The Promise and Perils of Voice

This article, based on the author’s presidential address at the International Communication Association’s 69 th annual conference, speaks to the dual-edged nature of voice. It positions voice and the public as two closely related concepts, and reviews how varying definitions of the public throughout the years have played a critical role in determining which voices get heard. The article then discusses the normative foregrounding of voice in deliberative democracy and how, facilitated by technology, voices also bring with them noise and clamor. Finally, this article highlights concerns that arise from an overabundance of voices, and calls for mindful, disciplinary exercising of voice.


P. Moy
The Promise and Perils of Voice

Voices and the public
Voices, whether in the days of Aristotle or an age of social media, are part and parcel of everyday life. In any given day, voices surround us and invade our senses. Voices energize at times, enervate at others. They can move us to action as well as tears, just as they can paralyze us in fear. Whether in the form of modern art or memes, a political debate or personal diary, the whisper of a loved one or the written word on a wet postcard, voices can be crisp and authoritative or tentative and inchoate. They can be unambiguous or polysemous, permanent or ephemeral.
The concept of voice fits naturally into all corners of our discipline, and voice matters. But the issue is not whether voice matters or not, but whose voice matters.
This question of whose voice matters has plagued us from ancient Greece onward. Those who could exercise voice were considered members of the public, and deciding who could be a member of the public revolved around issues of citizen competence. Ancient Greek philosophers asked whether citizens were sufficiently knowledgeable to rule, with Plato positing that governance should be left to philosopher kings. Similar questions arose throughout the Enlightenment era and the American founding experience. With their implications for how broadly or narrowly to define the public and which voices to count and discount, questions of citizen competence have remained at the heart of intellectual and normative debate throughout the 20 th century.
Some colorful language from the pejorative camp comes from Walter Lippmann's (1922, p. 16), who wrote in his seminal work, Public Opinion: If his atlas tells him that the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he had found gold.
In Lippmann's (1922) view, individuals are unable to experience large parts of a very complex world. Therefore, they are forced to rely on whatever they can-maps, information of all sorts-to conjure up trusted pictures of the world they cannot personally experience. Ultimately, the "pictures in our head" for which Lippmann is so well cited stem in large part from the voices that reach us. We rely on these voices because we have to, and thousands of effects studies have shown these voices to bear upon our perceptions of reality and our behavior.
Early notions of a singular public, and the debate over whose voices counted or not, were oriented around issues of decision-making and governance. Today orientations around voice include not only decision-making and governance, but also power, identity, culture, and politics with a little "p." Early notions of a singular public also have fallen by the wayside. Individuals are no longer classified as being in "the public" or not. Rather, they can be classified as belonging to some type of public. For instance, as Price (1992) characterized it, we have general publics, voting publics, attentive publics, active publics, and issue publics. Neuman's (1986) perspective on publics defined three disparate groups: a very small percentage of politically sophisticated elites, a large middle mass, and a stratum of apoliticals. Obviously, depending on the scholarly painting, the size of those groups can vary.
Conceptualizations of the public generally are differentiated based on how knowledgeable and active individuals are-in other words, the extent to which they meet key criteria of what we consider good citizenship. The question of whether individuals are ill-equipped or fully competent to exercise their voice and engage in politics has simultaneously intrigued and vexed scholars for decades. Their answer to this question usually depends on their definition of citizenship and how voice is exercised.
From Verba and Nie's (1972) seminal typology of citizens as apoliticals, spectators, or gladiators, to Wells' (2015) theorizing of citizens as actualizing versus dutiful, studies of voice run the gamut. As Thorson (2012, p. 70) notes, "our discussions and debates about democratic ideas, valuable though they are, tell us little about the day-to-day lived experience of citizenship." Some of these studies might be a bit discouraging, but we should be heartened by the fact that we are able to study political voice where we can.
Today's discussions of citizenship are indeed more nuanced, and they involve more than just expressing voice. These conceptualizations now include citizens' critical capacities; for instance, are members of marginalized communities able to critically analyze their social and political conditions and endorse societal equality (Diemer, Rapa, Park, & Perry, 2017)? Citizenship also turns on critical capacities in the digital domain, involving ethics, media and information literacy, participation/engagement, and critical resistance (Choi, 2016). And the concept of global citizenship includes individuals' sense of social responsibility, global competence, and global civic engagement (Morais & Ogden, 2011).
Regardless of differences in how voice or citizenship are theorized, a key commonality exists: namely, that voices matter for the system to work optimally. Voice is tied to efficacy, the sense that one can effect change or make a difference. It is also tied to trust, which fosters the sense that one is being heard.
Democracy is based on difference, and democratic theorists (regardless of their specific ilk) generally extol the virtue of having at the table as many diverse voices as possible. Why? The presence of a greater number of voices should lead to greater equality. Indeed, this plurality of voices is the hook on which deliberative democratic theorists hang their hats. From a deliberative perspective, voice engenders recognition of all communities and systemwide learning, perhaps about social grievances that are in need of political attention.
Deliberation in its truest form excludes no one (Sanders, 1997, p. 351). In its ideal form, deliberation is "focused on the common good, requires some form of manifest equality among citizens, and shapes the identity and interest of citizens in ways that contribute to the formation of a public conception of public good" (Cohen, 1997, p. 69, emphasis in original).
In an ideal deliberative process, each citizen possesses an equal voice. He or she can raise issues, speak up in support of or against a proposal, and offer solutions.
Ideally, individuals are not constrained by resources such as wealth or power (Cohen, 1997). Because everyone's points of view ostensibly can be expressed and accommodated, decisions emerging from an ideal deliberative setting should be of a higher quality (Christiano, 1997).
But ideal deliberation should involve more than merely manifest equality. It should involve mutual respect, with citizens addressing each other as equals and acknowledging this status by "offering reasonable, morally justifiable arguments to each other" (Sanders, 1997, p. 348). Certainly, Thompson (1996, 2004) advocate for deliberation as a salve for the moral disagreement that pervades society.
Scholars across disciplines foreground voice not only normatively, but also methodologically. Studying all members of a community or large population once was impossible. Instead, we were relegated to observations of book burnings or riots; in other words, the loudest voices were the ones we could hear. Today our tools allow for more voices to be heard without regard to decibel level. Today we are able to register the voices of countless individuals, thanks to interactive voice response technologies, Qualtrics panels, Mechanical Turk, data scraping, and the like. We're collecting more and more data from more and more people. We're hearing more and more voices, which is great! But is it? Is more better?

