The “scholar's anthology”: Contemporary rhetorical studies

This issue samples a range of theoretical and critical studies exemplifying several currents in contemporary rhetorical thought.     

Metaphor and the rhetorical invention of cold war “idealists”

This paper presents a five‐step procedure for identifying metaphorical concepts guiding the rhetorical invention of three Cold War idealists”;: Henry Wallace, J. William Fulbright, and Helen Caldicott. The source of their collective failure to dispel threatening images of Soviet savagery is located in a recurrent system of metaphorical concepts (including MADNESS, PATHOLOGY, SICKNESS, AND FORCE) that promotes a reversal of the enemy‐image rather than its transcendence. By decivilizing America's image, “idealists”; turn the victimage ritual inward upon a self‐righteous nation and provoke “realists”; to regress further into decivilizing images of the Soviet Union.     

Speech and the “new” philosophies

Speech philosophy, in the face of the current anti‐intellectualism, deals with the place of rational‐logical elements in discourse. The author argues for the supremacy of reason in communication, and calls for neo‐classical communicative logic fused with the social direction of thought. Such a goal inevitably incorporates value judgments. Thus the intellectual, logical, and ethical components are an unbroken continuum in their expression and effect.     

Freedom of speech and the “new left”

This article examines the role and responsibilities of the “New Left”; in current social contexts. It explores, specifically, the legal rights and obligations of any dissenting group and the part that these dissenting factions play in our society.     

The Attractiveness of Magazines as “Open” and “Closed” Texts: Values of Women's Magazines and Their Readers

This study examines the widespread notion that people turn to media to find reinforcement for their personal values. Based on a representative sample of subscribers to women's magazines, the article investigates relationships between readers’ own values and the values they ascribe to the magazine. For some titles, selective exposure to a periodical that presents values close to their readers is observed. For others, readers disagree on magazine values to an extent that indicates considerable room for interpretation of a magazine as an “open” text. Some women's magazines seem to allow their readers to project their own values onto the published contents rather than presenting a clear-cut, “objective” value pattern that could steer exposure.     

“Created this way”: liminality,rhetorical agency,and the transformative power of constraint among gay Christian college students

This study offers liminality as an analytic tool to investigate the discursive strategies of the negotiation of oppositional identities. Interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning Christian college students reveal appeals to essentialism, labeling, and identification. Specific findings include appeals to being “created gay,” the naming of identity labels that support and resist both traditional sexual minority and religious labels, and the deployment of a gay Christian identity as evangelism. This essay explores how disciplinary rhetorics create the conditions for the emergence of rhetorical agency, allowing for a nuanced understanding of the transformative possibilities of minority sexual identity formation.     

Theorizing Community as Discourse in Community Informatics: “Resistant Identities” and Contested Technologies

Community informatics (CI) is a form of activism that involves the application of information and communication technologies in pursuit of community development within localities. This article draws on discourse theory (DT) to re-evaluate activists’ self-interpretations that rely on community, and to make sense of the political struggles at the heart of CI. It is argued that activists’ community discourse constructs, through articulation, locally “resistant” collective identities and an associated collective agency capable of appropriating technology in pursuit of unfulfilled social demands. However DT also suggests that the socially progressive nature of CI is not guaranteed by recourse to the social ideal of community.     

Pranking rhetoric: “culture jamming” as media activism

This essay explores the practice of “culture jamming” as a strategy of rhetorical protest. Specifically, “pranksters” deploy the tools of the mass media and marketing in order to take advantage of the resources and venues they afford. Through the concept of “pranking,” this essay suggests that the most promising forms of media activism may resist less through negation and opposition than by playfully appropriating commercial rhetoric both by folding it over on itself and exaggerating its tropes.     

“Riding Two Horses”: Radio at Television's Creation. An Interview With Dr. Frank N. Stanton

This study investigates both the internal competition for advertising revenues among radio stations and the external competition with other media. The study of the advertising revenues of the Greek radio market from 1988 to 2007 shows that there is a low concentration in the sector, allowing low barriers to entry. However, the radio market is inferior to other media regarding advertising revenues. A key reason is the constant decrease of the advertising cost, something that in the future may affect the intensity of competition and the quality of radio station content.     

