Rhetoric of Technology

This Foreword, about robots, written in both poetry as well as prose, introduces the edited collection _Androids, Cyborgs, and Robots in Contemporary Culture and Society_, edited by Steven J. Thompson (IGI Global, 2018). The link on the thumbnail cover at
https://www.igi-global.com/book/_/179222 will take you directly to the published Foreword, which is open access. The attached PDF, sent directly to me from IGI-Global to use here, is presented with written permission of the publisher.

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that infuence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public deliberation effective and how we can teach students to deliberate.

This Impact Report identifies and summarises the diverse impacts, resulting from the £500m of UK funding of Science and Technology in 2013, using numerous quantitative metrics and short case study extracts.  It shows how the varied impacts of a national science and technology organization and its many funded programmes can be annually identified, captured, tracked, and summarised in a public document.

The report was produced for, and by, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) -  the UK Research Council responsible for funding: (1) all UK astronomy, particle and nuclear physics research, (2) related UK science and technology facilities (e.g. as Harwell and Daresbury), (3) the UK contribution to international science (e.g. CERN, international telescopes and space missions), (4) innovation and business spin-off programmes, and (5) UK public engagement activities.

The Report was co-researched and co-authored by the STFC Impact Team, including myself while Impact Evaluation Manager in 2013, with Dr. Claire Dougan-McCallie (lead author/Head of Impact) and Jenny Beard, with additional input from senior managers, and many data and case study contributions from other key managers across STFC.

Varied key impacts are identified and reported including:

• Research amongst the best (by citation impact) in astronomy, nuclear and particle physics.
• Supported research of 226 Principal Investigators in 70 universities, led to 1,100 peer-reviewed papers in 2012.
• Facilities (the Diamond Light Source, ISIS and CLF) were used in 2012/13 by over 4,200 unique users , in over 2,400 experiments, producing over 1,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

• Technology from CERN benefited the UK economy by over £100 billion every year.
• Funding the development of the UK’s space, internet and computer animation industries, returned over £500 billion to the UK economy per annum.
• Funded Innovation Campuses hosted over 230 enterprises and supported over 5,000 jobs.
• UK industry won £43 million in contracts from the international subscriptions funded, and had accumulated a total of £150 million since 2005.

• Funded research inspired future generations to study STEM subjects, attracting 90% of UK undergraduates to study physics, funded 782 PhD students  and 16,800 student training days.
• Between 2009 to 2012 public engagement programmes engaged people on 58 million occasions, with 2 million people engaged in face-to-face activities in 2013 alone.

A critic inquiry on "Cloud Computing" as a buzzword obscuring today's crucial issue of the reterritorialization of internet.

* * *

Un enquête critique sur le "Cloud computing" comme buzzword occultant l'enjeu actuellement crucial de la reterritorialisation d'internet.

Research concerning computer hackers generally focuses on how to stop them; far less attention is given to the texts they create. Phrack, an online hacker journal that has run almost continuously since 1985, is an important touchstone in hacker literature, widely read by both hackers and telephone and network security professionals. But beyond its instantiation as a compendium of illicit technical knowledge, Phrack was, above all, a rhetorical publication. The files in each issue of Phrack created a shared rhetorical vision concerning the place of the hacker underground within society and in relation to law enforcement officials, as well as what it means to be a hacker. This essay examines two important events in the evolution of the hacker movement through the lens of Phrack—Operation Sundevil and the arrest of Kevin Mitnick. How these events were framed in Phrack both shaped and reflected emerging shifts in hacker collective identity.

In recent years, humanists and social scientists have shown increasing interest in human-animal relations – to the point where many now speak of an ‘animal turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Across history, psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology, philosophy, and law, an interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies has been forming. Certain common themes run through this diverse field, not least the reproduction of human-animal difference, and the conditions and the implications thereof.

