A rhetoric thing...

‪I’m seeing more and more people using the same words and phrases as other people of their ‘tribe’ (in many areas/ affiliations /sides) online and in the news.

This is disturbing for me to see in the doxa (shared public consciousness / discourse). I feel like a kind of message is communicated when a majority of the opinions voiced in public echo one another so closely.

What I mean is that an accumulation of sameness in public speech begins to exert a pressure towards more sameness, rhetorically speaking. The subtle implication of many voices conforming to the chosen phraseology (even if it’s an expression of the beliefs of ‘your’ ‘side’) is that it’s not enough to agree with certain principles - you should state your agreement in specific terms and turns of phrase. There’s a catechismic quality to it that I find unsettlingly culty, whether I vehemently disagree with the underlying argument or align with it.

Obviously this is at least on its surface a stylistic criticism rather than substantive criticism of specific arguments, and as such you can dismiss it as irrelevant to the very important discussions that are taking place online and in public forums right now. Which is why I’m writing this here rather than tweeting it, I guess. But style is impactful.

More than just “the medium is the message”, the message is the message and the way the message operates is also a message.

Here are three ways I think that this kind of repetition and mirroring in-group language in public argument has an impact:

1) it flattens the argument: it conflates many voices into one amplified voice, and so robs some of the impact or value of *people* as individuals. People repeating and mirroring arguments reduces the discourse to avatars of ‘sides’, reacting predictably. That sameness can reduce the persuasive power of a group agreement; it erases individual points of view that happen to be in agreement by rendering the crowd ‘faceless’.

2) it privileges the ‘studied’ responder over the uneducated but well meaning responder: this is one of the things I notice particularly on the left (though the thing I’m talking about happens all over the place with everything from teenage girl coolness to office slang). When terminological exactitude becomes THE marker of your allegiance to a cause and acceptable terms change rapidly, people must either invest time in remaining up to date, or be cast out of the in-group by the rapidity of the movement; as in centrifugal force.

3) its apparent strength is fragile: while it presents a unified front, it also erases the difference between people who know what they’re talking about and people who don’t. Which is good for the people who don’t know what they’re talking about (they can use the proper phrases as a deflector shield), and bad for the people who do know what they’re talking about, because it becomes difficult to distinguish between the expert and the parrot.

3b) very personally, I find it boring and annoying and frustrating. It’s limited and limiting. It’s inherently self conscious and performative, because it’s by definition studied.

I don’t know what the solution is; it’s not just access to a thesaurus, though that wouldn’t hurt. Maybe it’s making sure people have enough of an education to confidently synthesise complicated information and articulate it in an individual way at the least and - more ideally - generate original thoughts in response.

The thing that worries me the most, I guess, when I see this kind of choral speech is that i worry it will make people afraid of original expression, and as a result, discourage original thought.

Xx

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