3rd blog post

            My second year here at San Jose State, which was last year, I participated in the Forensics Intramural tournament as part of my comm major units. This annual tournament is composed of different possible ways a student can participate. There are individual debates, partner debates, poem recitals and speeches. Me and a classmate participated in the partner debates. There also are students who can be judges and help organize the event. At the time, I was taking a Comm 40 argumentation and debate class and I found I enjoyed arguing both sides to every speech we gave in class. Our job to prepare for the tournament was to prepare strong arguments for each side for three issues. Some of the issues we were going to be debating were:

• Should sports be eliminated from SJSU?
• Should bullying be considered a crime?

            We made a list of positive and negative points for each. We had a strong argument for each side, so we were very confident. We wouldn’t know who our opponents were until the day of.

            The day came and we went through each of the debates. Unfortunately, the side of the argument we hoped we would be on was not the side we were assigned. It was tough, but we had to make that argument ours even if we did not completely agree with it. Some of the opponents were not humble and treating it as if we seriously were arguing with them. One of the judges even was friends with one opponent. Then and there, my partner and I knew we would lose.

            But guess what? We won SECOND place!! Those girls that we thought would do better than us, because she was friends with the judge was not even on a top place, which made us glad that the judge was still fair.

            Now, what communication theory can we apply to mine and my partner’s successful participation in the forensics tournament? I chose the Muted Group theory. It is defined as “people belonging to low power groups who must change their language when communicating publicly, thus, their ideas are often overlooked”, according to A First look at Communication Theory by Em Griffin. Those low power groups that are mentioned in the definition are usually women or minority groups.

            The intramural tournament had obvious people who were in forms of power, which were the judges. I mean, they had the power to choose a winner for each debate and an overall score for each team at the end. That sounds like a tremendous amount of power to me.

            When dealing with the muted group theory, there ALWAYS has to be some sort of hierarchy. There is always a group or an individual whose voice is more heard than the other. In the debate where my partner and I felt we were going to lose, the girl that was friends with the judge seemed more in power than any power we might have had. I felt that anything we said, whether they be good arguments or not, would not matter.

            I believe that sometimes the muted group theory sometimes is something that plays out in one’s mind. In my example, it was all in my head that someone had more power than my team did. But I do believe that this theory can apply to everyone almost anywhere they go, whether their feeling of having less power than that of someone else is real or not.