Questions for Week 9

Can someone agree to post questions for week ten so I have something to respond to? It is the last week of class and I need one more answer submitted. 

1) Postman makes the claim that in modern political discourse, complex political ideas have little or no place in the conversation surrounding an election. Instead, we have candidates who worry about their image more than their ideas. He said “You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content.” Do you agree that the age of content has passed when it comes to political ideas? Can candidates skate into high office because of their good looks or image alone or with only vague traces of substance or is the content of the ideas still important to us? Put another way, does the “pretty” candidate always win in the end? How much of a disadvantage does a strange looking candidate (examples: Mike Huckabee or John McCain) have against a good looking one (examples: Mitt Romney or Barack Obama)?

 

2) In chapter two, Postman argues that television has made the American discourse “shriveled and absurd”. He says that television as at its worst when it tries to be the most content orientated. The television is a means of conveyance for entertainment and triviality. When it tries to raise the discourse of its products beyond that, it instead pulls the important into triviality along with all the entertaining junk because our brains organize television as entertainment, not serious subject matter.  Do you agree or disagree with this assessment? Why or Why not?

 

3) The implication of McLuhan’s idea that the medium is the message (or plays a huge role in the effectiveness of the message), as stated at the end of the selection, is that speakers must either choose the proper medium for their rhetoric or adapt their style to reflect the medium they are forced to use. Using the classic example of the debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, the radio audience overwhelmingly endorsed the idea that Nixon won the debate and the TV audience, who say a scowling and sweaty Nixon compared with a handsome and composed JFK, thought that Nixon had badly lost the debate. This example seems to support the idea that Nixon should have changed his style to reflect the television audience’s expectations since that audience was larger than that of the radio, which McLuhan calls a hot medium, lending itself to details and serious discussion. Do you agree with my assessment of this selection and my use of the debate example? Why or why not?

Questions for the Readings – Week 6

1)      Chapter ten of the book states, “Psychologist Jerome Bruner has argues that we live our lives in terms of stories that make sense of who we are and what we do.” In a sense, narrative is all reliant on our perspective and self-image. In recent days, the captain of the US Airways plane that crash landed into the Hudson River in New York City has given several interviews where he rejects the notion of himself as a hero and instead makes the case that he was simply doing his job. This is in stark contrast to the majority of media coverage, which has portrayed him as the savior of the 155 people on the plane and countless people in New York City below. Does this theory of narrative as “world-making” fully explain the discrepancy between the two versions of the same event or is there a better explanation?  Can the pilot be a hero to everyone except himself or is there some objective truths about the event that outweigh any modesty or humility on his part? To what extent do you feel your own narrative framing is shaping your answer to these questions?

2)      Aristotle believed that all arguments could be logically proven to be valid or invalid. He also found that arguments that connected the premises of the argument with audience preconceptions made for the most persuasive arguments. But what if, despite Aristotle’s hope that audience preconceptions are based in logically valid deductions, they are in fact full of very emotional, irrational and illogical assumptions. Clearly, neither the argument nor the audience needs to base their rhetorical processes in fact or logic in order to make an argument persuasive to a particular group of people. How would Aristotle respond to the charge that his notion of syllogistic structure is not something that his theory of enthymeme needs to rely on for successful persuasion?  

3)      Using the information in the reading by Warnick and Inch, I would like to ask for someone to analyze the following ads from the 2008 Presidential campaign: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv4bYWBTgdw ,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpmFd25tRqo , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHe_FQGfdyo , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1azQcs-8iI , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrRk8KQukY

 

As we read in this selection, evaluating the claim, reasoning and evidence is critical to argument analysis. Which of the above ads was most powerful? Were any overly strong and therefore off-putting? What are the different audience assumptions, orientations and background knowledge that each claimant is relying on in order to make his or her argument persuasive? Please use the concepts from the reading to make your analysis, rather than your own biases.