Despite the long history of language use as a marker of such difference, the academic quest to investigate the boundary between human and nonhuman has, somewhat surprisingly, not taken root within rhetorical studies – at least not until now. For this edited volume, we therefore call for chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our ‘brute roots.’ In other words, this book invites contributions which enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. Would such a turn imply, for instance, that rhetoric needs a nonanthropocentric reconfiguration? The question, perhaps, is this: What difference would it make to the discipline if we assumed that nonhuman forms of communication were as interesting as human ones?

“Where We Go One, We Go All”: QAnon and the Mediology of Witnessing

When critics admonish their opponents for circulating mere conspiracy theories, they are disparaging them for subscribing to facile accounts of socio-historical phenomena that are more sophisticated and aleatory than such heavy-handed narratives apprehend. Unfortunately, this kind of disavowal has the unfortunate side-effect of precluding conspiracy theories from more serious philosophical consideration.

Arguably the most notorious information age conspiracy theory of the moment is QAnon, a byzantine, messianic truther echo-system that has recently irrupted into mainstream public consciousness. QAnon derives its name from “Q,” a lurid, anonymous, putatively omniscient insider who has been dropping missives on message boards about Donald Trump’s clandestine war with a satanic, sex-trafficking, election-fixing cabal that lurks beneath the liberal establishment.

In order to engage with QAnon as a cultural phenomenon, my article probes the rhetorical coordinates of the popular concept of conspiracy theory through optics provided by Kenneth Burke and Jodi Dean. Drawing on the recent media scholarship of Carrie Rentschler, Kate Starbird, and John Durham Peters, I then examine QAnon culture as a misguided activist modality of witnessing (what Alain Badiou might call a “pseudo-Event”) precipitated, in no small part, by rhetorical and algorithmic architecture that subtends an ever-increasing proportion of human subjectivity.

I conclude with some reflections on the viability of what media theorist Jonathan Sterne terms an "intervention."

Through a media ecology perspective, this article examines the debates over slideware. Opponents indict slideware for promoting sophistry and deadening speakers and audiences, yet they implicate public speaking in general rather than inherent attributes of slideware. Proponents, however, draw on the same topoi, validating slideware as a neutral tool for transmission of the speaker's content. Slideware, instead, should be understood as responding to the remediation of public speaking and the cultural influences of electronic media (transmediation). This media environment alters audience expectations and perceptions, providing new possibilities for slideware and expanding the domain of rhetorical study.

Following the geographic, political, technologic and rhetorical tracks of Ricardo Flores Magón and the Partido Liberal Mexicano (architects and precursors of the Mexican Revolution and Chicano movements) in the U.S. and particularly in L.A. during the early 20th century, this essay looks at how the newspaper "imagined" and summoned revolutionary community, PLM tropes, Mexican manifesto traditions, early Chicana "pleito" feminism, and a Chican@ rhetorical tradition of repurposing communication technologies.

The controversies of science and technology supercede localizing disagreements by bringing into contention the vulnerabilities of culture to its own tenuous interface with the natural world and by opening up new
horizons of conceptual and material change.

I wrote this love song to a computer circa 1982. It was published in  _The Greenfield Review_ 13 (Summer/Fall 1985): 149-50, but first printed in the The RPI Review [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute] 5 (March 1985): 4, which is the version scanned here.

Please note: because the scan is of an older manuscript, it will not show up when you go to the next page; but if you click the Download button on the right, you will see that the poem is there, and you will be able to read or download it.  Sorry for the inconvenience; I wanted to preserve the old text in which this technological poem first appeared.

The essays in this book broaden and enrich the scope, at
once, of both rhetoric and Barad’s theorizing through
entangled reworkings of topics ranging from politics to
breast cancer, genealogy, the trope of academic "turns,"
Marx’s notion of exchange, and the "prehistoric" emergence
of human consciousness.
With a new foreword by the editors and afterword by Laurie
E. Gries, this collection is otherwise reprinted from the 2016
‘Figures of Entanglement’ special issue of the journal Review
of Communication

Rory Randall interviewed rhetoric professor Joshua Hanan about his paper 'Subjects of technology: An auto-archaeology of attention deficit disorder in neoliberal time(s)'. They discuss the effects of an attention deficit disorder diagnosis, the performance of disability, activism as a way out, and the use of theory in making sense of lived experience.

