Technologies of Public Persuasion

As technology increasingly dominates the public sphere, Technologies of Public Persuasion offers richly descriptive examples of how technologically influenced forms and artifacts of communication effect transformations in the self-understandings of publics and subjects. This special issue of Public Culture exposes readers to new discursive genres and practices, linking literary cultural methodologies and theories to social analysis. The contributors explore topics ranging from the use of cell phones by middle-class Filipinos in the civilian-backed overthrow of President Joseph Estrada to a media reported "hint" from Alan Greenspan that impacted and altered economic reality through speculation. An essay investigates the politics surrounding the formation and use of Indonesian as a self-consciously modern language designed to reconstitute the social and political identities of its speakers. A photo-essay depicts graffiti on abandoned school buildings as a communicative medium. "Crimes of Substitution: Detection in the Late Soviet Society" looks at late-Soviet detective fiction, censorship strategies, and Soviet semiotics to show how Soviet citizens subverted dictated modes of behavior and challenged the symbolic order of Soviet society. One contributor examines how performance and ethno-linguistic practices become techniques for spatially and socially locating identity. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and the editor of Alternative Modernities, also published by Duke University Press. Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, also published by Duke University Press.