February 15, 2004

public language#2

In the few days of last week that I spent visiting federal parliament in Canberra I listened closely to the public language of the politicians. What was the language of their rhetoric I wondered.

I realized that the public language of federal parliament is a machine language. Instrumental reason now uses a managerial language that is constrained by the opinion polls and media spin. It is focused on manipulating public opinion. It avoids the need to think about public policy in any depth.

Most of what I heard in Parliament was fog. Marketing fog. Some of it was corporate speak based on the command and control structure of politics. To participate you had to master the mind numbing style of managerial speak.

At a coffee shop I overheard a health bureaucrat talk in terms of nodes, value-added communication, networks between silos and enhancing customer choice. Everyone was customers.

There were no citizens. I wondered where they'd gone.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 15, 2004 11:34 PM | TrackBack
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