Tiger Woods gets caught. Brittney Spears shaves her head. Lindsay Lohan enters rehab. The goal of today’s media is to reach its audience and evoke emotion. News updates, celebrity lives, sports stories all employ pathetic language. We enjoy listening to caddy drama and intimate details of the lives’ of the famous and journalists, news anchors, media personnel, authors, and politicians know this. Emotion sells.
For any story to be successful, emotion must be present. In order to reach the intended audience, they must be lured in by bait. The bait is emotional language. Most would agree that a mundane news broadcast would be dreadful to watch. As sad as it is, people are drawn to disaster and drama. You rarely hear any positive information on the news today. Everything involves scandal, devastating homicides, and terror. The connection: emotion. Take educational books for example. Why do most students refuse to read them and instead use Sparknotes to quickly finish the assignment? The books are boring. If they involved topics intriguing to that age group, students would have no problem reading the entire book as opposed to the first and last chapters of boring books. Old English communities are the last thing high school students want to read. For my Women’s Gender class, it was mandatory to read a novel about homosexuals. In each book, the main character was a gay woman suffering though some dilemma. In mine, the narrator was a immobile, handicapped feminist lesbian. The whole book detailed her sexual acts and experiences. It succeeded. It withdrew an emotion. Disgust. I was appalled that I had to read a book that went into that much detail. I will forever be scared for life. Another example is a lackluster gossip magazine. That is an oxymoron. The point of the tabloids is to inform people of the exciting, dramatic, scandalous lives of celebrities. People would not buy a magazine if the main article was “David Beckham Goes Shopping.” We want to see action. Him lying on a beach revealing a chiseled six pack would be a more appropriate choice and definitely generate more profit. Point being, people respond to emotion, but it must be an emotion appealing to them. The media understands this thus abusing it and overusing emotional appeal in the headlines.
A direct relationship between language and emotion exist and when combined, equate to communication. Pathetic languages involve language, emotion and communication and when perfectly deployed, create a popular story. Media messages attack this strategy. Sometimes the amount of emotion used is suitable however most times, too much is used. Some things should be kept private. How would you feel if every single aspect of your life was detailed in a newspaper headline? It would be frustrating. Everyone is entitled to a certain amount of privacy. There are even laws involving confidentiality, yet the media still seems to neglect to abide by the laws and reveal every personal story of every celebrity, athlete, politician, and etcetera.
Personally, I enjoy the gossip magazines, I guess making me a hypocrite, but I do sympathize for the persons featured. Today’s world revolves around pathetic language. In some ways, for example communicating with a good friend, a future employer at a job interview, or a loved one, utilizing emotion to reach your audience is a good thing. But when the media intrudes on the personal lives of the famous for our entertainment is crossing the line. Everyone is given the right to privacy, but sometimes that right is taken away and exposed and that is not right. The media overindulges in the use of pathetic language, making public discourse too pathetic in today’s society.
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I definitely agree with the idea that emotion sells and people are often times more easily persuaded by an emotional appeal then they may be by a logical or an ethos appeal. Things truly are just boring when there is no emotion involved, but they would be absolutely absurd and without reason if the emotional appeals begin to greatly outweigh the logical appeals. That is why public discourse must maintain the balance between ethos, logos, and pathos even though it really is just easier and can be a lot more fun to rely more on pathetic appeals.
ReplyDeleteWhat outrages me the most is when the media distorts the images and perceptions of public figures in an attempt to evoke emotion from their audience.
For Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vClAHgN7xoI&feature=related
In this ad Tiger's father is reprimanding his son for his bad decisions that he made in the past few months. This advertisement seems kind of creepy to me, and is basically a direct attempt at evoking an emotional appeal from the audience from the words of Tiger's deceased father. This advertisement is very controversial because those words that were spoken, as Tiger stares like a guilty dog into the camera, were taken from an interview with Earl Woods a few years back when he was talking about his relationship with his wife. So these words were chopped up and rearranged together simply to entertain audiences through emotional appeals. A relationship between a man and his father and these choice words that are spoken from the wise and respected father to his son in a time of need are sacred occurrences that should be kept confidential. Not even being Earl's real words, Nike fabricated this whole emotional situation in an attempt to stimulate their audience to buy their product. This kind of exploitation is constant among movie stars, athletes, politicians, etc. And while it does help make some entertaining media that will be acknowledged by the American audience, it creates an impossibly high standard that these people, just as human as you and I, have to live up to.
The word 'entertainment' is especially of note in this discussion. As both posters have noticed, appeals to pathos are just more fun for both the audience and the speaker or writer. In any online forum, for example, you will come across the flamer or troll whose sole objective is to use pathetic fallacies such as the red herring or sentimental appeal to provoke an angry or particularly hateful response from the reader who posts an emotionally charged response in return to the delight of the trolling party. Why do trolls exist? Because to them (and many others) this emotional response is funny, completely irrational, and makes the author or speaker look like a fool. This is a good example of how many news programs or tabloids operate, often provoking that emotional anger or surprise that people are so attached to.
ReplyDeleteIf we enter the realm of neuroscience and explore what emotions really are, we see that they are particular patterns in which the neurons fire. They are chemically induced. For this reason, I believe that these emotions, this emotional rush, becomes an addictive pastime. Instead of watching your favorite news program for objective, useful news, perhaps we have trained ourselves to watch for the shot of emotions that arise when we see the latest local murder, funny or cute story, or the downtrodden face of Woods as he makes his public apology. It is clear the masses favor material that will generate any sort of emotional response.
While I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to want to generate this emotional rise or be provoked in this way, I do believe that in excess it detracts from the substance of the real argument and can often mask truly useful information of which we may want to pay our full attention to in a calm and thoughtful way.