When Matt Miller wrote his article asking if persuasion was dead, the country was in a very different political climate than the one we are in today. The nation was divided over many issues and that was emphasized in the 2004 presidential election. It seemed like no one could be convinced to believe anything opposite of what he or she already thought and it wound up being a very close race. However, in order to persuade, someone has to be persuasive to begin with and that’s where both presidential candidates failed. Neither John Kerry nor George W. Bush were very persuasive themselves during the campaign. Bush had the reputation of being a terrible speaker and Kerry wasn’t a strong one either, so it was the people around them and their parties stood for shaped public opinion about them. Yet even in that election persuasion wasn’t completely dead. A group outside of any political party called the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth was able to convince a substantial amount of Americans that Kerry wouldn’t be able to lead as president. Whether the evidence the group had was verifiable or not it did succeed in persuading where the candidates could not.
But with the next election the candidates did the persuading because they didn’t have a choice. Both Barack Obama and John McCain started out their campaigns with very little support and had to work convince not only the American people but members of their own parties to support them. Obama proved to be the more persuasive of the two for example by reaching out to a wider audience via the Internet. One of McCain’s persuasive tactics was to attack Obama based on a weak acquaintance with a former domestic terrorist, but this didn’t work. Ultimately it was the more persuasive candidate that convinced the most people.
Overall, the ability to persuade is largely up to the speaker himself. Some people can present a weak argument so affectively that even if the evidence isn’t true many people can be convinced of that person’s point. Persuasion definitely isn’t dead, it’s just that we don’t always hear the important arguments delivered by persuasive people.
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Persuasion is as alive as it has ever been.
ReplyDeleteMatt Miller suggested that it will not be easy to get persuasion back up and running, in his article, “Is Persuasion Dead?” He directs the loss of persuasion to politics, not everyday life. I would have to agree that it is harder to persuade a person into changing their political views or their stance on certain issues. He does not find persuasion relevant any long in the political world. I would have to argue that persuasion is still out there in the field of politics, but more so on the everyday level. It is more possible to be persuaded from someone you know and trust over someone who is trying to persuade you to vote for them.
I believe that persuasion is still alive and out there. There are so many mediums available to the public influencing opinions. One of the most popular forms of persuasion is the Op-Ed column. Recently, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has been trying to persuade the public to engage in his articles about Darfur and Chad. His goal is to try and get people interested in what is going on over there. His tool to do this: George Clooney. He thinks that by having a celebrity with him he will be able to get more of the public to read his articles. He is using this celebrity figure as a tool of persuasion to capture an audience’s attention and persuade them to read his articles. It is a pretty effective tool if you ask me. However, I already read his columns religiously, so it did not work on my. I was reading some of the comments and it seemed to be working.
I looked up on wikipedia the meaning of Rhetoric, it states, “Rhetoric is the art of using language as a means to persuade.” Not only do people manipulate language in order to persuade an audience, but also we have been discussing different forms of fallacies that could potentially fall under the form of persuasion, such as the bandwagon argument, “Everyone is doing it”. A friend recently pulled that argument on me in regards to gmail. He suggested that I get gmail before too many people have gotten it and before it looses its appeal.
Not only are there different mediums out there with opinions, but persuasion can been seen in everyday life. In my house at school, my roommates are constantly trying to persuade each other to do certain activities such as playing basketball, giving one another a ride, being able to use something of someone’s. There are different ways to persuade in situations such as these. One of my roommates graduated in December and has not yet found a job. He is easily persuaded to do things for people or do things around the house, because everyone says, “What else do you have to do?” We have a point. He does not have anything better to do, which is convenient, because we do not need to try very hard to persuade him.
In the end, persuasion is still a viable way to capture someone to your side.