As medical technology continues to progress, we are able to correct deficiencies in the body through means such as cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs. This has led some scholars to argue that we are creating technologized, cyborg bodies. However, these technologies have also enabled us to correct perceived cultural flaws in the body. This article explores the nature of the body through the lens of posthumanism, examining ways that individuals attempt to reshape their bodies through cosmetic surgery and other forms of body modification. Specifically, this article examines the practice of hymen restoration, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s artistic endeavours in cosmetic surgery and Stelarc’s cybernetic experimentations. These cases yield three potential visions of the body: the body must be restored; bodies must be unified; and the body must evolve. Such visions have consequences; the ways in which the body is rhetorically constructed influence how people choose to alter their own bodies. By considering the body itself as medium and as an interface with other technologies, we can better theorize what it truly means to be human.

New media technologies have created new ways of being in the world. As Marshall McLuhan put it, media are extensions of the body, and that “in this electric age, we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.”  Still, even as scholars shift the focus to the digital entity, the body remains at the center of our experience as humans. One cannot ignore the material realities of the person who may seem momentarily to exist only in the aether. Because rhetoric is an embodied art, it is important to understand the ways that new media influence our rhetorical strategies and alter how we experience of our rhetorical environments and even ourselves. To that end, I will examine two specific elements of digital rhetoric as it relates to embodiment. First, I will explore the utopian ideal of egalitarian discourse on the internet, where an ostensible Habermasian public sphere in which differences of race, class, gender, and other identifiable markers of identity are, in theory, bracketed out is the desired aim. I argue that this ideal has more to do with a distrust of the body that is rooted in equal parts in cyberpunk fiction and American Puritanism than in a desire to engage others as peers. Moreover, I suggest that this erasure of bodily differences weakens the potential for serious rhetorical engagement. Second, I consider the malleability of digital identity and the rhetorical and material consequences for the body when it is “outed,” especially those bodies deemed “other.” In short, we must consider the explicit link between the physical body and the virtual body.

Drawing upon the work of Marshall McLuhan and subsequent theories of media ecology, this article seeks to build upon an understanding of the complex interactions of the material and symbolic aspects of human action. To do so, I perform a tetradic analysis of an educational movement referred to as Do-It-Yourself (DIY) education. Broadly defined the DIY education movement includes any attempt to decentralize or disrupt traditional place-based educational models through the sometimes collective, other times individual use of digital media. Thus, The DIY movement is not simply a description of a particular model but rather, models that emerge or otherwise reflect a particular educational ideology. Accordingly, examples of this model could include online educational communities such as YouTube or for the purposes of this article, MOOCs. Ultimately then, through an analysis of the DIY movement I seek to elucidate the educational forms that emerge as a result of the interplay among discourses and technologies related to contemporary understandings of teaching and learning.

In recent years gamification has emerged as a design trend in customer relationship management, marketing, education and governance. It promotes the use of game design principles in the organization of every day environments, tasks and interactions. As an offspring of advanced communication technologies, gamification relies on the unhindered use of networked devices that transforms every experience into a user experience. Borrowing on the ubiquitous popularity of video games, the premise of gamification is the technologically enabled relationship between virtual causes and real-life effects, and its promise - a mutually beneficial coordination of corporate and personal interest. This dissertation outlines the socio-political implications of the concept of gamification through a critical examination of its content and intended meanings. The unpacking of gamification as an aspiration and a worldview reveals that as soon as we take for granted the equality of the sign and the signified...

