Technical monologue saturated civic forums, crowding out public debate

Evidence

The presentations at the bi-weekly LRC meetings were numbingly, exclusively technical. There was no time in this forum for citizens to debate public issues. Instead, almost every time, someone from the company gave a slide show or verbal presentation on a specific aspect of the proposed plant’s technology, without ever directly answering questions from the audience. One meeting, for example, contained a presentation that lasted over an hour describing the plant’s one-way valves, showing that the chemicals could flow only in the directions in which operators intended them to flow and at the rates intended. The presentation included six slides of the valves, and the company representative described each part of each valve, one by one, in excruciating detail. Thus, little by little, the whole official public sphere was filled to the brim with exchanges of unanalyzed facts. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1413

Categorization

• XREF: Overload by technicality resonates with reader’s soundscape-of-information themes and how procedural norms substitute for dialogue. — connects to: Treating issues as purely technical makes public protest look like attention-seeking, not debate. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1027; Authorities define citizenship as technical fact-absorbing so activists mute politics in public forums — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1373; Technical theory jargons politicized leftist critics while pulling them away from politics — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 89 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Authorities define citizenship as technical fact-absorbing so activists mute politics in public forums #expands (0.94) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1373
• Framing talk as fact-exchange makes political conversation feel intimidating and pointless. #expands (0.92) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1013
• Technical theory jargons politicized leftist critics while pulling them away from politics #expands (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 89