Noise and clamor: The costs of success
Communication research tells us more may not necessarily be better. Ads or public service announcements that employ moderate-fear appeals can motivate one to action; high-fear appeals run the risk of paralyzing the audience member (Witte, 1998). Some background knowledge about an issue motivates news consumers to attend to related messages; full background knowledge might disincentivize them from doing so (McCombs & Reynolds, 2009). Some healthy level of trust in our politicians or political system allows us to take action; complete trust means we do not feel motivated to effect change (Gamson, 1968). The point to be made from these examples is that it is difficult to find a concept that has positive outcomes when maximized mindlessly. The plurality of voices is a goal worth attaining, not only in democratic settings, but it introduces its own set of concerns-some commonplace, some more weighty. Perhaps Mark Twain said it best. Even though he was an early adopter of the telephone, he wasn't too enamored of it, pronouncing, "The human voice carries entirely too far as it is" (Biss, 2018, p. 4).
Certainly, technological advancements have put at our disposal tools that not only facilitate the entry of previously excluded voices, but also exacerbate whatever negative effects emerge from an overabundance of voices.

Overload
Consider the notion of information overload, not a surprising phenomenon when we are bombarded by more voices or more information than we can process. It's one thing Journal of Communication 00 (2020) 1-12 to contend with only the magnitude of voices or their decibel levels, but it's something altogether different when all these voices are advising us to take different tacks or when they are expressing markedly different opinions. Take, for instance, the days before Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight, when the spate of election polls published in a given week varied wildly in their findings. How did they process all that information? Which polls did one turn to for news about the latest developments?
It's a truism to say that information overload, whether it stems from technology or place (Misra & Stokols, 2012), causes stress. Information may help us feel as if we know more, but information overload lengthens our decision-making time, reduces the recall of specific information (Nelson-Field, Riebe, & Sharp, 2013), and induces overall anxiety. Depending on individuals' need for a well-organized world, information overload may motivate them to process information differently. Those with a high need for cognitive closure will likely seize upon information that allows them to reach closure sooner rather than later, then freeze or stop processing new information (Rinke & Moy, 2016).
In the end, the effects of information overload raise serious questions about the extent to which individuals today are on the higher end of the citizen-competence spectrum.

