Meta: possible method?

I just read Marlia Banning's "Truth floats: Reflexivity in the shifting public and epistemological terrain" Rhetoric Society Quarterly (35) 3, Summer 2005. pp. 75-99. I'm not thrilled with the article; it seems to claim that self-awareness about the creation of texts erodes publics' confidence in texts. It seems to cling a little too tightly to the myth of objective reporting. For example, she says: "As shifts in information increasingly obscure the purpose, source, and status of any given communication, and reflexive representations highlight the constructed nature of any account, however, the information and common reference world so central to the possibilities of conversation in public life is diminishing" (p. 92). I would argue instead of "obscuring" communication, they're simply upending our previous ways of understanding communication. I would also argue that the "common reference world" was always a convenient fiction; recognizing that not every public was the object of address in the past forces us to realize the need to (and difficulties of ) address(ing) them now.

I'd argue that it doesn't erode publics' confidence, so much as educate publics to the fact that objectivity is a myth to be resisted and interrogated. It educates publics to be smarter about the information they're consuming. And I don't feel the "natural risks" section is particularly convincing (i.e., there's nothing particularly enlightening about 'natural risks' than about any other type of story--it seems that she's generalizing 'natural risks' as a way to highlight the controversy over the science behind global warming--but without ever saying that. While it might serve as a relevant example, one could also point to the administration's parsing of the definition of "torture" as another example where the arguments over definition define the debate and divide the public).

I have to say that I do love the method she uses: "My method catalogues events across media and genres. As Michael McGee has delineated, any 'apparently finished discourse is in fact a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which it is made.' ('Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture' 279). Thus one of the primary jobs for rhetoricians in a fragmented cultural context, is 'inventing a text suitable for criticism' (288). I watched, read, or listened to public news just as anyone of my socioeconomic status and rhetorical training might do and then actively selected and catalogued the 'scraps and pieces of evidence' that I present here (279). That I catalog events in this manner is significant; it is this kind of cataloguing that eventually produces the density and compression of facts in daily living that form the information necessary for deliberation of public affairs. My methodology in this article--aside from my training and particular expertise--is a rhetoric of the everyday. It is a public method available to all, though circumscribed by the degree to which various publics are aware of the representation practices of the media and the state, and the kind of cataloging that is involved in producing the information that they use in their deliberation on public matters" (p. 79).

However, does the method of "I collected a bunch of stories I thought were relevant" have sufficient legitimacy? Is there a richer tradition that this is drawing on that can build enough to make a dissertation from? Or is it legitimate enough to go with based on just this article's reading of an article?

Tangent: politics, narrative, and statistics

I've previously talked about how the most important thing to winning an argument is not having the facts on your side, but having a compelling narrative that makes "the facts" make sense to the audience. We seem to be seeing that develop even more in national politics of late:
From Salon.com:
"It is striking how Obama's rhetoric differs from standard political oratory by being a statistic-free zone. In the closing days in Iowa, Obama might talk for 40 minutes in a tiny town like Perry while citing only one or two numbers. In contrast, Clinton on the stump is a human pocket calculator, constantly telling voters how much purchasing power they have lost under Bush (about $1,000) and how many jobs were created under Bill Clinton (lots!). Even Edwards spices his talks with a burst of numbers about the extent of poverty in America." (Shapiro, W. Barack Obama's breakthrough victory. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/04/iowa_dems/)

Dan Schorr (Schorr, D. The politics of truth and celebrity. All Things Considered, Jan. 2, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17790148) connects this phenomenon to "celebrity worship"; which, though I think it does provide some insight, unduly temporizes the phenomenon with a kind of presentism that probably wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. (i.e., while the trope that "America is celebrity obsessed, to the point of neglecting important issues" is everywhere today, I think the phenomenon of being more taken with the narrative than the data predates our collective obsession with Britney.)

Tangent: intellectual detritus

1) Citizenship rhetoric & education (continued): As previously discussed, schools are about creating the next batch of citizens; thinking about that in light of other previous thoughts about immigration, made me start to play the analogy out (something I do lots of; hence my interest in "reframings" and other ways to further inform the debate through tilting it on its side)...does this then make home schooling the equivalent reaction of the xenophobe? (We can't control the larger world, and it's all going to ruin, so we have to "seal the borders" and only deal with taking care of our own.) Is home schooling essentially the paleo-con position? If that's true, is public schooling essentially a neo-con construction? I suppose it could be, or it could be a liberal construction (if education is conceived as creating a new collaborative culture rather than imperially imposing culture upon the next generation--a la the neocons).

2) The rhetoric of NAR takes on media consolidation: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre [media environment] that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in [media diversity] made in the wake of the [the advent of public broadcasting in the US]. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral [intellectual] disarmament." Does saying it that way make my thesis more compelling?

3) Motivation & GEC: In my day job as a marketer, I got a copy of Motivation Strategies, a trade publication about using promotional items to motivate sales teams, etc. I found this interesting:

Including luxury brands in an incentive program can be a great way to dress it up and give participants something to stretch for--believing that if they just work a little harder they might have a shot at earning that high-quality, luxury item. But incentive end-users should also make sure the luxury item fits the demographics and profile of participants.
But don't let your luxury item become the be-all and end-all of your program, says Dana Slockbower, Director of Marketing for Rymax. 'You need to have quality branded products at price points for everyone,' she says. 'Some people will be driven by that aspirational luxury item they can work towards, but others need to feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return.'
It becomes demotivating, in fact, 'to offer rewards that cannot be reached,' says Norma Jean Knollenberg of Top Brands, 'regardless of the brand or the perceived luxury value of the brand.' ("Living in the Lap of Luxury (Brands)", Motivation Strategies, Vol. 11, Issue 4, Fall 2007. p. 22)

So why is this interesting? Not because it's particularly insightful--if one remembers the chapter from high school psychology class, one can probably resurrect that page about the rats in the cage with the electrified floor and learned helplessness. What's interesting is that it's coming from what can only be called "the heart of the GEC beast"--capitalism at its finest, where competition is celebrated, and good citizenship is a PR strategy, not a responsibility (previous issues have talked about how companies perceived as "green" are rising in popularity without any need to address the issue of being green vs. being perceived as green).
Yet even here, there's a recognition that "offering rewards that cannot be reached" can be demotivating. Yet the quintessence of the GEC paradigm is the understanding that education serves the purpose of increasing one's success in the marketplace. It has no "backup plan", no "quality branded products at price points for everyone" for someone who looks around h/erself and doesn't see people succeeding in the marketplace; it has nothing to say to someone who recognizes that h/er job opportunities are limited by factors that have little to do with education. It has only that dream to sell; anyone who doesn't believe is accused of not dreaming hard enough. There is no recognition (in the education policies proposed in the GEC paradigm) that there needs to be a reason to attend school that helps students "feel they can actually achieve their goals and get something of value in return."

And nevermind the idea of being first in the world in all subjects and all elements of the global economy is to offer "rewards that cannot be reached", no matter how "luxury" such an idea might seem. From reading articles like this, it seems apparent that even the business community (which educationists are supposed to be falling over themselves to emulate) recognizes that not everyone is the top salesperson; motivation strategies exist to help improve the overall efforts and effects of the sales staff, but not everyone can (or wants to) "achieve at world-class levels". Yet, to point out such a fact in education policy is complete heresy--seen as proof that one recognizes others as categorically inferior, rather than proof that one recognizes the belief that "everyone wants a Rolex" is a categorically inferior belief.