In this chapter, I look at CV Dazzle, an activist media art project aimed at thwarting facial recognition algorithms, in order to raise two related points about the relationship between rhetoric and computation. First, I expand existing discussions in rhetoric on metis, or cunning intelligence, to examine ways in which it is not always (just) a human capacity but is also active in non-human "bodies," in this case, open source "code libraries." Second, in posing the code library as entangled in CV Dazzle's rhetorical engagement with the world, and simultaneously with its audience, this chapter extends thinking on rhetoric and computation to imagine code, and especially code libraries, as complex audiences. How CV Dazzle does this, performs a kind of nonhuman (or not-quite-just-human) metis is through displacing what Michel de Certeau has called the "proper" place, the place of propriety itself. 1 CV Dazzle, in its operations, "undoes" the "proper place" of the facial recognition algorithms it encounters, while the active participation of algorithms, in its turn, scrambles the location of audience, rhetor, and of rhetoric itself. Through this examination of rhetoric and computation, I suggest that there is a productive way in which we can take large, extendible chunks of software-code libraries-as wily rhetorical bodies. The full implications of this is explored in the concluding section, where I sketch a notion of "rhetoric-machines" as another way of figuring the rhetorical encounter with computational machines, in which the entanglements of audience and address are quite complex. With the rhetoric-machine, it is not simply a matter of machines being either rhetors or audiences; they are, like CV Dazzle, somehow in between. CV Dazzle works through a highly stylized make-up and hair scheme that breaks up the visual symmetries computer vision algorithms look for in identifying the presence of human faces in photos or video.

Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and nonhuman animals, and even some plants, persuade to survive - to live, love, and cooperate. That this broad spectrum of rhetorical behavior exists in the animal world demonstrates how much we can learn from evolutionary biology. By incorporating scholarship on animal signaling into the study of rhetoric, the author explores how communication has evolved, and how numerous different species of animals employ similar persuasive tactics in order to overcome similar problems. This cross-species study of rhetoric allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing us with a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past.

Recent media studies scholarship has highlighted the extent to which previous work has often presumed an idealized object of study, an object that functions perfectly, without glitches, errors, or bugs. In contrast to such an idealization, this new strand of scholarship has attempted to account for the myriad of ways in which digital media fail and break down. This essay attempts to further such analyses by exploring the rhetorical process by which moments of failure are distinguished from the ‘normal’ functioning of digital media objects. In this essay, I argue that the distinction between these two states is not a natural or logical extension of the structure of media objects, and is instead constituted through a series of rhetorical appeals directed at users. While such appeals can be found in many sources external to digital media objects (e.g., user manuals), digital media are especially notable for the ways in which they internally advance arguments about their proper functioning, particularly through the use of error messages and other self-commentary. Viewed from a rhetorical standpoint, glitches, errors, and bugs become legible not simply as moments when digital media ‘break,’ but also as moments that rhetorically enforce a digital decorum—the distinction between the proper and improper functioning of digital media.

The Memex is an icon in the history of computer technology. It was first presented to the public in a 1945 Life Magazine article as “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The Memex itself was never built, but the image of what machines like it could do captured the imagination of a generation of computer engineers. The Memex was designed by an engineer and science administrator named Vannevar Bush, but he had actually designed the Memex to address inter-war America: the Memex article was written during the tumult of the late 1930s and largely untouched during World War II. This article examines the Memex within this interwar context, paying particular attention to how Bush used the design of a technological prototype to imagine how machines could help humans navigate the modern world. I argue that this effort was an act of rhetorical invention and show that the design of the Memex was a vehicle for Bush to endorse technocratic authority over American life.

Protest rhetoric has always provided a prime example of how communication can work to change the human condition, but strategies of protest have evolved as the United States has transformed into an information economy. Although protest remains “on the streets,” it has also moved into the digital realm. This essay builds on the work of Franklyn Haiman by considering the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of hacktivism (politically motivated computer hacking). After briefly tracing the historical development of hacktivism, I discuss several recent politically motivated website defacements and denial of service attacks, concluding that Haiman’s argument that the rhetoric of the streets should be held to different rhetorical and ethical standards still holds true in the online world.