Disengagement from politics
Implicit in normative ideals of voice is that more voices will yield greater diversity, which is certainly a laudable goal in many societies. In an idealized version of deliberation, people come from all walks of life and with vastly different perspectives. Unfortunately, exposure to diverse views is a dual-edged sword. As Mutz (2006) shows, listening to the other side bolsters political tolerance. But it also discourages political participation, especially among those averse to conflict. In this sense, diverse voices are desirable in terms of deliberative democracy, but problematic in terms of participatory democracy. Mutz's (2006) findings are predicated on people actually deliberating. Unfortunately, exposure to diverse viewpoints is not equally distributed across societies or even within societies. The gender gap in political discussion, viewed by some as the lowest bar to clear in terms of political engagement, varies greatly, as Nir and McClurg (2015) illustrate in their comparative study. And in their book, The Silent Sex, Karpowitz and Mendelberg (2014) identify various pathways to participation in deliberative settings. These pathways include confidence levels, the embracing or avoidance of conflict, and sensitivity to social bonds, all of which can be gendered.
So even if everyone is exposed to different perspectives via discussion-which the data categorically deny-the effects of such exposure are detrimental to other forms of participation.

Incivility
Another unintended consequence of the success of voice, particularly as facilitated by new technologies, is heightened incivility. To the extent that mutual respect and manifest equality are valued characteristics of deliberation and discussion, the migration of talk to online platforms has opened the proverbial doors to hell. Stripped of any pressure to conform to norms that govern face-to-face interactions, and possibly under a cloak of anonymity, individuals are able to infuse their voices with incivility, oftentimes with impunity.
When Susan Herbst was writing her book Rude Democracy, she told people she was writing a book on civility. She describes their response: "They thought of opening doors for women, naughty children misbehaving in public, and suppressing the desire to give others 'the finger' in traffic" (Herbst 2010, p. 3). If only online incivility were so innocuous. To be clear, there is no real agreement as to how much incivility exists today. Herbst (2010, p. 3) says it's all in the eye of the beholder, but we do see it in newer spaces carved out by technology, such as the comments sections that follow online news stories (Anderson, Yeo, Brossard, Scheufele, & Xenos, 2018). However, incivility cannot be attributed all to technological affordances. It's also fueled by what Berry and Sobieraj (2013) dub an "outrage industry," a media system shaped by economic and regulatory forces, as well as technology. Indeed, the extreme openness of the Internet has allowed the most extreme voices on a topic to pollute and crowd our public spaces of discussion.

