Tag: rhetoric

I made the mistake of adding tech feeds to my RSS reader and now I’m just mad all the time.

  • May 22, 2024

There was a time, back in the 00s or so, when I kept up to date on a lot of tech news. I spent the time trying to follow trends in web development and mobile technology and apps. It was important to my work, but part of my overall interest in how the Internet was being integrated into our daily lives.

Once I moved away from tech focused work and into education, I let those news feeds go. I purged myself of latest developments and relied on larger, mainstream news outlets to inform me about the technology that would impact my daily life. Yet, as I started teaching first-year composition, I realized (we all realized) that being up-to-date on the technology our students were using (not always by choice either) would make our discussions surrounding critical thinking that much more relevant. Trust me, when ChatGPT burst on to the scene, I suggested we lean into it, teaching it as a new tool that students can use in their ever increasing arsenal of technological apps that can help them… wait. Help them what exactly? What was I supposed to be teaching them? More on that in a moment.

As I’ve reinstated my tech RSS feeds, I find myself getting more and more suspicious about the proliferation of AI. While I’ve not been totally receptive to the computerization of our automobiles, nor the subscription model of everything, I still want to be able to glean the direction personal technology is headed, and, if Microsoft’s recent announcements are any indication, the future is AI.

If you follow my links of interest at all, you can see where this is going?

Who wants this? Why are we being told that we want this? Every time I read about another AI-enhanced laptop or an app that’s I’ve been using suddenly wants me to incorporate their AI model into my workflow, I get frustrated.

If I’m not building up the critical skills to summarize an article (and most public-facing articles are woefully short and simplistic already), what am I doing with the time AI is saving?

What’s the point of learning discernment and curation if I never skip over Google’s AI-created search summaries at the top of its results page? (Shouldn’t have made Google suck, yeah?)

How am I supposed to teach critical thinking skills if all the little ways in which we think every day are being eaten up by language learning models that have dubious bias built in and don’t have an understanding of a ham sandwich outside the fact that sometimes it’s mentioned next to mustard?

More and more I feel like we’re heading into a direction where we will teach two ways of existing cognitively in our technological future: 1) a way to prompt AI to yield results that save us from doing labor or gaining mastery; and 2) a way to avoid the AI altogether and create bare bones text and art in a way that hides it from the upcoming singular cloud. Both feel exhausting.

Meanwhile, a bunch of narcissistic shitheads are at the controls of the future.

Shouts from the top of the Ivory Tower

  • October 17, 2023

Certainly, not all students wear these moral blinders. But the fact* that many students do, and that they are at some of the nation’s leading colleges and universities, should be a cause for profound concern across higher education.

-Ezekiel J. Emanuel  “Hamas and the Moral Deficiencies of a Liberal Education – The New York Times“

*Where is that fact located, Professor? Could you cite your sources? Let’s keep focusing on the plight of liberal education by shaming 34 Harvard students for exercising their right to free speech. Would the good professor like to address food insecurity on campuses? How about other universities are slashing major parts of that “liberal education” he is crying about? I think the Vice Provost (again, what even is that job?) wanted to be mad at the Harvard students, but gets to yell about it in The New York Fucking Times.

We have left these students a world on the brink of death, destruction, and despair.

We have all failed them and they are letting us know.

Always write your notes as if they’ll be found

  • December 7, 2022

While I was transcribing my notebook today, I came across this paragraph I wrote about the first chapter of Richard Miller’s Writing at the End of the World:

Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is discussed in detail and while I’m pleased we found the time to discuss a female writer, I’m saddened that her story has to be about hope generated through the expression of her psychological and physical trauma and that her contribution is about forgiveness. Thank goodness for the lady nurturers. “It might seem that by organizing these readings in this way, I’ve been building up to a spirited defense of the social and therapeutic value of writing one’s memoirs” (24). Reader, he is not. Amis, Krakauer, Descartes all new that writing could exemplify, amplify their anxieties: “extend one’s sense of despair and one’s sense of superiority” (24) but they lacked the knowledge that Karr had, that writing could generate hope and forgiveness and an understanding of one’s own past and path. Miller forgets to point out that men often have the space, time, leisure to amplify their pain because the women compromise, cajole, and cooperate. Karr finds hope and optimism because she is not allowed the space to brood and sulk in the literary world. Her pain isn’t vented through literary doppelgangers or shooting sprees—it burns until it’s contained and only valued when her trauma is transformed into that most useful of all stolen artifacts—hope.

