Talking Politics

(By Joshua Babcock) Like other keywords in this series, “media” is a diverse concept and category. At once broad and narrow, “media” can refer to media industries —as in “ the media”—often with added modifiers, like “the liberal media,” “the alt-right media,” or “the media establishment .” Usually, when we talk about media, we assume that we’re dealing with technologies of mass communication: things like TV, radio, podcasts, the traditional press, social media, and even online messaging platforms that disseminate messages and connect large numbers of people simultaneously. These are important, but they’re just part of the story. As a term, “medium” also describes anything that acts as a means of accomplishing something, an intervening substance, or the material that enables something to happen. In this sense, both medium in the singular and media in the plural are always about mediation : how one thing is necessary for another thing to exist, happen, or enable something else to ha...

(By Roberto Young and Joshua Babcock) As the English-language riddle goes: what disappears as you say its name? Silence. In many ways, voices and silences are two sides of the same coin. In other words, silences are not merely the absence of voices. Instead, as the anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouilot has written, silences are active, meaningful, and productive sites that indicate where we expect but do not hear a particular voice. This can lead to a seemingly paradoxical situation: not all absences are silences, and not all silences involve an absence. For instance, we don’t generally expect that non-citizens living outside a country be able to vote in a different country’s elections or have a say in state-level policies. The fact that people living in Singapore or Guatemala don’t vote in U.S. elections is an absence, in other words, but not necessarily a silence. In the opposite case, instances of voter suppression (say, in the U.S. ) are often highly visible and talke...

(By Roberto Young) The Talking Politics 2023 theme includes the word “voice.” But what are we talking about when we talk about “voice”? What is “voice,” and what is “ a voice”? “Voices” are everywhere. We speak of the “voice of a generation,” the “voice of a movement,” the “voice of the people.” Get-out-the-vote campaigns (especially in the U.S.) routinely use the slogan, “your vote is your voice.” When people are politically included, they “have a voice.” Advocates and activists often claim to “give a voice to the voiceless” through their/our work. What does this mean? As should be clear, “voice” has a dual meaning. First, in a physical sense, “voice” can exist as a phonosonic phenomenon that results from the vibrations of vocal cords as air passes through them. It doesn’t need speech sounds, though: it also appears through gestures and signs that can be communicated visually and tactically, through sight and touch, as in sign languages. Second, in a metaphorical sense, “voice” can ...

(By Joshua Babcock)  As Talking Politics 2023 kicks off, we thought it might be helpful to start by answering some of the most basic questions about the series. Questions like: What is talk? What is/are politics? And how do the two connect?  When we say “basic,” we don’t mean these questions are easy or that you’ve never thought about these things before, just that these are some of the important, ground-level concepts and ideas that our presenters will be working with. First, talk/talking .  In this series, when we say “talk” or “talking,” we actually mean “real-world language use” in a broad sense. This could be writing, signing, gesturing, speaking, and/or posting memes, to name a few. People talk about politics and also talk to accomplish things that we think of as specifically or uniquely political, like deciding who to vote for, debating public policies (whether as a policymaker or informally with friends), deciding to support a ballot initiative/referendum, speakin...