While subliminal messaging is most consciously eschewed in the advertising industry as an unethical manipulation, the process has always been an integral covert operation of warfare. Through the speed of instantaneity and exponential strength, digital media messages are an ideal communication medium for masking during times of war. Ethical considerations regarding appropriateness of masking global media messages are daring, yet reality that every terrorist message is designed to impact the cognitive receiver as a weapon raises the bar for calculated alternative response deliberately designing a method for abatement of audience impact.

Inherent rhetorical ambiguities of mediated singular terrorist constructs are multi-faceted: there is the message for sympathizers, the message for the terrified, and the overall global message of the event as terrorism. Since these are destructive devices which render a terrorist message a media event -- and the moment is ubiquitously carried across digital channels at the speed of light, mechanically reproduced without exhaustion, and ultimately stored in collective memory -- iconic memory may have a more advanced role in this process than expected.

While Sperling’s initial experiment variables are problematic partly because of their unnatural laboratory environment (Haber, 1985), they lack an additional critical variable today: that of importance for icon value. Iconic memory moments or visual persistence -- especially when content is immediately perceived as having deep, revered meaning or may border on personally absorbed offense or injustice -- may somehow evolve iconic storage or trigger sensory mechanisms that allow for rapid identification and immediate transfer to permanent storage.

This research suggests a new value for the icon (Loftus, 1985) as digital, considers strategies for masks possibly terminating the icon (Smithson and Mollon, 2006), and discusses iconic storage phenomena. It proposes practical ethical logistics that global media may use to leverage psychosocial impact of terrorist messaging for intended audiences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted an unprecedented number of employees to online work environments. This move was not easy, but the work from home (WFH) trend has prompted many organizations to make it part of their regular practices.  Most individuals are still learning the dynamics of this new workplace context, but one core aspect has become clear: Effective WFH practices encompass how individuals perceive and engage in online exchanges. By understanding such factors, technical communicators can play a central role in shaping emerging WFH practices and contributing value to organizations.

There is no writing without technology. Although we are highly aware of writing's mediated nature when asked to learn new writing technologies either as individuals or as a society, we most often ignore these technologies, allowing them to disappear from our consciousness. Not paying attention to our tools can, however, have dangerous consequences. It becomes easy to forget the political, economic, and random forces that influence our choice of technology. Using personal narrative, I explore this tangled relationship between the disappearance of our tools, tool standardization, tool (dis)abilities, and tool design. I tell the story of my four-year-old son's journey to literacy and my discovery of a new type of writing software called Scrivener. Reading the story of Scrivener's development empowered me: I came to see myself as an active participant in the creation of my writing technologies, and I learned to identify when the discomforts of technology should not be ignored. I use these narratives to argue for a posthumanist view of our relationship with technology, a view in which boundaries between humans and technology are blurred, and I offer suggestions on how to adopt a posthumanist perspective toward writing tools in our composition classrooms.

Intercollegiate policy debate has long been regarded as an effective heuristic to inform high school and college aged students of the utility surrounding political discourse within a space of competition and rigorous study (Hogan & Kurr 2016). During the COVID-19 outbreak in the end of 2019, policy debate, along with many other academic programs across the United States, shifted online to continue the activity through the pandemic. In doing so, policy debate, an activity already steeped in anti-Black practices of targeting and 'exposing' Black debaters whom utilize the space to engage in discussions of race, governance, imperialism, and many more arguments typically labeled as controversial in traditional academia, acts as a catalyst for perverse and insidious forms of anti-Black surveillance. This article questions the extremity of this claim, considering the effects of the shift to e-Debate through the framework of afro-pessimist literature. To do this, this project takes a rhetorical approach regarding the specific policies produced by intercollegiate policy debate tournament staff and the direct implications of said policy's ability to respond to the question of pre-existing anti-black tendencies regarding blackness and surveillance within debate.

