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“While transparency is considered an ideal when it comes to good governance, the deliberative process between political elites is affected by the lack of private space where options can be discussed without concerns about immediate public sanctions over ‘potential’ ideas, let alone actual voting records. With continuous surveillance over every word uttered, the options and tradeoffs that should be considered when faced with a potential crisis are constrained.

While C-SPAN has provided a window into the world of Congress, it has also altered how politicians talk to each other as this window provides a grandstanding opportunity that they did not have before. Members of Congress are frequently tempted to address the television audience and not one another. In life, people make mistakes and they often apologize for them. With cameras recording nearly every political interaction, mistakes are not easily forgotten, preventing politicians from moving forward. This constraint of transparency is magnified by the reality that congressional representatives often come from relatively non-competitive voting districts where they are beholden to perspectives from one side of the ideological spectrum, hampering their likelihood of considering options and compromising on their initial positions.

What this means for people hearing these highly charged political interactions is that politics does not appear to be a place of productive decision making. Elite discourse does not mirror the types of conversation that everyday citizens often have to get through their daily lives, where compromise is key in the work place and in the family. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that citizens who pay attention to the political process often feel like mere spectators rather than actors and many citizens simply tune out altogether.”

“Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.”

I think Mauro’s conclusions may have lots of applications beyond the domain of video games, perhaps in political campaigns, etc. Read on for a terrific look at how such compelling and/or totalizing experiences can be crafted here.

“By privileging rationality, both the deliberative and aggregative [political] perspectives leave aside a central element which is the crucial role played by passions and affects in securing allegiance to democratic values. . . . The failure of current democratic theory to tackle the question of citizenship is the consequence of their operating with a conception of the subject which sees individual as prior to society, bearers of natural right and either utility-maximizing agents or rational subjects. In all cases they are abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. What is precluded in these rationalistic approaches is the very question of what are the conditions of existence of a democratic subject.” (Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, New York, Verso, 1996, pp. 95-96)

Protestors held signs in Tahrir square imploring “Leave, my arm hurts” and “Leave, I want to shower/see my wife/shave/get married.” Of particular note is the way in which administration appeals were used as material for comic fodder. I think that the existence of such discourses in these matters continues to demonstrate two points about the role of humor in politics: a) it still remains highly undertheorized in a way that is no longer adequate for present conditions, and more so, b) that in everyday practice, it blends with a variety of other ways of communicating to create interactional effects larger than the sum of their parts.

“To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.” (Geertz, Local Knowledge, 1983, p. 16).

Indirectly, I think Geertz is dealing with a fundamental crux of much work on public deliberation–asking us to maintain a “largeness of mind” that incorporates the vast diversities of our planet while still being able to produce unities, decisions, and other outcomes. Geertz’s quote leads me to ask: Are there fundamentally incommensurable forms of communication in our world? In other words, are there interpretive frameworks, linguistic understandings, or other forms of human symbol use that could never be brought together or reconciled, no matter how much communication was involved?

The unceasing repetition of certain terms in the media has become fair fodder for critiques by comedians such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Watch Colbert’s quick deconstruction of the “wave” metaphor in the midterm elections:

Colbert Midterm Election Coverage

One of my students forwarded me a recent Rachel Maddow segment similarly fact-checking an assertion that’s been propagated through many platforms about Obama’s expenses during foreign visits:

Maddow on the Media

It’s a sad day when some media commentators like Maddow have to turn from their jobs reporting and analyzing on all the happenings of governments, businesses, etc.—to spend their time fact-checking and trying to prevent corruption in other media. Stewart and Colbert have been our primary media critics of the past decade, and that these roles are being taken over by Maddow and others tells us just how bad the repetition problem has become in an oligarchic news industry.