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POLITICAL COMMUNICATION: Dumbing Down and Infotainment

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POLITICAL COMMUNICATION: Dumbing Down and Infotainment Department of Political Science Major in Politics, Philosophy and Economics Chair of Political Sociology POLITICAL COMMUNICATION: Dumbing Down and Infotainment Thesis Supervisor Candidate Prof. Michele Sorice Vittoria Pioli Student ID: 079052 Academic Year 2017/2018 1 Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………3 Chapter One: Political communication………………………………………………………….7 1.1 Public Sphere………………………………………………………………………………9 1.2 Media Influence……………………………………………………………………………10 1.3 The Information Age………………………………………………………………………13 Chapter Two: What is Dumbing Down?………………………………………………………...16 2.1 Political Participation……………………………………………………………………...17 2.2 Quality vs. Quantity………………………………………………………………………..18 2.3 Dumbing-down: reinventing the political process………………………………………....20 Chapter Three: What is Infotainment?..……………………………………………………..…..23 3.1 Measuring infotainment……………………………………………………………………24 3.2 Plebiscitary shows as democratic entertainment……………………………………….…..25 3.3 Performance, interactivity and engagement………………………………………………..27 Chapter Four: Applicability and Relevance today……………………………………………....30 4.1 Politics and Popular Culture………………………………………………………………..30 4.2 Celebrity Politicians and Political Communication………………………………………..32 4.3 Readdressing the electoral volatility…………………………………………………….....33 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………………….36 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………..39 Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………….46 2 “The two words information and communication are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.” - Sydney J. Harris1 Introduction If we come to endorse the Aristotelian concept of the Zoon politikon (IV sec. B.C.), that is to say, literally, that man is a “civic” animal, a citizen-animal, we would convey that men (i.e. mankind) cannot live by themselves and it will prove them necessary to interact and, therefore, communicate. The famous expression is sometimes mistakenly translated as a political animal, but the adjective politikon is derived from the ancient Greek word polis, which actually means city. However, more generally, man is considered a social animal in Aristotelian terms. In fact, all individuals need to live together in groups, communicate and accept that they (we) are part of the same – shared – world. Thus, we posit communication at the very basis of men’s lives and of their survival on earth. Communication is the first tool we have at our disposal to connect with each other, exchanging basic codes of conduct, values, symbols, preferences, opinions, beliefs and so on and so forth. When joining together, people build communities of mutual respect in the interaction of its members. The community will not reduce the essence of all individuals to some homogeneous quality common to all, but the group will highlight every personal characteristic by confronting each of them with the others, establishing relations of natural sociability within its members and efficiently developing everyone’s skills and attitudes in order to bring novelty, growth and added value to those given groups and communities. Once established, larger communities will necessarily need some rules to function properly and the most efficient dialogue in order to set out, develop and pursue a “good life” takes place in politics. Here, the purpose of communication, a purpose assigned to men by nature according to Aristotle, would be to reveal what is advantageous and what is harmful, and consequently to expose what is just and what is unjust. Furthermore, the “good politics” would prefer and follow certain paths and codes of behaviour instead of others in order to achieve the highest level of growth, health, and well-being of given communities. For instance, following David Easton’s outlook set out in 1953, Politics decides what is right and what is wrong through the correct interchange of the inputs from the environment and the outputs into the environment. In fact, a political system receives the 1 Harris, S. (1975). The best of Sydney J. Harris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin., p. 293 3 demands and the support from outside and then produces and communicates decisions and policies, which, in turn, will additionally accumulate new feedbacks for the well-functioning of the system as a whole. Thus, the coming together of those two spheres of human nature, sociability, and politics (the private and the public life of each person), would generate a political civil society producing multiple interpretations and representations of a shared reality. In more recent times, this happens also through the work of the media system. In this reality, people – namely, the citizens – have a certain “power to communicate”, an expression endorsed in our modern concept of the freedom of expression. The communicative power, in fact, gives the individual the opportunity to develop his own opinions, values, and attitudes. Moreover, it sets the way through which those opinions can be expressed, and it provides the place where the citizens can confront their ideas. Today, this place is the media sphere, and by the use of the latter citizens can reach larger and larger audiences and further influence other people’s opinions, beliefs and behaviours (Sinha, 1997). Nonetheless, and quite sadly, communication is not always transparent nor linear. In fact, globally, individuals face persistent forms of censorship and they receive distorted and misleading information along with stereotyped images of gender and race. Moreover, some of them have restricted access to knowledge and insufficient channels to communicate their ideas and opinions. That is why, remarkably, in this scenario, it has been drafted in 1996 The People’s Communication Charter (PCC), one of the most noteworthy, recent and legal examples of the people’s struggle for the right to communicate. The People's Communication Charter is an opening step in the development of a permanent movement concerned with the quality of our communication environment. The initiators of the PCC believe it is time for individual citizens and their organisations to take an active role in the shaping of the cultural environment and to focus on the resulting production and distribution of information and culture. However, even though the Charter has been codified at the international level, it still holds only basic consideration worldwide: for instance, shockingly many people do not even know it exists. Along with the creation of some pluralist and sustainable cultural environment, the aim of the Charter is to promote communication in general, since, as its Preamble mentions, being communication basic to the life of all individuals and communities, people are entitled to participate in it, and to make decisions about it within and between societies.2 In this scenario, the Charter points out to the importance of the freedom of expression, specifically free of any interference from public or private interests. It is fundamental 2 The People's Communication Charter: An International Covenant of Standards and Rights. Reproduced in Culturelink 19, pp 171-75 4 for citizens to develop their own communication skills, channels, and institutions through which they can speak for themselves and tell their own stories.3 Furthermore, The People's Communication Charter provides the common framework for all those individuals who share the belief that people should be active and critical participants in their social reality and should be able to communicate their ideas and opinions. But the Charter is not an end in itself. It mainly provides the basis for an enduring critical reflection on those world-wide trends, tendencies, and inclinations that determine the quality of our lives in the third millennium. Finally, it is true that public systems and national organizations do not always help people in getting proper information, but it should be recalled that, nowadays, public space is increasingly dominated by a varied assortment of uninformed individuals, many of whom are self-deprecating, contemptuous of formal education that tend to minimize the value of experience. It seems that now we are living in an era where disinformation overcomes knowledge. And this is not a good sign at all. A modern society cannot function without a social division of labour and without relying on experts, professionals, and intellectuals. Naturally, nobody is expert about everything. Regardless of our aspirations, we are bound by the undeniable limits of our talent. As a community, we prosper because we specialize and because we develop formal and informal mechanisms that allow us to trust each other for their respective specializations. The great technological development of our era has given us access to an unprecedented amount of information. The result, however, was not the beginning of a new Enlightenment, but the rise of an age of incompetence in which a sort of uninformed egalitarianism seems to prevail over traditional consolidated knowledge. This thesis explores the political dimension of communication – namely, political communication – through its academic and popular background. Our starting point shall be the presentation and the discussion of the notion of the public sphere as presented by Jürgen Habermas in 1962. Furthermore, we shall observe the structural, ideological and conceptual influence of the media apparatus, particularly during an era known as the Information Age, over this concept. Afterwards, we shall observe and learn
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