics and controversies of critical scholarship on spoken, written and visual texts, along with the role of theory in textual analysis and public address scholarship. In the fourth part of the book, questions of effect are broached, with attention being paid both to traditional notions of instrumental effect and more recent ‘constitutive’ understandings of rhetorical influence. The final part of the book focuses on ideology, and questions concerning the role of ‘race’, gender and sexuality in rhetoric studies. The 17 newly commissioned main chapters in the book cover a broad variety of topics, though are confined mainly to North American issues and cases. Overall, the volume engages thoroughly with the relationship between public address, civic involvement and democratic citizenship. It is a landmark publication in its field, and will be widely consulted.
Greg Goodale, Sonic Persuasion: Recording Sound in the Recorded Age, University of Chicago Press: Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, IL, 2011; 189 pp.: £17.99
There is increasing recognition that auditory aspects of culture have been neglected or at least sidelined by comparison with the visual, the inclusion of the definite article before the otherwise adjectival ‘visual’ itself signifying the ascendancy of sight above hearing. We understand far less of voices, music, noises and silence, and of how they culturally operate, because of this analytical deaf spot in our scholarly attention. Think of the ink spilt in attending to images, still or moving; there is nothing like this for the semiotics of sound, despite the introduction of the telephone, the phonograph and the radio over the past century or so, and despite the sonic dimension of visual media. This is gradually changing, and the deficit is slowly being reduced. Greg Goodale has made an interesting contribution to this effort. His book takes a range of sounds from various media and reads them for the ways in which they have been used to persuade. He shows the different ways in which we can closely listen to sound, examining its constituent features, whether these be dialect, intonation, phrasing or pausing, in relation to the human voice, or the rhetorical effects of non-human sounds, such as machinery, clocks or amplified heartbeats. Sonic expectations derive from the historically specific ways in which we listen, or from what Shai Burstyn has called ‘period ear’. It is in relation to such expectations that Goodale traces changes in the sound of the presidential voice during the period 1892–1912, culminating in Theodore Roosevelt’s oration ‘The Right of the People to Rule’ during the campaign of 1912. Following up on this, he turns to the impact of modernity on listening patterns, focusing on two iconically modern sounds, the clock and the locomotive. His discussion here takes in ultra-modernist responses to industrial and urban noise, and in an intriguing cameo analysis, Bukka White’s ‘Special Streamline’, a recording whose musical imitations of a steam train is interspersed with White’s spoken storyline involving a young woman and her Mississippi boyfriend, and the characteristic black experience of leaving the agrarian south for the industrial north. An insightful chapter examines the use of sonic tropes as they were used in the signification of race in North America during the interwar period. It includes close readings of ex-slave Phoebe Boyd’s 1935 reminiscences, a 1936 episode of Amos ’n’ Andy and Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of her signature song, ‘Strange Fruit’. Goodale’s final substantive chapter attends to the use of sonic manipulation by government agencies and Hollywood producers in attempts to shape, direct and contest public opinion. The epilogue rounds things off and moves to more general points about scholarly efforts to read sound. As a result of this book, Goodale helps us move further towards a sonic imperative in cultural analysis. Thanks to various communications technologies, we have a huge abundance of recorded historical sources, yet we have so far only skimmed the surface of them. We have only just begun to listen carefully for what such sources may tell us of sound and voice meanings, and how such meanings capture and communicate different temporalities within and across time. This book provides further encouragement for the analytical tasks ahead.