Looks Matter

Though I was unable to attend the caucus last night, I did decide that I needed to begin to exercise my rights as a citizen eligible to vote. I will be the first to admit that I am enormously naive when it comes to politics; however, I decided that I wanted to rid myself of some of this inadequacy and #geteducated.
 

-The Caucus Mass-

This evening's experience at the Republican caucus was both enlightening and terrifying. I arrived 15 minutes before 7pm and the masses began to form around different parts of the tiny elementary school. My first observation was how many people of all walks of life were there, but especially students! I overheard a lot of them saying, "what's going on?" or, "what does this even mean?" It took at least 30 minutes to find the right line and then another 15 to get my ballot. You could tell that the true decorum of the event was taking all the staff by surprise because there were way more people than they expected to show up.

Analysis of Rhetoric in Politics

I was not able to physically attend one of the caucus meetings on Tuesday, but I was able to research the kind of communication and rhetoric that is affecting this year's politics. From what I know about politics, the candidate stands in front of a group of people, usually a large mass, who are either for or against their argument or stance. This rhetorical device helps the candidate present his/her views on a bias and non-bias scale.

Here are some other rhetorical devices or approaches that I have found through research:

• Markus Koppensteiner and two others in their article “Moving speeches: Dominance, trustworthiness and competence in body motion”, discuss how body movement or language gauge their dominance and trustworthiness levels. For example, according to their research, “Male speakers from the opposition were rated higher on dominance but lower on trustworthiness than speakers from other groups.”

• Politicians like to present positive views on what the public likes to hear, so that presents the rhetorical device of appealing to the audience. Melanie Mason in her article “A subdued Donald Trump sticks to standard pro-Israel positions in speech to lobbying group”, talks of Donald Trump “appeal[ing] to the pro-Israel crowd.” This helps politicians gain more favor and maybe even receive more votes.

• Social media and digital media are significant contributors to the political scene. Caucuses and political debates are always televised and/or put online on blogs, social networks, etc. This also affects citizens themselves. Yonghwan Kim said in his article “Social media and online political participation: The mediating role of exposure to cross-cutting and like-minded perspectives”, “Previous studies have demonstrates that news media use indirectly influences citizens' participatory behaviors via psychological variable such as political efficacy.” This is because social media has created false identities of people, so why not the politicians as well?

Looking more into the social/digital media aspect (because that is what I am researching for my project), it has affected all aspects of life, including politics. My argument is that social media is adversely affecting civilization through personal relationships since personal relationships are one of the things that hold society together; politics do as well, so when media starts to negatively affect politics, then civilization is in trouble.