“It’s Not Okay”: FX’s Starved and Eating Disorders as Entertainment

In 2005, cable channel FX made the risky decision to air Eric Schaeffer’s Starved, a bold experiment that challenged preconceived notions about eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating. The show poses interesting questions about illness, forcing the viewer to consider whether eating disorders can ever be considered funny. The show ultimately received mixed reviews and was cancelled after just seven episodes. Through an exploration of this challenging show, the author examines what happens when eating disorders are explored through comedy rather than the more typical tragic narrative. By comparing the show to similar sitcoms such as Fat Actress as well as serious reality programming such as Intervention and made-for-television movies, it becomes clear that while Starved may push the viewer to confront the horror of the disease, it fails not only to create empathetic characters and situations but also is unable to make audiences laugh.     

Constituting “the People” as Rhetorical Interruption: Barack Obama and the Unfinished Hopes of an Imperfect People

This article explores how Barack Obama's oratory positions “the people” as a site of ongoing rhetorical negotiation regarding national identity, ideology, and potentiality. Like the subjects implicated in Charland's consideration of constitutive rhetoric, “the people” of Obama's rhetoric emerge as the choosers, deciders, and accomplishers of collaborative identity performance. Unlike Charland's subjects, however, Obama's rhetoric of imperfection and dissent positions “the people” as never fully constituted but always engaged in the act of constitution. The people, like the country they constitute, are flawed, never perfect, and always in the process of perfecting.     

Expert critics: operationalizing the judgement/decisionmaking literature as a theory of “bugs” and repair strategies

Humans are well-known for being adept at using their intuition and expertise in many situations. However, in some settings even human experts are susceptible to errors in judgement, and a failure to recognize the limits of knowledge. This happens often especially in semi-structured situtations, where multi-disciplinary expertise is required, or when uncertainty is a factor. At these times our natural ability to recognize and correct errors fails us, since we have faith in our reasoning. One way to deal with such problems is to have a computerized “critic” to assist in the process. This article introduces the concept of automated critics that collaborate with human experts to help improve their problem solving performance. A critic is a narrowly focused program that uses a knowledge base to help it recognize (1) what types of human error have occurred, and (2) what kinds of criticism strategies could help the user prevent or eliminate those errors. In discussing the “errors” half of this knowledge base, there is a difference between the expert's knowledge and his or her judgement. The focus in this article is more on judgement than on knowledge but both are addressed.To build automated critics it is important to understand the use and behavior of human critics. For this reason critic theory, principles and rules for design are described in this article. These are presented by showing various types of criticism encountered across a variety of generic tasks, such as medical diagnosis, coaching forecasting and authoring among many others. Thus a model of expert cognition and rules for identifying cognitive biases are presented. This rule base exploits four decades of literature on the psychology of judgement and decisionmaking as a generative theory of “bugs” in expert intuition and as a deep knowledge from which rules about buggy behavior are drawn. For the commonly recurring expert errors, specific preventive and corrective strategies are also reviewed and considerations for criticism presentation and deployment are explained. Particular attention is given to rules about when and how criticism should be offered. By consulting and attempting to operationalize the judgement and decisionmaking literature within the critiquing approach, this establishes criticism-based problem solving as a novel way to bridge the gap between the traditional domain knowledge-rich approaches of AI and the domain-independent, theory-rich approaches of decision analysis. Attention is also devoted to the obstacles to, and opportunities for, further bridging this gap.     

Understanding the “Heroes” and “It Getters”: Fandom and the Colbert Nation

The Colbert Report, an innovative American satirical news show, and the show's dedicated viewers, known as “the Colbert Nation,” redefined fan engagement through audience participation, mediated culture jamming, and ironic political spectacle. Yet very little is known about this fan group. This survey of The Colbert Report's devoted followers finds that the fans are distrustful of political and media elites, highly cynical, very politically involved, not apathetic, and moderately efficacious. Further analysis reveals that viewers have different motivations, some seeing the show as primarily entertainment, some mainly as a trusted source of political information, and others as a mix of entertainment and information. The fans are also found to be highly sophisticated consumers of satire and news, and watch the show as an alternative to mainstream media and as a form of comic relief from current events. Several implications are discussed.