Who gets to be a teenager?

  • November 29, 2022

An open letter to NPR:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/news-wrap-teenager-pleads-guilty-to-killing-ten-black-workers-and-shoppers-in-buffalo

Why purposefully use “teenager” in this headline to describe the adult male pleading guilty? His attack was racially motivated and since we have a long history of “aging up “ Black people in our media to make them seem more threatening, this is a bad editorial choice.

“Man pleads guilty to killing ten Black workers and shopper in Buffalo.”

There. You don’t even have to put “white” before his name if it makes you uncomfortable, because we know. Of course, we know.

Heather annotates: “Beware the ‘Storification’ of the Internet”

  • November 21, 2022

Stewart, Sophia. “Beware the ‘Storification’ of the Internet.” The Atlantic, 17 Nov. 2022.

I really appreciated Sophia Stewart’s review of Peter Brook’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, as it’s probably a book I would pick up and read as supplementary to my exam readings in rhetoric. I especially appreciated the shortcomings she outlined and wanted to share my own thoughts on her review. I am thinking of making this a regular thing.

Also, I think anyone doing rhetorical commentary has to do more than mention the Internet. It is the driver of discourse in a number of ways, particularly in what media outlets choose to cover. The average person may not be on Twitter or TikTok, but they’ll hear/read about it over their morning coffee. 

"There is a growing trend in American culture of what the literary theorist Peter Brooks calls “storification.” Since the turn of the millennium, he argues in his new book, Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, we’ve relied too heavily on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us, which has resulted in a “narrative takeover of reality” that affects nearly every form of communication—including the way doctors interact with patients, how financial reports are written, and the branding that corporations use to present themselves to consumers. Meanwhile, other modes of expression, interpretation, and comprehension, such as analysis and argument, have fallen to the wayside."

On the surface, what Brooks seems to be asserting is bull. All things are stories. The things listed here are parts of narratives and this is just some tiresome way of saying personal ≠ rational.

"The danger of this arises when the public fails to understand that many of these stories are constructed through deliberate choices and omissions."

So, like, what the humanities provide? The thing we’re defunding?

"In other words, we could all benefit from a lesson in close reading and a dose of skepticism."

Interpretation is deliberate choices and omissions!

"In times of turmoil, we search most desperately for the familiar hallmarks of storytelling: clearly defined heroes and villains, motives, and stakes."

This will never really change, it is part of the human existence. What we have to do is not rely on a single story – but a breadth of voices to give a full picture.

"His sole mentions of the internet—vague acknowledgments that “Twitter and the meme dominate the presentation of reality” and that ours is an “era of fake news and Facebook”—fail to grasp that on the internet especially, more attentive, analytical reading is essential."

His observation is based on the story of the Internet woven by outdated media institutions.

"But it also provides language for hard-to-articulate feelings: In another video, a forlorn teen stares into the camera above the text, 'i know i’m a side character, i have no purpose except to sit and wait for my next scene.'"

People who have grown up in front of the DVD player, with videos streaming on tablets at their youngest age, whose adolescence is framed through a Snapchat filter will invariably describe their lives in the vocabulary of the mediums they use. Every generation does this.

"As narrators of our own lives, Brooks writes, 'we must recognize the inadequacy of our narratives to solve our own and [others’] problems.' Pulling from Freudian psychoanalysis, Brooks concludes that telling stories should be a tool we use to understand ourselves better rather than a goal in and of itself."

Adriana Cavarero talks about how we are not the ultimate authors of our lives, it’s those we know who tell our “true” story – I am slowly becoming convinced of the realness of this message (though I am resistant.) The Internet accelerates the dispersion of our story, but ultimately is not the final editor. Our stories are told over and over, in various way, through various mediums and with various intent.

"Although Brooks briefly worries about 'inflated claims about [narrative’s] capacity to solve all personal and social issues' in the first chapter, it never comes up again in the many rich and rigorous close readings that follow."

Sometimes narrative’s role is just to show that those personal and social issues exist.

Perhaps I should have organized this as more of a narrative, but I labeled this as an annotation so there wouldn’t be an expectation of me spinning a story.

Don’t put me in a situation…

  • October 31, 2022

This is my illustration of the rhetorical situation, sort of. Think of it as a biblically accurate angel with less surety. All the stick figures are the same person, just at different moments. That’s the cardboard tube of genre in the middle. It has form but easily bendable. Yes. Ok.

This was also posted on Facebook.