Echo chambers
While technological shifts have allowed for a greater diversity of voices to be expressed, they also raise the question of whether these diverse voices are indeed being heard. The personalization of content today through search engines, news aggregators, and social networks (Flaxman, Goel, & Rao, 2016) has created filter bubbles-what Pariser (2011) calls "personal ecosystems of information"-as well as echo chambers, metaphorical spaces where messages are amplified and reverberate (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008). Today's high-choice media environment poses a threat to democracy, as Van Aelst and his colleagues (2017) describe, but fortunately, early concerns about filter bubbles and echo chambers appear to be somewhat assuaged by recent empirical evidence (Dubois & Blank, 2018;Guess, 2018). In short, filter bubbles may not be as large, and echo chambers not as cavernous, as initially feared.
The high-choice media environment that defines contemporary society comprises niche news and outlets that cater to niche identities. On the bright side, communities built around these niche identities might be stronger, offering their members greater social support and encouraging them to exercise their voice. However, the robust exercising of voice in a homogenous group, reflected in what Eveland and Hively (2009) termed "safe discussion," becomes more problematic when differing communities engage with one other. Because filter bubbles and echo chambers help to reinforce these niche identities, they make it more difficult for citizens to identify and focus on the common good, as envisioned by deliberative theorists.
At the same time, more homogenous groups may be less tolerant of deviance, exert greater pressure on their members to conform, and induce a greater fear of sanctions (as noted by Moy and Hussain, 2011).
Despite the equivocal evidence, one point is clear: Having more voices does not guarantee greater diversity in the public sphere. The more connected people are with each other, the more single voices can be echoed and spread. Indeed, a recent study showed that exposure to opposing views on social media can actually increase political polarization (Bail et al., 2018).
Ultimately, despite the very commendable goal to engage the broadest swath of voices, we must be mindful of its unintended consequences. The proliferation of voices has not brought with it more reasoned arguments, but reason and passion (Lupia & Norton, 2017). The very worthy goals of manifest equality and mutual respect remain less than fully attainable, thanks to linguistic inequalities (Lupia & Norton, 2017), monetary inequalities (Shapiro, 2017), cultural inequalities (Hayward, 2004), and gender inequalities (Karpowitz & Mendelberg, 2014), to name but a few. The voices we hear about an issue are never context-free; they are inflected by our bodies and experiences, as well as our Twitter handles and the clothes we choose to wear. Lupia and Norton (2017, p. 64) put it quite succinctly when they wrote, "Inequality is always in the room." Such unintended consequences of voice highlight tensions between the normative and the empirical, between articulating what we desire and bemoaning what has been realized. My goal in highlighting such costs is to remind ourselves of two points. First, the antithesis of voice-silence-also is voice. Second, in a world where voice is overabundant and valued, we need to foreground another antithesis of voice: listening.
To the first point, silence is used to communicate. What it communicates, however, is not always known. Silence meant to reflect anger might be perceived as acquiescence. Silence meant to convey thought might be misconstrued as indifference. And silence born from shyness may be read as aloofness. Silence is used to calm. Silence is used to unsettle. Silence is used to express power, as in silencing someone or giving someone the silent treatment (Brox, 2019). Silence is also used to resist, as in silent protests that reflect a form of political activism (Hatzisavvidou, 2015).
To the second point, that we need to foreground listening, Lipari (2004, p. 122) emphasizes the need to "listen ethically" by keeping "an ear out for places of silence, erasure, misrecognition." Certainly, listening is implicit in discussions of voice. In effects studies, we presumably have listened to and processed messages. In research on hearing the other side, we presumably have listened to what those across the aisle have said. And in studies of deliberation, we presumably are listening. But as many have wondered, what happens if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it?
Listening comes in many forms. The less desirable forms include inattentive or interruptive listening, monologic listening (Dobson, 2014), and "cataphatic" listening, which Waks (2007, p. 154) describes as listening through the use of "pre-figured categories." These are a far cry from empathic and active listening (Bodie, Worthington, Imhof, & Cooper, 2008) or apophatic listening (Waks, 2007), which involves opening the self to the other and putting those aforementioned, prefigured categories aside. Indeed, Parks and Foot (2019) illustrate how such dialogic and hospitable listening can play a critical role in cross-sector collaborative efforts against human trafficking.
Imagine what a different story the Remarkable Rocket would have been had all of Oscar Wilde's characters listened.

Exercising voice as a discipline
Finally, as we study voice-and silence, and listening-in our own corner of the communication universe, we need to remember that our discipline can exercise its own voice. In an era marked by much noise, let us focus on voice.
As academics, we are in a unique position of privilege to shape the voices of the next generation, regardless of where they end up, whether it be in the academy, in the commercial sector, or in government and nonprofit agencies. The theory, methods, and skills courses we teach students, and the research with which we engage them, have great capacity to shape their understanding of the world out there. The ideas we introduce to students have significant potential to shape their mindsets about and interactions with others, particularly those unlike themselves.
As academics in communication, we serve not only our students, but also society at large. No discipline is better poised than we to contribute to mitigating-if not solving-social, cultural, and political problems that have plagued countries around the globe. Given where our discipline is now, compared with where it was a few decades ago, we are indeed able to engage more fully in the public arena.
As communication scholars, we have a rightful place at the table and should avail ourselves of those opportunities. Conversations about pressing societal matters require communication scholars. Our work already relates to other areas of research, and we need to leverage the strength of sometimes weak ties to join the conversation. Take, for instance, the f-word du jour: fake news. How do you teach about fake news? How do you even define it? Is it misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, rumor, or something else? Probably all of the above. How do you offer a tool kit in which one can identify, understand, and combat fake news?
Such efforts can draw upon the work of media literacy scholars; on the work of those specializing in quantitative reasoning and visualization; on psychologists and other social scientists to understand information-processing biases; and on data scientists to illustrate how search-term algorithms can be manipulated. What about area specialists to illustrate the implications of fake news in specific domains? And in which domains? Politics? The environment? Public health?
For many decades, communication has been viewed as the orphan second cousin of other, more established disciplines, drawing from those fields. Today, we are able