Free Public Discourse Essays and Papers

impact on personal and public discourse? Many people may say that it affects discourse negatively. Most people, however, agree that e-mail is a very common, cheap and quick form of communication which enables them to fulfill their social need of interaction. People at different age and different education or social level have their own e-mail accounts and they communicate with others electronically way very often. E-mail has positive impact on personal and public discourse. E-mail has positive influence

Neil Postman, "Amusing Ourselves to Death -- Public discourse in the age of show-business" This book is a classic: everybody knows it, and everything has been written about it. Let me write some more. Postman's book caused a lot of public discussion in the mid-eighties, but it is now as relevant as ever, possibly more so. Today, it has almost become an axiom of our society that the answer to the questions raised by our technological advances lie in the application of further technology, some of it

Public identity and opinions are formed through the rapid circulation of information. The emergence of new forms of communication have profound effects on society by drastically shaping the social landscape though rapid information transmission. Gabriel Tarde described the formation of publics as resulting from accelerated information transmission following the introduction of the railroad, printing press and telegraph which “perfected instantaneous transmission of thought from any distance” (31)

should be able to speak up on a public setting and state their case. Whether they should possess the ability to freely protest or not, depends on if their argument will be detrimental or beneficial to the minds of a multitude of the population. This process of deciding the worth of a speech should consist of a group of experts who are concerned with the topic at hand. Now, I insist that experts of the subjects of speeches should decide the fate of these discourses, because they understand better

digital computers.2 News delivery is present on every communication medium. I will look at the difference in value of the content between the media. And I will explain how the World Wide Web — as a new invocational medium — will bring back a public discourse based on logic and reason. And how it will re-democratize the libertarian press. Comparative Descriptions In published media — the oldest technological news distribution method — news is provided on a physical support on which alphabetical

according to author William Dalrymple, attention to the crisis in the broadsheets and broadcasts of the West is "occasional and momentary" at best. No doubt this reticence must in part have to do with the West's tendency to quarantine religion out of public discourse and concern. The persecution of Christians lays a special injunction on the church in the West to examine modern paradigms and strategies for evangelism. Often Christian missionary approaches are founded on racial and religious assumptions that

  Within a couple of minutes, the stage was set for all that was to follow. Since adopted by the media, the Bush administration and the American people, the religious reference of ³evil² by the President has become an integral part of the public discourse.  Framing the way we talk and think about the day¹s events, and all subsequent events, including talk of Bin Laden, the Taliban and terrorism, the use of binary language in religious and metaphoric expression have become an important element

is only able to illuminate limited areas of language. It will be then suggested that metaphysical speculations about the sort of entities named by words are at best unhelpful. The idea that words get their meaning from the way they are used in public discourse will then be introduced as potentially more useful, although some problems with this approach will also be noted. Finally it will be suggested, very briefly, that an answer to this question may best be found in the common human condition – how

British TV Drama To what extent has British television drama contributed to a public discourse on major political and social issues, both in the recent past and during the 1960s. Please draw on specific examples in presenting your argument. In this essay I will discuss how political and social issues have been raised in British television drama and also how they relate to public discourse in Britain. I will discuss TV dramas such as Our Friends in the North, Talking to a Stranger, Cathy Come

the National Endowments of the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment of Humanities (NEH) (Childs, 2). This is the artist's job, to make us, all of society, think about who we are and who we are becoming. Art, just like any other production of public discourse, is there to persuade us to look at our lives and to act accordingly. And despite the fact that they might not explicitly say what our course of action should be, they will tell us through their brushstrokes, sculpting or lyrics. Likewise, the

Amusing Ourselves to Death: It's Time to Stop Laughing The form of communication created by the television is not only a part of how our modern society communicates, but is has changed public discourse to the point that it has completely redefined it, argued Neil Postman in his convincing book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He viewed this as very harmful, and additionally so because our society is ignorant of it as they quickly becomes engulfed in its epistemology. When faced with the question

the human conscience. With all the options now available to company executives, citizens must be sure to keep them from abusing their powers and continuing to harm employees, mistreat animals, and kill consumers. The best ways are to promote public discourse and to make the most of the power of the consumer by thoughtfully deciding where to spend their hard-earned dollars. To understand where the fast food industry is today, we must look at the technological advances that allowed it to reach

The Importance of Exile in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney To be a poet in a culture obsessed with politics is a risky business. Investing poetry with the heavy burden of public meaning only frustrates its flight: however tempting it is to employ one's poetic talent in the service of a program or an ideology, the result usually has little to do with poetry. This is not to condemn the so-called "literature of engagement"; eye-opening and revealing, it has served its purpose in the unfinished story

the dominant political, economical and cultural force in the 21st century." Quote from "Globalism: The New Market Ideology" by Manfred D.Steger, Page 6 Globalization is one of the most charged issues of the day. It is everywhere in public discourse - in TV sound bites and slogans on placards, in web-sites and learned journals, in parliaments, corporate boardrooms and labor meeting halls. Extreme opponents charge it with impoverishing the world's poor, enriching the wealthy, and devastating

anything that is indecent, or to send anything indecent with "intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass" ("Stop the Communications ..." n.p.). The goal of this bill as written (though not as stated by its proponents) is to try to make all public discourse on the Internet suitable for young children. The issue of whether is it necessary to have censorship on the Internet is being argued all over the world. There are numerous homepages on the World Wide Web discussing this issue, or asking people

happily surrendering ourselves to it, Americans are losing the ability to conduct and participate in meaningful, rational public discourse and public affairs.  Or, to put it another way, TV is undoing public discourse and, as the title of his book Amusing Ourselves to Death suggests, we are willing accomplices. Postman bases his argument on the belief that public discourse in America, when governed by the epistemology of the printing press, was "generally coherent, serious, and rational" (16)

Critical Discourse Analysis Jan blommaert and Chris Bulcaen makes a brief introduction to the study of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA intends to use social-theoretical method in discourse analysis and is primarily linguistically based (Blommaet & Bulcaen, 2000, p.447). It intends to analyze the structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control through a textual study (Blommaet & Bulcaen, 2000, p.448). Based on the assumption that social discourse is constructed and

topic, which resulted in the creation of legislation prohibiting "conspicuous" signs of religious affiliation in public schools. This article of law, was pointedly aimed at young Muslim girls who wore the hijab in state schools. Proponents of the law argued that it was a defence of laicite, a French principle which is described as delegating religion to the private sphere, and out of the public civic sphere. Joan Wallach Scott writes, that such legislation, or separation is the state acting to protect

reasons being are we don't take the time out to recognize the problems that escalade with our democracy and education before they get bigger, we as a whole don't care about our children’s education, and we are not properly discussing issues using public discourse but instead we are arguing, turning arguments into fights and fights into death. Today folks are too worried about the latest fashion, celebrity gossip, the hottest songs on the radio and all I hear from my generation are things like, “You mad

news coverage, and literary works). Recent scholarly articles and books have attempted to correct this verbalist imbalance by examining the genres and discourses of nuclear art (e.g., painting), cinema and photography. Collectively, this work establishes that the Bomb is -- after W.J.T. Mitchell -- an "imagetext" in which verbal and iconic discourses interanimate to produce ways of (not) seeing and forms of (not) feeling that have historically positioned cultural subjects in relation to the technologies