Happy Talk Research Articles

Critical Digital Studies: A Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Digital Studies: A Reader Timothy Dugdale (bio) Critical Digital Studies: A Reader. Edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 583. $90/$39.95. When I was a kid growing up in Canada, there wasn't much on the telly. Hockey Night in Canada and The Galloping Gourmet were easy favorites, but the joker in my deck was a strange news program. A veteran journalist staged mock interviews with a variety of historical figures, usually played by some Shakespeare festival tippler happy to chew the scenery incognito and in the bag. One night Rasputin was the guest and the host quickly put the boots to him. "Sir, please explain how you came to seduce all the ladies in the Russian court and even some of their men?" The guru-cum-swinger [End Page 766] chuckled and stroked his beard. "Well you know, if you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it is bound to stick." Artie Kroker has thrown plenty of shit in his day and enough of it has stuck to enough walls to win him a posh sinecure out on the Pacific Rim. Kroker is arguably Canada's foremost cultural theorist precisely because he effortlessly channels the spirits of two other enmerdeurs of the first order—Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard. In his breakthrough book, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics, Kroker rebooted McLuhan's seminal oddity, The Mechanical Bride, deep in the ugly heart of Reagan's second term, when Dutch was napping himself into dementia while Ollie North and friends enjoyed an imperial farce in the twilight of the cold war. Kroker rightly saw the psychic weather of Reagan's America for what it was—a wet dream of poisoned Norman Rockwell tableaux articulated through Orwellian happy talk of God and shining cities on hills. His discussion of Eric Fischl's suburban dystopia paintings has never been equaled, by Robert Hughes or even the artist himself. You can open Excremental Culture to any page and find Kroker gloriously foaming at the mouth with a twinkle in his eye as he bites down on anything and everything that signaled The Last Man and The End of Civilization. It was performance art, pure and simple. Almost twenty-five years and many books later, the Kroker at work in this collection is less a protean mad dog than a benevolent ringmaster to a dog's breakfast of essays on digital culture, such as it is. Indeed, thanks to the glacial pace of the academic publishing process, this volume has a certain sad valedictorian quality to it, an uneven time capsule of how the cyber wing of the academy brooded away the very dark eight years of incompetent skullduggery by Bush II. One author suggests tagging Detroit, that vibrant, shambling necropolis of the analog, with the digital graffiti of hypertext. As if. Another discusses the Cyborg Mother in an equally dreary jargon-rich essay that only a mother could love. There is precious little ethnography in here and far too much theory and its attendant gibberish. As in so many collections on digital culture, a number of well-worn themes make an appearance. Some ghosts are factory-installed in communication machines. We install other ghosts, no less problematic, as we shamelessly upload our lives into the machines. The machines speak to one another. We can never be sure what the machines are saying. We are never able to fully break their codes or keep up with their output. Bad men use the machines to do bad things. And people let them. Even though he is Exhibit A of what Allan Bloom called "the Nietzschization of the Left," Kroker still fizzes when shaken. And nothing has him more spooked than the Holy Ghost. "From Pentecostal Inuit and born again Christians in the heartland of the American Empire to the fast currents of Islamic jihad, the problem of salvation is the dominant singularity haunting [End Page 767] the twenty-first century." Soon he is in a white heat, mixing physics and metaphysics. "We live in the universe of the special theory of political relativity, where power accelerating at the speed...

Risky Trade: Infectious Disease in the Era of Global Trade

Risky Trade: Infectious Disease in the Era of Global Trade

Diversity in Everyday Discourse: The Cultural Ambiguities and Consequences of “Happy Talk”

Few words in the current American lexicon are as ubiquitous and ostensibly uplifting as diversity. The actual meanings and functions of the term, however, are difficult to pinpoint. In this article we use in-depth interviews conducted in four major metropolitan areas to explore popular conceptions of diversity. Although most Americans respond positively at first, our interviews reveal that their actual understandings are undeveloped and often contradictory. We highlight tensions between idealized conceptions and complicated realities of difference in social life, as well as the challenge of balancing group-based commitments against traditional individualist values. Respondents, we find, define diversity in abstract, universal terms even though most of their concrete references and experiences involve interactions with racial others. Even the most articulate and politically engaged respondents find it difficult to talk about inequality in the context of a conversation focused on diversity. Informed by critical theory, we situate these findings in the context of unseen privileges and normative presumptions of whiteness in mainstream U.S. culture. We use these findings and interpretations to elaborate on theories of the intersection of racism and colorblindness in the new millennium.