In Francis Bacon’s The Great Instauration, he presents his theories on the “Idols of the Mind,” describing those influences by which humankind is led astray from valid scientific inquiry and, ultimately, the advancement of knowledge, due to the defects of their reason. What is otherwise a unique and powerful ability also leads people to create distorted perceptions and understandings, false assumptions and narratives, logical fallacies, and superstitions. If truth in understanding is possible, technology may reflect the tool of reason itself, with so much potential to provide insight and depth of understanding, yet also easily distorts information in service of the human tendencies Bacon describes. In the modern digital information environment, the idols are exacerbated rather than relieved, which is especially apparent in the debate on climate change.

Gary Hink, Ph.D. "Protocol Rhetoric, Electracy, and the Aesthetic Paradigm"
<< edited transcript >>
Adobe Spark (supplemental): https://spark.adobe.com/page/hvAei/
Rhetoric Society of America Conference 2016 | Session C27: Rhetoric and Aesthetic

Given digital technology’s expansion of environments that teaching and learning take place, this book seeks to elucidate how both discourses and technologies themselves impact our understandings and practices of higher education. Additionally, I show how current educational movements centered primarily on new technologies are situated within broader ideological relationships among teaching, learning, notions of progress, technology, and work. I then move to analyze various strains of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) educational movement and the primary discourses that fund them. I argue that despite the opportunities for positively transforming higher education, many iterations of the DIY movement ultimately fall short when understood through the rhetorics of neutrality, determinism, and entrepreneurialism. Thus, when goaded by the values of neoliberalism the DIY movement perpetuates unhealthy relationships between our personal and professional spheres of life. However, by having a fuller understanding of the ways in which discourses and practices mutually influence our experiences of higher education, we can create learning environments that are more conducive to cultivating ethically informed and engaged lives.

This essay examines a particular, and particularly fraught enactment of digital and material rhetoric: a tactical media intervention into the militarized drone program, to map a posthumanist reading of "tactics," updating Michel de Certeau's famous concept for the current global situation. To introduce what will be posthuman about the model of tactics presented, this essay reviews the current state of work in rhetoric and composition on posthumanism and rhetorical materiality, arguing that it points us to a materiality that is not reducibly, simply present. This situation, on the one hand, produces a political need for experimentation, and yet if we encourage an experimental, tactical response to complex posthuman encounters such as that with the drone's thermal vision, then we are also encouraging an affirmation of that encounter, which entails its own risks. This essay then argues that while Certeau gives us the tools to imagine how we can tactically use the things of the world, we need to reimagine tactics in a posthumanist key. This essay calls for a retooled model of tactics that would draw out the experimental possibilities of media tactics through understanding their imbrication in systems that are material, distributed, and yet not simply self-present things.

In recent years gamification has emerged as a design trend in customer relationship management, marketing, education and governance. It promotes the use of game design principles in the organization of every day environments, tasks and interactions. As an offspring of advanced communication technologies, gamification relies on the unhindered use of networked devices that transforms every experience into a user experience. Borrowing on the ubiquitous popularity of video games, the premise of gamification is the technologically enabled relationship between virtual causes and real-life effects, and its promise - a mutually beneficial coordination of corporate and personal interest.
This dissertation outlines the socio-political implications of the concept of gamification through a critical examination of its content and intended meanings. The unpacking of gamification as an aspiration and a worldview reveals that as soon as we take for granted the equality of the sign and the signified, we also accept that life experiences do not exceed the signs we use to describe them. Therefore, to play life as a game, as gamifiers urge, is to live life by design.
The definition I coin considers gamification from the perspective of political consequences, rather than practical application and mechanics. I work towards this definition by focusing on the rhetoric of gamification as an expressed intention that constructs motives and renegotiates beliefs. Hence, the theoretical model I apply draws on the work of two major theorists. American rhetorician and philosopher Kenneth Burke offers a theoretical apparatus for the study of the form and rhetorical devices of addressed messages. French semiotician and social theorist, Jean Baudrillard, informs the deconstruction of the claims gamification makes. The treatment of language as intention and action that is necessarily subjective and interested, offers a liminal stand-point from where the vision of a gamified world can be seen as an ideology which normalises itself by rhetorical means. Thus, I propose that the concept of gamification, whether applied in practice or not, is a political act. It constructs an ideology that seeks to reconcile the myth of the sacrosanct freedom of the Western individual with the constant imposition of corporate and government demands for compliance, accountability and efficiency.

