Digigoguery

Identifying and preventing digital demagoguery

Digital Demagoguery. Or the divisive Us vs. Them mentality as a discursive communication strategy and less the work of a single demagogue. Siloed information by corporate media and social media algorithms feeds our identity unless somehow disrupted or disfigured. And, I have some more bad news: if we use language, then we all demagogue (not necessarily often or always). Really.

Demagoguery referred, in my mind, to a person manipulating a crowd. Meaning I knew they were saying obvious falsehoods, exhibiting or inhabits ‘bad’ qualities, appealing to populism, and pandering to the crowd through emotion and passionate speech. Yet, these metrics don’t exactly help me see when I was being misled but only when others are being misled.

But, I have some good news. While I am under no illusion that this substack may not change broad public discourse, I believe investigating the media’s and our own use of media can disfigure our curated certainties if we examine how language and demagoguery operate in our posts, our lives, etc. by revealing how we too easily ourselves demagogue. One post at a time, one daily use of media. One approach changed. Demagoguery is present in media and political discourse in spades, of course, but can we identify it in ourselves?

Article Summary:

• Digigoguery means digital media foment Us/Them mentality

• Digigoguery is a communication culture we engage in via language and social media usage

• Corporate media share incomplete information via the rumor incentive

• Frame-check, not Fact-check, to disfigure our Us/Them communication patterns

• What the Digigoguery logo means

Anytime you read corporate news or social media posts, remember each is creating knowledge for you to consume. A few hundred or thousands of people employed in corporate newsrooms create what millions read. What are their selection methods and beliefs and the quality of their knowledge? We see every day how corporate media present differing versions and valuations of the very same events and people. I call this cornucopia of news MediaMart where corporations pack the ‘shelves’ with catchy chyrons and misleading ledes to compete for our attention.

To me, the news is no less than limited, biased knowledge backed by deep financial incentives.

Their proprietary rumor propagation models, and minute-by-minute news cycle, precipitate the sharing of deeply incomplete information, or the Fog of News. In Lies, Damn Lies, and Viral Content (2015), Craig Silverman identifies this practice in journalism as the rumor incentive: share the earliest version of a story with the least amount of information as quickly as possible to attract eyes to our ads and generate more clicks than our competitors. We know the common adage that runs something like “lies travel halfway around the world before the truth straps its boots on”. But what to do about the common media practice of pushing simply incomplete information at scale over hundreds of news outlets and within bias-confirming social media silos?

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Let me define demagoguery before I go too far.

From a Spring 2021 Ph.D. course on modern rhetoric, we discussed how Patricia Roberts-Miller (RM) defines demagoguery as a culture of discourse where deliberation about policy via arguments is replaced by arguments about identity wherein we ‘solve’ our societal problems by scapegoating some out-group. In Digigoguery, I apply her definition to digital contexts because it centers on the ways we accept demagoguery not just by how we easily find it in others. Our acceptance of certain social and corporate media ‘news’ unwittingly drives demagoguery. RM posits that when we rely on any of the following to make our arguments, then our conversations engage in demagoguery:

• binary paired terms (us/them; in-group/out-group scapegoating)

• naive realism (my subjective beliefs are unbiased, objective facts)

• projection (I condemn corruption, ergo, I’m not corrupt)

• apocalyptic metanarratives (my group faces extermination, compromise is disloyal)

Does any of this identity-based argumentation sound familiar? Because Others are faulty and not Me, My policies and conclusions are right and There’s are definitely wrong? Like speaking in broad terms about liberals v. conservatives, Democrats v. Republicans, elites v. deplorables, my opponent will end democracy, democracy is about to end, white supremacy v. black sanctity, etc. Now, none of these characteristics denies that people are threatened or that injustice occurs, it just reflects how we go about problematically and unnecessarily simplifying complex conditions to sidestep deliberation.

That scapegoating can occur by “appeals to expert opinion, a calm affect, in elitist language”, not just emotional populism, explains how the professional class’s blatant pandemic-era scapegoating of lab-leak theory adherents or Covid-19 vaccine efficacy skeptics was so accepted and divided the American public, as David Brooks seemed to acknowledge yesterday in the NYTimes. While Biden drew appeal for his apparent calm, grandfatherly contrast to Trump’s irreverence and bombast, each demagogues: even President Reagan (who demagogued with his “we win/they lose” line about the USSR) noted in 1987 that then-Senator Biden was a “smooth but pure demagogue”, with others in 2020 observing Biden is purely transactional and “will say whatever it takes” to become president, “discarding his demagoguery” on any wrong issue and moving on to the next issue (more on Biden’s and Trump’s demagogic style in another post). Essentially, demagoguery reduces policy arguments into in-group/out-group loyalty assuming “good people do good things, and so we don’t need to argue policy” but figure out “who is good and put them in power” (RM 177).

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Frame Check not Fact Check

To illuminate the demagogic and rumor-filled nature of corporate news media and social media, each week by Friday, I plan to publish a text-mined content analysis of 30-40 articles on the same event from the prior week. As when I teach writing students, I will use news aggregation sites, tools, and bias charts from Allsides, AdFontesmedia, NewsGuard, Media/Bias Fact Check, Ground News, and Sourcer to conduct what I call a Frame-check of each article instead of a Fact-check. Checking facts is useful for labeling speech true or false, right or wrong, according to one’s definition of facts (naive realism) yet limited and insufficient for revealing underlying fact-framing patterns and how we accept certain ‘facts’ over others.

Arguing about facts conceals what commonly informs and defines ‘facts’ to begin with: ideology and demagoguery. Via Frame-check, we will see how ‘facts’ and events are defined via the outlet’s ideological leaning, demagogic rationale, and article framing. And according to ideology scholars like Therborn, an ideology determines what exists, what is good, and what is possible. We can see how each outlet and even article argues what problems exist, what virtues exist, and what solutions are possible. This ideological frame-check understanding will reveal how easily we allow demagogic media to influence how we engage with each other in town, at work, online, and at school.

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The Digigoguery Logo

The 3-D curved logo of oval-shaped round bubbles represents the isolating incompleteness of and global siloing effect of social media feeds and the corporate news cycle. Each red oval can represent someone’s algorithm-constructed bubble and how we tend to project our subjective curated feed as global common knowledge. Each red bubble can represent a news outlet’s limited grasp of information and events. And, by seeing multiple bubbles curved as if over the earth, then I imagine we can better see how commonly we and the media easily identify Others from these bubbles. I don’t wish to replace this with one big bubble. Rather, I wish they become more opaque and less deeply ‘red’, as if the richness level of the color indicated the level of demagogic behavior (where more red = more demagogic and less red = less demagogic).

I intend for this logo to symbolize how our news feeds are not based on disconfirming information, that we are severely deluded into accepting a corporate/social mediated world that reflects our biases back to us by projecting our subjective perceptions as largely shared objective truths so that “the premises of our life become the premises of Life” (RM18).

Thence the demagoguery and Othering and the division, much of it created by algorithms disguised as our own identities and biases.

Within the next few months, I expect this Frame-check analysis strategy will become the first step in developing an analytical method I plan to call Epistemic Emissions wherein the rhetorical quality of knowledge (source reliance, incompleteness, ratio of objective terminology, sentiment analysis, etc.) in each article and outlet receives a demagogic assessment and rating to illuminate our perception of demagoguery in our social media usage.

See you next Friday!