| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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agency of their community. Each rhetorical situation provided listeners with opportunities to reevaluate orators’ virtues through their proximity to truth claims. Greek orators revealed special knowledge of issues affecting the community while reminding their audience of their own obligation to become responsive to the issues at hand. When speech was rendered for public consumption, Greek orators were scrutinized in terms of whether normative values and expectations were being satisfied or left unfulfilled by their deliberations.
The communicative symmetry of the Greek oratory model provides a working example of the ideal speech situation for rationalizing consensus and is a point of intervention into critical and historical debates of how radical antagonists found in industrial novels indirectly shaped public opinion and expressed cultural and social interests within the bourgeois public sphere of the nineteenth century, as well as demonstrated its transition from oral culture to literate culture. In the modern and postmodern ages, the written word has been further prioritized over oral traditions, which have not been so easily replicated or mass-produced. Although textual reproductions convey properties of language such as grammar and syntax, they fail to adequately reproduce sentiments, gestures, and intonations that empower language and make speeches memorable and transcendent.
The growth of the Internet in the late twentieth century and the emergence of a new technological sphere have been limiting the potential for critical speech as an essential component of communicative rationality. Digital communication has yet to fully achieve its potential for invigorating social exchanges of critical thinking. Rather, the Internet has been inspiring passive reliance on technical processes that have altered the consumption and production of information once used to formulate critical responses within the public sphere.