Rhetoric Of Technology Research Articles

Big Data, Congress, and the Rhetoric of Technology: Or, How to Industrialize Cyberspace

As new and developing technologies impact public and private life, rhetoricians would be remiss to overlook the deliberative rhetorics that justify their development, implementation, use-value, and impact. Using the 2013 joint congressional hearing “Next Generation Computing and Big Data Analytics” as an example, I argue that justificatory rhetorics about technology intersect with rhetoric from technology, obscuring information vital to critical deliberation. I demonstrate that the expert witnesses at this hearing draw upon rhetoric traditionally associated with American industrialization. Doing so allows them to articulate Big Data as a resource situated upon a metaphorical, American landscape and thus encourages the public to treat it as a natural resource that must be exploited for the betterment of the nation. Ultimately, I argue the use of this rhetoric dissuades critical analysis of the worth of Big Data and investigation of its technical aspects. This raises troubling questions about the ability of rhetoric about technology to both veil and guides what the public accepts as ethical rhetoric from technology.

The Rhetoric of Google Lens: A Postsymbolic Look at Locative Media

ABSTRACT This article examines textual artifacts surrounding Google Lens, an image recognition application, to reveal how it forwards reductive representations of the complex sets of relations constituted through locative media and augmented reality. Working across textual and posthumanist traditions, this article introduces a theoretical approach for investigating the rhetoric of technology, termed the postsymbolic. In acknowledging the formative and ontological role discursive rhetoric plays in the spatial operations and user experiences of and through locative media, the postsymbolic asserts the need for an integrated approach in which symbolic artifacts might be examined through the lens of both discursive rhetorical theory and posthumanism.

Monsterization, Mechanization, Contradiction: Marx’s Rhetoric of Technology

This essay examines Marx’s style and argumentation to argue that Marx crafted a rhetoric of technology that has empowered critics and theorists to assert that he advocated a range of competing philosophies of technology. It analyzes Marx’s use of monsterization and mechanization tropes to show how his technological writings can be associated with multiple conceptions of technology, including technological determinism, technological domination, social constructivism, and human/nonhuman assemblages. Monsterization is intended to mean the attribution of monstrous characteristics to things or people while mechanization is the attribution of machinelike characteristics to nonmechanical things. The essay then turns its rhetorical analysis toward Marx’s argumentation to show how his use of contradictions has aligned his writings with technological neutrality, liberation technology, and political technology. Monsterization, mechanization, and contradiction thus provide the textual evidence for Marx’s philosophical multiplicity while also articulating a wide-ranging rhetoric of mid-nineteenth-century industrial technology.

Communicating paradox: Uncertainty and the northern lights

While many characteristics of tourism products are well known, relatively little work has explored elements of uncertainty and risk. Little is known about how tourism operators communicate aspects of uncertainty. This qualitative study uses content analysis to explore the language used in promotional material of tour operators and destination management organisations to communicate the unpredictable nature of northern lights. The study involves two Norwegian destinations (2004–2014). Three rhetorical strategies are identified: first, the rhetoric of technology, enhanced mobility, and adding additional activities; secondly, through ‘hiding’ or obscuring the uncertainty; and thirdly, through employing culturally and geographically appropriate metaphors (i.e. ‘hunt’) to embrace the element of uncertainty. This study advances our understanding of how tourism operators rhetorically address temporally and/or spatially uncertain attractions by demonstrating how the operators negotiate and minimise uncertainty through the narrative of ‘the hunt’. This rhetoric implies that uncertainty can enhance value in a touristic experience.

Patent Wars and Ecosystems: Metaphor and “Black Boxes”

Traditionally, the role of metaphor in rhetoric has been seen as recasting the unknown into the realm of the known. Metaphor as explication has been well documented in scholarship of the rhetoric of science. This article argues that scholars interested in the rhetoric of technology should view metaphor as akin to “black boxes.” Relying on Lakoff and Johnson’s theory of “conceptual metaphor,” it analyzes one episode in the so-called “Smart Phone Patent Wars,” focusing on two metaphors: “ecosystem” and “patent war.” Ultimately, the article finds that as black boxes, these metaphors constrain the possible options that people see for their relationships with technology.

Common Sense and the Rhetoric of Technology

This article investigates rhetorical methods for establishing notions of common sense, especially the common sense that makes technological choices take on an aura of inevitability. I rely on a rhetorical framework drawn from Aristotle and Perelman \& Olbrechts-Tyteca, as well as the philosophers Charles Taylor and Andrew Feenberg.

