Sequence III Public Discourse

1. Sequence III Public Discourse

2. Logical Fallacy Arguing something false or misleading in an attempt to get the audience to agree with the speaker/writer’s position. Actually, keep in mind all of the rhetorical key terms. Use what you just learned to help you formulate ideas for your essay. Analyzing the rhetoric used can be an effective way to fully understand the issue and the existing beliefs and arguments about this issue.

3. Stakeholder “a person or group that has an investment, share, or interest in [the debated issue]” (dictionary.com) Ask yourself, “Who has the most to gain or lose from the situation, potential decision etc.?”

4. “Economic Citizenship and the Rhetoric of Gourmet Coffee” “As globalization signifies the interdependence of national governments, international trade organizations, and transnational business interests, the lines between local and global issues blur” (165). “Economic citizenship means accepting the task of defining political agency around the roles each of us plays in the cycle of global production and consumption” (165). “scotosis: rationalized acts of selective blindness that occur by allowing certain information to be discounted or unexamined” (167).

5. Race Just as the concept of “gender” has been made more sophisticated by shifting the emphasis away from biological signs to the gender role one performs, the concept of “race” cannot be defined as simply innate. Rather, it involves one’s role, behavior, conception of self, and how others represent a person or group. Personally, I would argue that racism is more or less founded on the principle that “race” is simple—something clear and precise that can be used a label and stereotype. So, in my opinion, being a responsible thinker means keeping in mind that “race” is actually complicated and complex.

6. Utopia dictionary.com: “an ideal place or state; any visionary system of political or social perfection” “a pure no-place where human interaction can occur” (Nakamura 145) “It is part of the business of advertising to depict utopias: ideal depictions of being that correctively reenvision the world and prescribe a solution to its ills in the form of a commodity of some sort” (Nakamura 152).

7. Commodity Product Item packaged and exchanged “the advertisement positions MCI’s commodity … as a solution to social problems” (Nakamura 145).

8. Spectacle “a public show or display, esp. on a large scale” (dictionary.com) “This ad writes race and poses it as both a beautiful spectacle and a vexing question” (Nakamura 146).

9. Tourism People traveling for pleasure; taking vacations to locations away from home “These advertisements, which promote the glories of cyberspace, cast the viewer in the position of the tourist, and sketch out a future in which difference is either elided or put in its proper place” (Nakamura 145). “Travel and tourism, like networking technology, are commodities that define the privileged, industrialized first-world subject, and they situate him in the position of the one who looks, the one who has access, the one who communicates” (Nakamura 146).

10. Xenophobia “an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange” (dictionary.com)

11. The Other • Us versus Them attitude • Subject vs. object • Looker vs. looked at • Mobile vs. stationary • First world vs. third world • West vs. East (“orientalism” and “occidentalism”) • Good vs. evil • Viewing groups of people as being like or unlike “us” in order to make one’s own in-group seem better or to justify their actions. Sometimes involves using stereotypes to make quick, inaccurate labels. • “Difference, in the form of exotic places or exotic people, must be demonstrated iconographically in order to shore up the Western user’s identity as himself” (Nakamura 148).

12. The Exotic Other Since something unlike us can be considered threatening, attempts are made to represent the other as something exotic, perhaps, but not threatening. This is sometimes referred to as “domesticating the foreign.” “This world without limits is represented by vivid and often sublime images of displayed ethnic and racial difference in order to bracket them off as exotic and irremediably other” (Nakamura 146). “The foreignness of the Other is exploited here to remind the viewer—who may fear the IBM-speak will make the world smaller in undesirable ways (for example, that they might compete for our jobs…)—that the Other is still picturesque” (150). “the exotic Other which both attracts us with its beauty and picturesqueness and reassures us of our own identities as ‘not Other’” (152).

13. Kitsch The term “kitsch” emerged in Munich, Germany during the middle of the nineteenth century (about 1860-70). It was used among those in the artistic realm to designate poorly made, “cheap” works of art. Although it has since then expanded internationally into discussions not only of visual art but also of literature, film, speech, and culture, its negative connotations have more or less persisted. Kitsch is seen as that which is poorly made—something that lacks depth of subject matter and quality of expression. In addition, however, kitsch is also considered to elicit simple and generic emotional responses. This accounts for the notion that kitsch pleases its audience, and, in fact, someone who tends to revel consistently in this sort of pleasure has been labeled a “kitsch-person.”

14. Kitsch (continued) “cute” non-threatening representations of culture, race, place etc. Object provoking a simple, common-to-all emotion (i.e. using pathos to get entire audience to feel the same emotion) Cheap item of little artistic quality; replica made out of cheaper material than the original “This fake NYC is much like the souvenir NYC snow-globes that visitors to NYC take home and recontextualize within their curio cabinets” (Congdon & Blandy 127).

15. Hyperreality Term introduced by French theorist Jean Baudrillard to refer to a contemporary world in which simulation replaces, or at least blurs, the distinction between “real” and “fake” A lifestyle permeated by reproduced copies and simulated experiences. “a world that seems to be without limits, one in which the images of nature are as good as or better than reality” (Nakamura 148). “living in place is no longer associated with common sense conceptions or experiences of reality” (Congdon & Blandy 128).