Public Speaking

anonymous said...

Well on the whole, I think freedom of speech has much diminished in this country in every respect, except the internet--not a novel thought of course...and it's uncertain how long that can last. The technologies for tracking speech are so evolved here, it's unclear to what extent, freedom, that
is constitutionally protected speech, and speech that is autonomous (that is unmonitored) really exists. (Even as I write you, google is tracking me, in embedded ways the old technologies did not intrinsically possess.) The tools are so much more sophisticated, as is the facility for speed and sophistication of communication. It contrasts significantly with the broadside, the old primary model for communication in the old civil rights movement.

My students are obssessed with the Jena Six. One wonders if the knowledge being disseminated though is intrinsically more a-historical than in the past, along with all the media's translations of contemporary events. That is clearly a weakness now. I think we have to ask ourselves what the nature of the democracy that is being asked is and can it be sustained through the media being used, broadly in their social economy, and also whether the very modalities, terms of communication construct a sustainable democracy, what its outcomes might be. I wonder if it doesn't have a tinge of a blighted dystopia, that never submitted to the demands of a utopia (that existed for a short time only for the internet).

Maybe new social forms always do. What was said of the university when it first emerged? It is losing its place as locus of freedom of speech. It doesn't seem that there is anything as thoroughgoing in its avowed commitments to replace it. Anyway, I suppose I'm not optimistic, though I agree it does now give people new places to congregate and meet talk organize see act (within the scrim of representation) and create in ways that can result a material impact.

Interesting questions you raise.... I think about the dimension of dissemination contained in the question a great deal and whether the democracy, which I don't think is a radical democracy, though fleetingly it was, is now hostage to publicity of all kinds, not merely the corporate which is so apparent and much discussed.