“Shared Symbols of a Community”: Roger Silverstone and Media Commonplaces

Can ancient rhetoric help us investigate and understand the communicative paradigms of media speech? Roger Silverstone tries to find an answer to this question in his well-known book Why Study the Media? to shed light on the unconscious legacy of our communicative past. More specifically, this chapter focuses on Silverstone’s interest in the contemporary use of stereotypes and commonplaces within our mediascape, since advertising and political discourse often rely on mediatized contents and opinions. While arguing that commonplaces are “shared symbols of a community”, Silverstone gives an insight on the semiotic complexity of our digitalized environment, in line with the representative and narrative paradigms that permanently evolve through the development of new media and the diffusion of repeatability of knowledge. Assuming that “rhetoric is both practice and critique”, Silverstone delves into the expressive and symbolic patterns of the media with the analysis of the metaphorical and metonymic flair of the journalistic discourse. In this context, commonplaces may exalt the shared beliefs of a globalized community confronting the issue of safeguarding our cultural roots, “for commonplaces are the places of invention and innovation as well as memory and memorial”.