3 points & a question

Thinking with Type
• The rise of industrialization and mass consumption during the 19th century created a large-scale need for advertising, which led to a demand for different kinds of typography that would be appropriate for this type of communication. Designers created new typefaces with features—shadow, inline, etc.—and sizes—much bigger and bolder than traditional typefaces—that were necessary in these advertisements, not only because of space limitations in the advertisements, but also because these different typefaces allowed the ad designers to attract audiences based on the typeface they used.

Freire
• Freire’s philosophy about learning and literacy is based on the idea that the instruction of a student (a person who is illiterate) should be a dialogue rather than a “domestication.” He suggests that when students have the opportunity to play an active role in their education, they will understand why it is important and necessary to become literate and to be able to contribute substantially to the society through more than just oral communication.

Killingsworth & Palmer
• Killingsworth and Palmer discuss the difference between communicative action and instrumental action and reveal the dangers of instrumental rationality through examining the language and audiences of the government’s Environmental Impact Statements. At the end of the article, the authors show the importance of understanding the rhetorical situation, the audience and the purpose of the communication in creating a document that is useful to the audience—similar to Flower et al’s “Functional Documents.”


Question:
Is either communicative action or instrumental action really ideal if the underlying aim of instrumental action is the exclusion of the nonexpert audience in making decisions and the control of their perspectives through discourse created by experts, and communicative action considers input from many people with different perspectives, making it less cost effective and time efficient?