The Importance of Critical Discourse Analysis in Everyday Life

With the widespread availability of the internet and various news sources, the role of discourse in people’s everyday lives seems more important than ever. However, this importance and its influence on people’s beliefs and opinions often go unnoticed. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) tries to explain how these phenomena work.

            According to van Dijk’s (1995) definition, CDA is an issue oriented, multidisciplinary approach to studying discourse. It mostly concerns how people see and understand the social world (Fairclough, 2013). This intriguing approach in Applied Linguistics first appeared in the 1970s, at the University of East Anglia where a group of linguists aimed to examine texts in relation with their contexts.

CDA’s main focus is how discourse is used to gain more power (political, for example) and observes the effect it has on social relations (Fairclough, 2013). CDA tries to explain whether good speakers can achieve more and have more influence on people and if so, how is that possible. Moreover, they say that just as actual weapons, this sort of power can be abused as well. Therefore, linguists concerned with CDA focus on social and political issues and study how discourse is used for the wrong reasons, for dominating groups of people, enforcing inequalities, or influencing others’ ideas. The most important topics influenced by discourse include gender inequality, media discourse, political discourse, and social issues, such as anti-Semitism, nationalism, or racism. (van Dijk, 2001).

It is somewhat alarming to see that powerful people might be able to use certain forms of discourse as a mean to control people’s minds. Also, if they manage to do so, they might have some control over their actions too, since these people are “more or less passive targets of text or talk” (van Dijk, 2001).

In one of his studies, Dutch scholar Teun van Dijk (1994) presents a very interesting example of how mind control via discourse works. He brings up racism against minorities as a social issue through which he introduces the problems of one-sided media representation. To begin with, very few minority journalists are hired and even if they are, they almost exclusively write about news concerning minorities. Moreover, minorities rarely appear in newspapers in news about other than violence, crime (often related to drugs), or racial conflict, with headlines highlighting words such as ‘police’ or ‘black’. Newspapers often use semantic techniques to distance themselves from minorities (e.g. referring to them as ‘these people’) and rarely quote them. This sort of representation and choice of topics can have a negative effect on how society sees these groups as pre-existent stereotypes can be strengthened or new ones created.

Another very important topic which concerns CDA is gender inequality. It can also be heavily influenced be media representation. In order to find a concrete example for that, it might be worth taking a closer look at the recent Steubenville rape case to which the media had an unexpected and quite surprising reaction. Although they did not openly take the two boys’ (who raped an unconscious girl at a party) side but they did start to lament their promising football careers. Several prestigious news sources (including the CNN and the Associated Press) highlighted that the boys were very talented football players with bright futures ahead of them which were now ruined, They also stressed that the victim was drunk at the time of the incident, maybe suggesting that she was responsible for the boys having to live the rest of their lives as registered sex offenders. (Culp-Ressler & Strasser, 2013)

What is relevant in the case from the point of view of CDA is how dangerous the influence of the media can be and how careful journalists should be when presenting such a sensitive topic. Ordinary people believe what they read (especially if it is the CNN or other trusted news site) and tend to agree with the opinions they find there. Therefore, social issues (like rape culture or victim blaming, as seen in the Steubenville case) will be made more difficult to overcome.

A seemingly less serious, but not less relevant example of unequal representation in the media is what everyday interviews with male actors look like in contrast with questions addressed to actresses. At a press conference for a box office hit, the male lead was asked about character development and character depth, while the female star of the film was asked about the diet she had to go on, in order to look good on the screen (DigitalSpy, 2012). This rather small excerpt exemplifies how deep-rooted these sort of sexual stereotypes are and how easily they can be supported by more or less everyday discourse.

In conclusion, people are surrounded by social issues such as the ones previously mentioned, and they rarely notice that the representation of those can be biased and even misleading. Critical Discourse Analysis tries to point out how discourse is used by powerful people (media sources, political leaders, or other authorities) to influence others’ opinions and shape them as they please. Its ultimate goal is understanding, exposing, and finally resisting social inequality (van Dijk, 2001).

References

Culp-Ressler, T. & Strasser, A. (2013). How The Media Took Sides In The Steubenville Rape Case. ThinkProgress. Retrieved from http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/03/18/1732701/media-steubenville/

Digital Spy. (2012, April 20). The Avengers UK Press Conference in full. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBbSNnGmPfw

Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. New York, USA: Routledge

van Dijk, T. A. (1994). Discourse and Inequality. Lenguas Modernas, 21, 19-37.

van Dijk, T. A.  (1995). Aims of Critical Discourse Analysis. Japanese Discourse, 1, 17-28

van Dijk, T. A. (2001). Critical Discourse Analysis. In Tannen, D., Schiffrin, D., & Hamilton, H.: Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 352-371). Oxford, UK: Blackwell