Language Games

Language is pretty much fundamental to journalism yet it is, and always has been, highly contentious. In 1932, Aldous Huxley wrote of a future in which people are so bombarded with useless information that anything resembling the truth is drowned. 

In his novel, 1984 (published in 1949), George Orwell sketched a dystopian future in which language is designed to control the masses and preclude dissent. 

Images courtesy of Stuart McMillen

 Philosophers too have agonised over language. Ludwig Wittgenstein argued most (if not all) philosophical problems arise from the short-comings of our language and our failure to understand its logic. In, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he suggests that if we could amend our logic and our understanding and use of language, philosophical problems would dissolve. They wouldn’t be solved, they would dissolve – we would realise they were never truly problems to begin with. So we don’t so much gain wisdom as escape confusion.

Of course no-one has yet successfully dissolved the problems with language so the journalist’s primary tool remains an imperfect one. For better or worse it can be used to influence and control the audience’s way of thinking without them even realising it. In his book of the same title, Steven Poole refers to this phenomenon as “Unspeak”. When you encounter phrases like “intelligent design”, “ethnic cleansing”, “the war on terror”, “pro-choice”, or “pro-life” someone has put a lot of effort into getting that exact word combination to you. Far from being neutral, these words come pre-loaded with an unspoken but heavily biased argument. 

You’re in a pretty tough position if you wish to voice opposition to a war everyone accepts as “the war on terror”. Strictly speaking, to oppose such a war is to take sides with terror. The usual way of fighting this is to employ some unspeak of your own. In the early 1970s, “pro-abortionists” ditched their literal but unappealing moniker in favour of “pro-choice”. By 1976 anti-abortionists – who had been calling themselves the “right to life” movement – had constructed the reactionary epithet, “pro-life”. These two terms have been framing the debate ever since, thrusting people into an ethical dilemma before they’ve even had a chance to be informed on the issue – which do you value greater, life or choice? Life is fundamental but choice denotes freedom and what kind of life can we have without freedom? 

As a journalist, it is very easy to be drawn into using these words and unwittingly passing on the manipulation to a wider audience. How many articles do you see reporting on “ethnic cleansing”, “the war on terror”, “operation Iraqi freedom” and other ethically crowded phrases? Then there’s always the potential for you to take some subversive initiative and start manipulating language yourself. Or you could always try to fight back and refuse to use language in this way. Whatever your choice, it requires a level of hyper-attentiveness to recognise these phrases rather than just consuming them. It seems quite fitting to end with the words of Wittgenstein:

"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself."

Blog is such an ugly word

I’ve never liked the word blog. It sounds like some weird, gross medical condition you’d feel embarrassed to tell people about. 

(Image by: Krystle Richardson)

Aesthetics aside, there’s no denying blogs, and social media in general, have fundamentally changed journalism. What was once a predominantly one way system is now a collaborative enterprise; and the immediacy of the web means the public can have their say without having to sit down and bash out a letter to the editor. While there are obvious benefits to the increased access journalists now have to their audience (and vice versa), you have to wonder how it affects the quality of what’s being spread. The same immediacy which is so alluring can also be quite worrying. Blog posts don’t have to be approved by an editor and there is rarely any standard to be met for comments to be publically visible. Not that I’m advocating censorship but people are frighteningly carefree about posting death threats these days. Those posting these threats may know they’re idle but that doesn’t exactly provide peace of mind for the people who have been targeted (including journalists and even a 6 year-old).  

Social media driven, reciprocal journalism is still quite new though. Blogs only really took off within the last decade and facebook was only made fully available to the public in 2006, the same year twitter was launched. Each wave of new journalists will, hopefully, have a clearer view of the problems and be able to find ways to absorb and work around them. 

In the end, whether you’re a blogophile or blogophobe, there’s no fighting the massive online tide (unless you want to start taking Chuck Palahniuk novels a little too seriously and get all anarchistic). And even though technology has changed the game, the words of Charles Darwin still apply:

"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”