Readers panel - Happy talk

Readers panel - Happy talk

Learning the language of HAPPY TALK

Children with speech or language difficulties benefit enormously from confidence-boosting activities. Jackie Cosh, a freelance writer from Glasgow who specialises in children and education, explains.

Infants' Listening Preferences: Baby Talk or Happy Talk?

The most robust finding on infants' listening preferences has been widely characterized as a preference for baby talk (BT) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Although prosodic modifications characteristic of BT also convey positive affect, differences in affect across BT and ADS speech registers have not been controlled in previous studies. This set of experiments sought to elucidate the basis for 6-month-olds' listening preference by independently manipulating affect and speech register. When affect was held constant, no preference for any speech register was observed. Moreover, when ADS stimuli presented more positive affect than BT stimuli, infants' preferences followed the positive affect. Higher and more variable pitch was neither necessary nor sufficient for determining infants' preferences, although pitch characteristics may modulate affect-based preferences. The BT preference is thus attributable to a more general preference for speech that imparts relatively positive affect, a preference perhaps ascribable to a preexisting general-purpose mechanism opportunistically exploited by language.

What the Stars Meant

On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon, By the marble statue of Pessoa; On an antique astrolabe in London Tracing out the sky above Samoa, Thousands of miles away-in time, in place, Each night conspires to create a myth That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with vague impression of a human face. fragments fly apart and shift, trembling On the threshold of a kind of fullness: minor wonder of remembering; greater wonders of forgetfulness. For one looks back as someone else might yearn For a new life, and set his course upon polestar, bid his adieus, and move on. journey takes a solipsistic turn, Forsaking starlight for an inner glow, And reducing all human history, All human culture-highbrow, middle, low -- To one reflecting surface, one story. What fills the heaven of a single mind? things that used to fill Kant's mind with awe - The starry heavens and the moral law -- Seem distant now, and difficult to find Amid the message of satiety Issuing from the corners of the sky, Filled with monotonous variety: Game shows, an interview with Princess Di, And happy talk, and sitcoms and the news, shit that floats across your living room Each weekday evening. Waiting in the pews, Out in the desert where the cacti bloom, Something else was forming, something stranger Gathering in the gulf below the stairs -- As though the mystery of the manger Were written in the day-to-day affairs Of a world consecrated to Mammon, Yet governed by those sacred absences That make the spirit soar, and presences At one remove, like the sound of Cuban Drumbeats issuing from the Ricardos' Love-nest on the television station Like distant thunder; or Leonardo's Wave that flees the site of its creation. In the desert far beyond the city, One hears the cadences for which one longs, lyrics of those half-forgotten songs, - Some of them poignant, some of them witty -- Brimming with the melody of passage; One feels the wind that blows the soul about, Repeating its inscrutable message; And as night falls, one sees the stars come out. …

Ethical Issues in the Classroom: Realism or Happy Talk?

(1987). Ethical Issues in the Classroom: Realism or Happy Talk? The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas: Vol. 61, No. 2, pp. 85-87.

Happy talk

Happy talk

The Ravenous Half-Shut Eye Manufacturing Bad News from Nowhere?

Everywhere broadcasting institutions are in question, and nowhere is their vulnerability more apparent than in television journalism, as the uproar over the ABC's National testifies. Studies of TV news have proliferated. Epstein, and Altheide on organisational imperatives; Gans on social class determinism; Tuchman's interpretative approach; McLuhan's ‘Happy Talk’; the polemics of the Glasgow Media Group; Windschuttle et al on news values; Nixon's ‘the evening news is a series of mini-dramas’ …

Happy talk: perceptual and acoustic effects of smiling on speech.

Smiling is a universally recognized visible expression of happiness. A side effect of smiling is an alteration of the vocal tract, suggesting that during vocalization smiling may be heard as well as seen. The present studies investigated this hypothesis. Smiled and straight-faced tokens of 29 utterances were collected from six speakers, and presented to three groups of 12 subjects for forced-choice identification. Groups 1 and 2, instructed to select the. smiled or happier sound, respectively, performed significantly better than chance for all speakers. Group 3, asked to select the sadder sound, chose the straight-faced token reliably :For four speakers, but for one also picked the smiled token. Acoustic analyses showed that smiling raised the fundamental and formant frequencies for all speakers and amplitude and/or duration for some. Particular cue combinations appear to be heard as smiling specifically, whereas others are associated with emotionality in general.