1) “Posthumanistic”

2) “Divorce in the Cosmos: A Complaint”

These two poems were published in _Elohi Gadugi Journal: Narratives for a New World_. (Winter 2016). Copyright granted by the publisher back to the author.

Both of these poems present a far-distant future.

The animal turn is changing the way humanists envision their traditional domains of study. Recent efforts to expand the context of rhetorical theory to include nonhuman animals have raised several issues that call traditional disciplinary assumptions into question. How do we define what is and what is not language? If some animal communication demonstrates syntax and symbol use, what makes human persuasion unique or special? What is the originary essence of rhetoric? Is it a logic? An energy? An ideology? An affect? In this workshop we will explore the justifications for, as well as the benefits and dangers of, studying rhetorical theory and practice in a cross-species context.

ABSTRACT This paper critically appraises the rhetoric of marketing management texts. Its interpretive frame is informed respectively by critical management and discourse analytic theoretical traditions. Its main data set is drawn from popular
textbooks written for taught university courses but it also draws attention to similar rhetorical strategies in leading academic marketing journals. In addition, parallels are drawn with other popular management and consulting fields. In this way the paper
attempts to mark out an initial topology of the ideological influence that is enabled and mobilized by marketing's rhetorical strategies. Marketing rhetoric often escapes critical attention precisely because it is platitudinous. Marketing management axioms have become slogans and the slogans have become cliches regularly employed in organizational, educational and political settings. But the prevalence of platitudinous rhetoric in management consulting schemes does not necessarily hinder their popularity or inhibit the deployment of their rhetorical/ideological strategies in other settings. Popular marketing management rhetoric is a special case because it positions itself not only as a prescriptive management-consulting framework but also as a legitimate academic fleld. It is in the latter guise that the success of managerial marketing's rhetorical/ideological strategies has proved most striking.

This paper offers a critical political-economy of the promise and disappointment of the forprofit Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in higher education. Our goal is to encourage awareness, dialogue, and reflexivity about the gap between the rhetoric and reality of the MOOC in higher education and to highlight and interrogate the persuasive and profit power interests served by “the rhetoric of the MOOC.” To this end, the first section outlines our critical approach and defines some key concepts: “the rhetoric of technology,” “the politicaleconomy of edu-tech” and “the public sphere.” The second section highlights the MOOC’s rhetorical promises and real disappointments. The third section contextualizes the “rhetoric of the MOOC” with regard to the persuasive and profit power interests it serves, and then evaluates this rhetoric with regard to the norms and values of the public sphere. We argue this rhetoric is a promotional discourse that is a poor guide to public deliberation and de...

Originally conceived to highlight problematic labor relations that required emotions, the term emotional labor is now deployed to describe emotional relations that require problematic labor. In this paper, we identify how digital platforms have amplified this inverted form of emotional labor and spawned a phenomenon we term technoliberal managerialism, or the use of the connection, quantification, control, tracking, and optimization capacities of technology to manage everyday interactions. Through the analysis of viral self-help Twitter threads, a mobile application, and an algorithmic prototype we trace how the resulting habituation rewards happiness, efficiency, and uniformity at the expense of moodiness, messiness, and difference. Ultimately, we argue that going off scripts and embracing the “fuck up” can help resist technoliberalism.

This paper reports on a preliminary comparative study of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant voice assistants (VA) that explores the origins of answers provided on each platform in an attempt to determine the extent that these origins influence responses. Questions were selected from Text Recognition (TREC) 2017 Live Question Answering (QA) Track Data, a collection of pre-assessed questions that are part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) TREC QA track. Responses were collected as voice memos and screen captures, then analyzed to determine the origins of each answer or set of answers provided. Results indicate that the origins of answers are different search engines, and that algorithm-centered processes in each voice assistant result in vast differences in answers to questions. Because the online search results provided as answers by voice assistants are influenced by content and structured data, technical communicators and UX practitioners can help ensure that voice assistants are able to provide accurate, complete, and ethical responses to users’ questions.

