Before photography went digital and camera phones accompanied people most everywhere, Pierre Bourdieu observed in 1965 that photography had become a "middle-brow art". "How and why," he asked, "is the practice of photography predisposed to a diffusion so wide that there are few households, at least in towns, which do not possess a camera?". Novel at the time, the question has been superseded today. Estimates indicate that 1.27 trillion new photographs will be taken in 2017. That amounts to an ambient (...) symphony of over forty thousand clicking shutters per second. That means the human population will take three times more photographs in one year than there are stars in the Milky Way.... (shrink)

In his 2002 Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, distinguished professor and legal theorist Richard Posner laid out for an academic audience his claim that intellectual engagement and conversation are increasingly the province of the academy and no longer torches carried by intellectual figureheads out into the public sphere. Two years later, in 2004, the best-selling Swiss writer Alain de Botton published a work of accessible nonfiction for a popular audience called Status Anxiety. In it, he argues that anxiety about (...) our status—our position in society—“possesses an exceptional capacity to inspire sorrow” (2004, ix). The two books—one from an elite academic calling fellow cognoscenti to engage the masses, the .. (shrink)

The rhetorical tradition has long been concerned with how to negotiate the discursive juncture between mass and elite audiences. Such a concern has contributed to what might be characterized as the rhetorical tradition's anxiety with regard to its own status. In this article I suggest that this anxiety parallels an ontological conception of the elite as second-order in relation to the first-order mass. I use the standoff between novelist Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey in 2001 as a running example of (...) status tensions in the public sphere, arguing for a theory of vernacular as language that talks and of specialized language as language that talks about. Finally, I suggest that the separate claims to status of vernacular and specialized language might be resolved by thinking further about Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia. (shrink)