Critical Viewing and Participatory Democracy

Abstract

Contempora y critical cultural studies of audiences, through the language of "resistance, '' encourage political acts that are often reactiona y , evasive, and ra-trictive. m e language of "critical viewing, '' as it is employed in contempora y communication studies, although more inclusive in its recognition that all people have the potential to explore and promote diversity, is nevertheless as divorced from any direct relationship with participato y democratic lijie as is the language of resistance. mis essay attempts to realign the language of critical viewing with the goals of participato y democracy, by suggesting qua1itie.s of critical viewing that are conducive to achieving and maintaining social power in a democracy.Since Plato's distrust of the formal study of rhetoric, students of communication have held onto the view that "armed with knowledge of rhetoric, we are better able to combat demagoguery and chicanery; ignorant of it, we may stand powerless before them" (Hostettler, 1980, p. 340). The idea that understanding communication can he a form of social power thus continues to motivate socially conscious students of communication. In fact, much contemporary work within the field o f communication falls within the rubric of Cultural Studies, a multidisciplinary approach to culture that aims to understand the ways people can intervene in sociocultural processes and to further facilitate that intervention (C. Nelson, Treichler, & Grossberg, 1992). This paper, however, argues that many critical cultural studies of audiences in effect fail to promote the goals of participatory democracy and presents a case study of talk around the television in order to suggest an approach to critical viewing that is more meaningful to the reading, writing, and teaching of communication criticism.Many contemporary scholars believe that the ways audiences make Jodi R. Cohen is an associate professor in the Department o f Speech Communication at Ithaca College. The author wishes to thank Doty Owens from Ithaca College and several anonymous reviewers for their editorial assistance.

Mediatized Humanitarianism: Trust and Legitimacy in the Age of Suspicion

“…Publics do not merely take media content at face value. Rather than passively absorbing media content, consumers are aware of issues of authenticity and intention in media production and put to work important critical abilities enabling them to make inferences that go far beyond manifest content (Cohen 1994;Liebes and Katz 1989). Studies show a marked decline in trust in media and media content since the mid 1970s (Carlson 2002;Duffy 2003).…”

Citizen's Deliberation on the Internet

“…It appears that since the Ducsai, hybrid procedures have become a common way of participating in public decisions, even if it is not yet widely recognized and accepted by all political elites. We have here an unidentified deliberative object that presents certain characteristics of traditional deliberation (on-and off-line meetings with arguments exchanged, a transparency of the procedure, opened to all stakeholders) but which does not correspond to the canon of deliberation (Habermas, 1997;Cohen, 1994): It is a moving space, with actors entering and exiting and a wide use of rhetoric, emotions and personal relationships.…”