Drug-Squad

largely opaque, but vitally importantcounterpart to dialectic in the communicationindustries.Many modern dilemmas are foregroundedby the question of dialogue or its absence. Inthis article I follow the critique ofcommunication set out by Peters (1999) andtrace the (predominantly Western) sources ofideas of dialogue to understand why themodern experience of dialogue is marked byan impasse and unfulfilled expectations. Iargue that the difficulty of dialogue acrossvarious social and media boundariesconfronts us daily and present a critique ofdialogue that avoids both the commonlyattributed moral privilege of dialogue and thetragedy associated with its absence.My aim is to investigate the contradictionsin the implication that dialogue leads to anunproblematic social world bereft of themoral opprobrium of dissemination and oneway,persuasive communication and dwell onthe lacuna in this argument.I suggest that by exploring older views of‘dialogue’ we can establish why dialogue istroublesome in the modern milieu. Mystrategy follows a distinction WalterBenjamin (1968) made between modes ofhistorical narration. He saw in every act ofhistorical narration a constructivist principleand wanted to align and compare thoughtthrough different ages no matter how difficultor inconsistent this approach could be. In thisview, the past lives selectively in the presentand helps us understand it. In this‘simultaneity’ across time, history works notin a solely linear way but by being arrangedinto various constellations.This work sets out to show how ideas fromthe ancient past and the near past haverelevance to the Internet and other moderncommunication media and their currentcommunication affordances. However, Iaccept, as Williams reminds us in Keywords,that it is not enough to investigate the originof a word or the context of its use over time,but that it is also required of the scholar torecognise…as any study of language must, thatthere is indeed community betweenpast and present, but also thatcommunity––that difficult word––is notthe only possible description of theserelations between past and the present;that there are also radical change,discontinuity and conflict, and that allthese are still at issue and indeed arestill occurring. (Williams, 1983, p. 23)This is notably the case with respect to theword ‘dialogue’ in the context of the multiplenetworked instances of what are commonlycalled ‘dialogues’ and ‘polylogues’ thatcharacterise the world of the social media.Vint Cerf (2005) demonstrates this idea inthe following statement:The Internet comes along […] and as aconsequence, the dialogue amongpeople with common interests has vastlyincreased.Somewhere between the liberalarts/humanities and the social sciences,dialogue exists in a contested space whereadvocates of different methods and positionshave attempted to capture it and appropriate itfor their purposes (see Van Eemeren, 2010;Habermas, 1990; Ong, 2004; Toulmin, 1992).In theory, dialogue is ‘trapped’ in the to-and-froof theoretical attempts at the separation andreunification of the dialectical and therhetorical (Crosswhite, 1996; Van Eemeren,2010).Dialogue as a registry of modern longingsIn his book, Speaking into the air: A history ofthe idea of communication, Peters (1999)argues that the idea of dialogue has becomerevered as the solution to many ofcontemporary social challenges:In certain quarters, dialogue has attainedsomething of holy status. It is held up asthe summit of human encounter, theessence of liberal education, and themedium of participatory democracy. Byvirtue of its reciprocity and interaction,dialogue is taken as superior to the onewaydissemination communiqués ofmass media and mass culture. (p. 33)It is a popular belief that lack of dialogue isto blame for many human problems, and thatMersham, G. (2014). Dialogue, non-dialogue and dissemination—ancient questions, contemporaryperspectives. PRism 11(2): http://www.prismjournal.org/homepage.html2