“Greg Mankiw’s Blog”: How Greg Mankiw Asserts Affiliations with Multiple Economics Discourse Communities
From the birth of the printing press in 1440 to the continued emergence of digital media in today’s world, technology has played a critical role in facilitating the exchange of feedback and information between discourse community members. The purpose of this essay is to examine a piece of technology — in this case, a blog written by Greg Mankiw — and how it uses both rhetorical theory and Swales’ discourse community theory to assert affiliations with the Harvard economics discourse community and other economics discourse communities. The author of the blog, Greg Mankiw, is an introductory economics Professor at Harvard University, who graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in economics from Princeton University. His blog, published on “blogspot.com”, is comprised of posts and articles that offer solutions to contemporary economic issues as well as updates on the current global economic situation. Concerning Mankiw’s objective, it is to “keep in touch with current and former students” and to allow “teachers and students at other schools, as well as others interested in economic issues”, to use his resource and learn from it (1). In other words, Mankiw’s goal is to use his blog to train novices from economics discourse communities everywhere. Greg Mankiw successfully asserts affiliations with multiple economics discourse communities by educating their less experienced members (establishing a common goal), using his blog as a tool to educate members and further his goal (providing a communicative convention), having strong ethos (inspiring members to want to learn from him) and utilizing kairos (offering new information regularly to keep membership attraction).
Although the active, general goal of economics discourse communities is the “enrichment of everyone” (Trivium 1), there is another, passive goal that is shared by them as well: survival. To that end, Mankiw affiliates with economic discourse communities by relating his goal, which is to educating less experienced members, to the discourse communities’ passive goal of survival. To put this in the words of Swales, “Discourse communities have changing memberships; individuals enter as apprentices and leave by death or in other less involuntary ways. However, survival of the community depends on a reasonable ratio between novices and experts (222).” Mankiw helps to balance this ratio between novices and experts, as while other experts may disaffiliate themselves with economics discourse communities, Mankiw is there to train new members to become new experts. This ensures that membership in economics discourse communities remains in existence for future generations. As such, Mankiw effectively affiliates with economics discourse communities by assuming the role of an expert and training novices to ensure membership survival.
After establishing the common goal of membership survival, Mankiw then uses his blog as a communicative convention to further that goal. The blog contains extensive knowledge and information on both economic policy and contemporary economic issues such as tax reforms, the housing market, and stocks. In order to convey all this information and effectively affiliate with economics discourse communities, Mankiw’s communicative convention incorporates spatial, visual, and lingual modes of communication, allowing members to more easily understand, connect, and affiliate with his objective. Concerning the spatial mode, upon visiting Mankiw’s blog site, his articles are centrally focused, and the borders of the webpage encompass his articles with white space. Thus, it takes the appearance of a more traditional textbook, and allows the audience to focus most on the articles he writes on the economy. This helps his affiliation with economics discourse community members because his information is easy to locate. In addition to the spatial mode of the webpage, Mankiw also employs a visual mode of communication. Specifically, Mankiw utilizes reverse chronology to make his work more accessible, as the titles of his most recently published articles appear at the top of his blog page, allowing his audience to sift through and identify which articles hold the information they seek. As an alternative to scrolling, however, at the top left of the homepage, Mankiw has a search bar that allows members of economics discourse communities to plug in words that will lead them to the same desired information. This allows him to affiliate with economics discourse community members because they can quickly and easily access his work. The final aspect of multimodal communication present in Mankiw’s blog is a lingual mode. Throughout his articles, Mankiw utilizes word choice that allows for easy connection to his point of view, as instead of using sophisticated language and complex sentences, he uses common words and succinct sentences that are easily understood by novice members in the economics discourse communities. Furthermore, any language that might be considered sophisticated is defined by Mankiw, in order to mitigate the possibility that a non-economic discourse community member reads his “New York Times” article. This allows Mankiw to easily affiliate with experts and novices alike in economics discourse communities because he uses language that every member (or non-member) can understand.
In addition to effectively employing the two above-mentioned characteristics of Swales’ discourse community theory, Mankiw utilizes ethos and kairos to better affiliate with the economics discourse communities as well. Apart from graduating summa cum laude from Princeton University with a B.A. in economics, Mankiw has published multiple best-selling textbooks on macro and microeconomics, served as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, became Mitt Romney’s economic advisor during his 2012 campaign, writes monthly columns for the Sunday business section of the New York Times, and is ranked the 23rd most influential economist in the world according to the h-index (1). Mankiw’s experience and credibility in the field of economics is exceptional, and because his ethos is so strong, both novices and fellow experts are willing to listen to what he has to say, thus strengthening his affiliation with the economics discourse community. Along with his credentials, Mankiw also presents himself as a fiscally conservative economist. In his articles, he favors policies such as lower taxes, less government control on market systems, and corporate tax incentives. Moreover, serving under the Bush and Romney campaign further indicates his conservative tendencies regarding economic policy. Although this may strengthen his affiliation with economics discourse communities that have more conservative viewpoints, his affiliation with liberal economics discourse communities, such as the ones that favor higher taxes, greater government involvement in market systems, and policies that are otherwise opposite to his own, is considerably weaker.
In addition to ethos, another aspect of rhetorical theory that Mankiw employs is kairos. Given that economists are constantly concerned with the ongoing changes in the global market situation, experts and novices alike require resources that will provide them with up-to-date information and advice on how to deal with those changes. Mankiw provides economic experts and novices with just that, as every week, Mankiw comes out with an article that asserts his position on how to best handle an economic problem, or just simply alerts members on what is happening with the economy. This helps his affiliation with all economics discourse communities, no matter their views, because each of their members can go to his website for news updates on the economy.
Taking the analysis of Mankiw’s blog into account, it can be seen that technology has significantly changed the means by which authors can assert affiliations with discourse communities. In the case of Mankiw’s blog, the primary way it has changed how people assert affiliations is by decreasing transaction cost, both in a timely and monetary sense. Before the internet, gaining access to journals was incredibly expensive, and additionally, one had to have university credentials. Now, however, technology has enabled authors and readers to connect with one another for free and with greater speed, as all it takes is a quick google search at public library, for example. Additionally, it allows for faster sorting of desired information by making use of hyperlinks, which directly connect an individual to that desired information within a massive database, rather than having to waste time and money looking for information in a library.
Word Count: 1,359
Citations:
Wardle, Elizabeth A., and Doug Downs. “The Concept of Discourse Community.” Writing about Writing: A College Reader. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 215-29. Print.
Mankiw, Greg. “Greg Mankiw’s Blog.” Greg Mankiw’s Blog. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 July 2016.
Trivium. “What Is the Goal of Economics?” The Platonist. N.p., 06 Mar. 2012. Web. 14 July 2016.
https://ideas.repec.org/top/old/1604/top.person.alldetail.html (h-index citation)
Help Received: Major Garriott (Critical Comments and Organization); Google Search (Who is Greg Mankiw?)