Public Rhetoric and Practical Communication
How Are Form and Content Related?
Lecture 4: CAT 125
Elizabeth Losh
http://losh.ucsd.edu
Langdon Winner on
“Mythinformation”
“Taken as a whole, beliefs of this kind constitute what I would call
mythinformation: the almost religious conviction that a widespread
adoption of computers and communications systems along with
easy access to electronic information will automatically produce a
better world for human living.” (NMR 592)
“information=knowledge=power=democracy” (NMR 595)
Wikiality and Tripling Elephant
Population
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/72347/july-31-2006/the-word---wikiality
Colbert’s Rhetoric
Truthiness
In satire, truthiness is a "truth" that a person claims to know
intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic,
intellectual examination, or facts.
Wikiality
Reality as decided on by majority rule.
“Bringing democracy to knowledge”
Use of the rhetoric of news graphics
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI8_DDEuswk
Virgil Griffith, WikiScanner, and “SelfDetermination”
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/183247/august-21-2007/the-word---self-determination
“Of all the computer enthusiasts’ political ideas, there is none more poignant than the
faith that the computer is destined to become a potent equalizer in modern society.
Support for this belief is found in the fact that small ‘personal’ computers are becoming
more and more powerful, less and less expensive, and ever more simple to use . . .
Using a personal computer makes one no more powerful vis-à-vis, say, the National
Security Agency than flying a hang glider establishes a person as a match for the U.S. Air
Force.”
Epistemological Hierarchies
Information in the Ancient World
The information culture of the Roman world was exploding with new
libraries and modes for disseminating written texts, maps, scientific
illustrations, art works, and luxury goods
Etymology of “Information”
“The term itself traces back to the Latin verb informare, which for
the Romans generally meant ‘to shape,’ ‘to form an idea of,’ or ‘to
describe.’ The verb, in turn, supplied action to the substantive,
forma, which took varied, cognate meanings that depended mostly
on context. The historian Livy used forma as a general term for
‘character,’ ‘form,’ ‘nature,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘matter.’ Horace applied it to
a shoelast, Ovid to a mold or stamp for making coins, while the
wily Cicero, among other uses, extended it to logic as ‘form’ or
‘species,’ his rendering of the Greek. . . . The practical notion of
‘form’ as a last, mold, or stamp remained closely tied to its more
abstract, logical meaning, which paired content and container.”
Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman, Information Ages: literacy,
numeracy, and the computer revolution
What informational structures will you
bring to your blog?
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Chronology
Links to primary sources and commentary
Photographs and information graphics
Tags
A Blogroll
http://losh.ucsd.edu/courses/example_blogs.html
Is everything really self-determined
A Word on Reflection
Reflection is not just about “personal reflection”
The Rhetoric of Governments, Universities,
Corporations, Churches, and Organizations
We all serve as spokespeople
Beginning a book with reflection
One day, in 1988, the computers and modems suddenly
appeared, as if by magic. They were second-hand Apple IIe
terminals, but in my mind it was a miracle to have them at all. At
the time, I was fresh out of college and running a chronically
underfunded after-school program at a delinquency prevention
center under the auspices of the California Youth Authority.
Ending a book with reflection
Reflection Does Not Need to Be
• About the distant past
• A negative appraisal
Edward Tufte
Visual Explanations
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
“These costs result from the cognitive style
characteristic of the standard default PP presentation:
foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial
resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure
as the model for organizing every type of content,
breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal
fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin
information rather than focused spatial analysis,
conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation
with formal not content, an attitude of commercialism
that turns everything into a sales pitch.” (4)
Chart Junk in the Shuttle Disaster
Colin Powell’s Evidence Presented to
the United Nations
Strategic Thinking and PowerPoint
http://lay-uh.ytmnd.com/
Does PowerPoint Oversimplify?
Professor Oreskes point about
editability
The Lincoln PowerPoint
http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
Default Templates
The Yes Men
http://theyesmenfixtheworld.com/trailer_hd.htm
PowerPoint as a Lecturing Tool
Jill Bolte Taylor
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
Bolte Taylor’s Rhetoric of Personal and
Professional Expertise
• “I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who
has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia”
• Speaking “as a sister and later as a scientist”
• Family photo “I can make my dreams come true”
• Lab of Dr. Francine Benes at Harvard Dept. of Psychiatry
• Question about biological differences: research question
• Mapping microcircuitry
• Advocate for NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness
• Morning of December 10, 1996
• Medical scan of hemorrhage
• Show and tell moment with human brain
Bolte Taylor’s Rhetoric of
Disempowerment
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“I could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall”
“An infant in a woman’s body”
Humor of personifying right and left brains
Humor of how language sounds to her
A long tradition of “captivity narratives” and
“conversion narratives”
Bolte Taylor’s Rhetoric of
Empowerment
• Peace of choosing to leaving left hemispheres
• Who are we? The “lifeforce power of the
universe”
• Power to choose how and who we want to be
in the world – the “we inside of me”
• Rhetorical questions: Which would you
choose? Which do you choose? And when?
Testimony vs. Evidence
A Thesis from Lecture Three
Although TED talks seem to represent a new
form of what Henry Jenkins has called
“spreadable media,” the most popular online
videos are often those with conventional
messages that follow traditional narrative
structures. For example, the TED talk by Jill
Bolte Taylor borrows from much older popular
American rhetorics of captivity and
conversion.”
Ideas worth spreading
Spreadable Media not Viral Media
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY
Going shorter
The pecha kucha format
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NZOt6BkhUg
Associated with architects, designers, game
designers, etc.
Image driven not text driven
The Status Update Format
Going even shorter to 40 characters
An Experiment for Class
Sign up for Twitter before January 25
Enable its mobile functionality
Bring your mobile device to class on January 25
Use the #cat125 hashtag for the first twenty
minutes of class, while we are viewing the
disability videos and learning about Joseph
Weizenbaum’s argument about computers
Think about decorum
Turn off your mobile device while I introduce
professor Humphries
For Next Time
Thinking about Old Media and New Media with
Vannevar Bush and Lev Manovich