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May 22, 2007
A sunny day in Dublin
by Sylvia S Tognetti
Just thought I'd share... actually that was yesterday. Now in County Wicklow, where, to my friend Tom's great disappointment, the pub in the town of Laragh ran out of Guinness. In other words, posting may be light over the next few weeks - but it usually is anyway. On the other hand, if I get inspired, or blessed by the Blarney Stone, I may put on my SylviaTognetti, not Poggioli hat and send a few dispatches.
Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at 8:46 AM | TrackBack
May 17, 2007
Al gets it
by Sylvia S Tognetti
As attention gathers around Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason
American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole....
...When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls."
I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the "consent of the governed" was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.
As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.
The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to "psychographic" categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.
In the article he also says:
If I do my job right, all the candidates will be talking about the climate crisis. And I'm not convinced the presidency is the highest and best role I could play. The path I see is a path that builds a consensus—to the point where it doesn't matter as much who's running. It would take a lot to disabuse me of the notion that my highest and best use is to keep building that consensus.
But if he should he decide to run, bloggers will have his back this time.
Luntz may be history anyhow as it isn't clear he would even know how to begin to reframe climate and related issues. In the Frontline interview, he also said: "you tell me where global warming fits in on the more immediate issues - Iraq, Iran, terrorism, health care, prescription drugs, education..." I will, but not today. It takes much more effort than finding jingles that resonate and this isn't my full time job. If we want to bring people around we have to go through the painstaking and discomforting process of constructing a new frame of reference rather than using inadequate ones just because they work. This dilemma is what motivated me to start blogging in the first place.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~p.s. Since I don't post regularly, I have not solicited donations for this blog but if you enjoy it, and buy your books through Amazon, you can help offset my costs by using links to books on this site or the Amazon search box in the side bar when you do so.
Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at 3:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
On the cultural and environmental philosophy of coffee cups
by Sylvia S Tognetti
David Ng shares some thoughts about his coffee cup and asks:
1. Can you show us your coffee cup?
2. Can you comment on it? Do you think it reflects on your personality?
3. Do you have any interesting anecdotes resulting from coffee cup commentary?
3. Can you try to get others to comment on it?
So here is one of mine - a souvenir from attending working group meetings of the Millennium Ecosystem Asessment. The full text on it reads: "Coffee, freshwhater, sugar... in f act everything we use is provided by the ecosystems we are part of. How much longer will they be able to provide these services? When I finish this cup I am going to look into it..." Inside at the bottom of the cup, as a reminder, is the link to the MA website. My other cup says "Oysters are habitat forming." And now I have a paper to finish about protecting ecosystem services provided by soil so I can keep drinking this stuff, and so the oysters in the Chesapeake Bay don't have their filtering mechanisms overwhelmed.
Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at 1:01 PM | TrackBack
May 16, 2007
The Pro-Glacier agenda
by Sylvia S Tognetti
I have real work to finish but, in the wee hours of the morning, as I waited for more coffee to bubble up from my stovetop espresso pot, I turned on the TV just in time to catch this clip of Stephen Colbert ranting about The Pro-Glacier Agenda. He also reminds us that Ptolemy's view, that the the sun revolves around the earth has been around 1400 years longer than the the notion that the earth revolves around the sun - but watch the video for more insight on mental rigidity and denialism. Then compare the above picture, taken by me on the Denali glacier sometime in the spring of 1988, with this one taken at the same location in June 2004, posted at wunderground by Steve Gregory. According to the pilot who flew him in, who could easily have been the same one that flew me in, "the out-cropping of rock in the background took all of just 3 years to become visible."
Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at 11:43 AM | TrackBack
May 14, 2007
"Dr" Luntz
by Sylvia S Tognetti
Doctor Frank Luntz now wants to advise Democrats about the use of words, and asks "why can't we have a civil discussion in this country?" Bill Maher, Paula Poundstone and Arianna Huffington tell him. (So did I in this post). For some cathartic release, see the video on HuffTV. Bill Maher and Paula Poundstone have much better advice for the Dems. Global warming is now "extended allergy season." But for more advice, watch the video. More commentary from Arianna here.
And Dr. Luntz: if you would like to be a guest commentator on The Post-Normal Times, my invitation stands, to come over and talk about the climate of increasing uncertainty - that you have helped to create, while polluting public discourse. Frankly, civil discussion doesn't happen without integrity on all sides. There are many people, including myself, who have not only advocated but have tried to have exactly this kind of a civil discussion, and have built careers looking for ways to "be environmentally protective and not be anti-economy" as you put it. According to you, we (i.e., all "those who advocate a change to global warming") are all angry and hysterical. But what makes you so reasonable? Name one reason anyone should listen to or pay you? I really don't care about the shirt on your back but I do have a vision of the future in which you flip burgers for a living.
Update: Jeffrey Feldman at the Frameshop has a detailed analysis of what is now called, The Luntz - a term now among the numerous synonyms for common street crimes collectively known as "The Confidence Trick." In this case, it is about selling Luntz's book - don't buy it. Feldman tells you everything you need to know.