The Rhetoric of Technology as a Rhetorical Technology

The Rhetoric of Technology as a Rhetorical Technology

The Land of Faery as Cosmic Cheat: A Lewisian Analysis of Robert Zemekis’ Contact

This essay explores Robert Zemekis’ film adaptation of Carl Sagan’s book Contact, through the lens of rhetorical constructs adapted from the critical writings of another science-fiction author, C.S. Lewis; specifically his concept of Sehnsucht, the rhetoric of technology, the persuasive use of misdirection in indoctrination, and the power of debunking to destroy someone’s sense of values. I argue that Zemekis’ film represents a “cosmic cheat” in that it promises filmgoers transcendence, but delivers only a warm materialistic nihilism. Ultimately, however, it may be that the resilience of the transcendence inherent in faery stories will overcome the sterility of technology.

Looking to the Future: Electronic Texts and the Deepening Interface

Since the initial appearance of rhetorical analysis of text-based and hypertext communication, the rhetoric of technology has evolved along with the new media forms it studies. This essay reviews critical consensus that calls for a move away from printcentric criticism. It advocates innovative methods for criticism of electronic texts, such as emphasis on comparative media analysis, visual representation, and attention to the programming and codification of electronic texts.

2 + 2 = 5 If 2 Is Large Enough

This article suggests a perspective on rhetoric of technology as discursive exploitation of the margins of indeterminacy affecting the development of technologies and technical artifacts. It examines such margins by examining the development of an aircraft auxiliary engine in a California aerospace company, focusing especially on how engines are tested. It examines technical documents associated with testing as arenas for rhetorical transactions involving various factors and interests vested in a technology and as residua of compliance and negotiation. It suggests that margins of indeterminacy in technology development provide critical rhetorical spaces for agency and decision making, spaces that engineers and technical communicators must be trained to appreciate and exploit appropriately.

Response to Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class"

Response to Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe, "The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class"

The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class

vironments. Writing instructors who hope to function effectively in these new electronic classrooms must assess ways in which the use of computer technology might shape, for better and worse, their strategies for working with students. Along with becoming acquainted with current composition theory, instructors, for example, must learn to recognize that the use of technology can exacerbate problems characteristic of American classrooms and must continue to seek ways of using technology that equitably support all students in writing classes. All too frequently, however, writing instructors incorporate computers into their classes without the necessary scrutiny and careful planning that the use of any technology requires. Such scrutiny will become increasingly important with computers, given the considerable corporate and community investment accompanying this technology as its use expands within our educational system. Unfortunately, as writing instructors, we have not always recognized the natural tendency when using such machines, as cultural artifacts embodying society's values, to perpetuate those values currently dominant within our culture and our educational system. This tendency has become evident as we continue to integrate computers into our efforts at writing instruction. In many English composition classes, computer use simply reinforces those traditional notions of education that permeate our culture at its most basic level: teachers talk, students listen; teachers' contributions are privileged; students respond in predictable,

Educational Technology Utilization in Jamaica's Secondary School System: present problems and future prospects

AbstractThe rhetoric of technology from the developed world tends to mesmerize educational planners in Third World countries into thinking that the introduction of technology (ie, television, radio, computers, etc) into their educational systems will act as a panacea for whatever ills are being experienced. A study of the actual use over the past two decades of educational television (ETV) and self‐instructional materials (SIM) in the Jamaican secondary school system reveals that ETV and SIM have had limited impact. Inadequate provision of infrastructural requirements, too heavy a reliance on foreign aid, and unrealistic assessment of the real costs of innovation have contributed to this.Current trends in the use of computer‐assisted instruction (CAI) suggest that the mistakes made in the past with ETV may well be repeated. More significantly, use of CAI in the high school and the new secondary school system in Jamaica may well lead to greater disparity in educational opportunities offered to children from different social classes—a situation that successive governments have tried to correct. The paper points out the need for Third World countries to ‘demystify’ technology and assume greater responsiblity for initiating educational innovations that are better suited to the economic and social realities of developing nations.

The SST controversy: A case study of the rhetoric of technology

During the SST controversy old arguments were losing force and new ones were developing. As in other recent technological debates, SST proponents raised charges of environmental catastrophe which were most difficult to disprove, while SST proponents made serious errors in analyzing their audience. We have not yet learned how to conduct effctive public discussion of scientific issues.