As Editor-in-Chief at The Freelance Netizen™ online magazine, I edit, peer-review and supervise peer review services for all article and editorial submissions.

The Freelance Netizen™ explores the interdisciplinary connections between Information & Communication Technologies and the history of information culture, civil rights and social action. It critically addresses digital mediums as the intercultural confluence of global dialectics. A typical editorial at TFN magazine might explore the present and future directions of Intercultural Information Ethics and its crossroads with the latest WikiLeaks debate.

TFN magazine provides a crossroads between the academic applications of philosophy, technology and interculture with current events, looking to philosophies of communication and information as a platform for addressing questions of digital ontology. TFN magazine is currently exploring, alongside the International Centre for Information Ethics, applications of global citizenship in a digital era with a specific address of digital citizenship and the netizen.

The objective of TFN magazine is to further expertise in intercultural editing and writing for academic and scholarly communications and current events, both on a local and global scale, by researching and structuring innovative dialogue towards a citizen engagement of Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) through an understanding of the nature of information.

Jared Bielby,
Editor-in-Chief, TFN
Co-chair, ICIE
Editor, IRIE
www.jaredbielby.com

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The Rhetoric of Economics is a course that illustrates the important relationship between persuasion and modern science. Examining the discipline of economics as its particular object of analysis, the course will argue that this field of thought must be understood as an attempt to rhetorically secure belief in an innate market logic that undergirds all human behaviors and social practices. Both critical and historical in its engagement with a wide variety of economic texts, the rhetoric of economics will provide students with a vocabulary to grapple with many of the most pressing problems of the 21st century. These topics include, but are not limited to, financial crises, globalization, living wages, and climate change. An open mind and willingness to question taken for granted assumptions about society and culture are important prerequisites for the course.

This study resumes elements of pioneering research initially conducted in Internet addiction and dependency (Thompson, 1996). Further study of Internet phenomena over the 15 years since, has taken the author into the realm of iconic mediated messaging as a struggle between global media, terrorism, and the viewer (Thompson, 2010). Having grown in access and privilege within the consumer Web -- initial concerns over usage and expectations as laid out in 1996 whereby Internet addiction and dependency were determined to be more along the lines of investment and empowerment vs. self-destructive habit -- the maturation process from initial usage to full-fledged Internet literacy has been fraught with obstacles, yet with deep reward.

As a scholar well-versed in interdisciplinarity and cybercultures, and having moved away from the fears of Internet addiction to the reality of empowerment, one recognizes a plethora of reasons why Internet literacy has molded scholarship and individual into a new creation of cybernetic origin: cyberspace provides and subscribes opportunity for humans to communicate as more than the sum of their parts. In the process of literacy change and alteration over this time period, there has also been adjustment in the cyber network, which has been fed both the good and bad that humanity has been able to conjure and upload: a vast, endless, exponential archive of every human conception.

What have we learned in the last 15 or so years as a species interacting with the virtual species that has seemingly aligned itself with our purposes and future, a future that has taken on the permanent persona of an ever-presence in which we are? This study evaluates emerging information literacy trends, the media, and individual participatory freedoms and consequences that confront those trends within the Internet.

The stated aim of this conference is to debate the continuing evolution of IS in businesses and other organisations. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by exploring the concept of appropriation from a number of different epistemological, cultural and linguistic viewpoints to allow us to explore &#39;the black box&#39; of appropriation and to gain a fuller understanding of the term. At the conceptual level, it will examine some of the different ways in which people have attempted to explain the relationship between the objective and concrete features of technology and the subjective and shifting nature of the people and organisation within which that technology is deployed. At the cultural and linguistic level the paper will examine the notion as it is found in the Francophone literature, where the term has a long and rich history, and the Anglophone literature where appropriation is seen as a rather more specialist term. The paper will conclude with some observations on t...