Reading Notes: Ambient Rhetoric

Ambient Rhetoric rocked my world. It opened new paths of exploration and generally knocked me out of my growing comfort with network as a metaphor for rhetoric. One idea in particular rocked me to my theoretical core, while a (what I thought to be) tenuous connection to trickster turned into some remarkable parallels between Rickert’s (2013) theory of…
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Mindmap #14: Concept Groupings 2

Last week’s concept groupings focused on theories; this week’s focuses on theorists (although, to be honest, I’ve not been adding individual theorists for the last few theories). I also added and linked in Social Network, Ideological Determinism, and Ambience as the final three theories we’ve addressed in the class. I wanted to have the full…
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Reading Notes: Althusser and Hall

control room - photo

What Althusser (1971) refers to as “the ideology of the ruling class” (emphasis mine), become the ruling ideology “by the installation of the ISAs [Ideological State Apparatuses]” is analogous to Hall’s (1973/2007) “dominant-hegemonic position” (emphasis mine) set in place by the metacode “which the professional broadcasters assume when encoding a message which has already been…
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Case Study: Scaffolding Outline

OoS: Google Analytics Activities addressed in my OoS: Collection, Collation, Processing, Reporting GA Data Model: User (Visitor), Session (Visit), Interaction (Hits) Data Model Collections and Reports: Dimensions (“descriptive attribute or characteristic of an object”) and Metrics (“Individual elements of a dimension that can be measured as a sum or ratio”) (Google, 2014). Theories & Selection…
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Mindmap #13: Concept Groupings 1

Israel/Palestine border wall

This week is the first of two focused on grouping theorists and/or theories by concepts. I identified five concept groups to which I’ve connected theories: Agency, Flow, Meaning, Boundaries, and Composition/Rhetoric. I’ve included a screenshot of the area I’ve set aside for concept grouping, along with a full-map version. I described the concept groups as…
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Reading Notes: Deleuze & Guattari, Scott, and Rainie & Wellman

forest photo

Deleuze & Guattari Reading A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) is an experience in disorientation and reorientation. The first pages are entirely disorienting. What is that scribbled piano piece for David Tudor? What is a book without subject or object? How are lines and measurable speed related to the assemblage,…
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Case Study #3: GA and Castells’ Network Society

Wires photo

Literature Review As I noted in Case Study #2, Google Analytics (GA) appears most often in scholarship as a black-boxed application that reports (presumed accurate) visitor frequency and browsing behavior on websites. Websites are said by be “successful” in terms of reported visitor traffic to the site, number of pages viewed while on the site,…
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Mindmap #12: Connectedness

connect visualization

Last week’s mindmap took into account most of what we’ve read from Castells, so I did not add any more to the Castells nodes. Preparing for end-of-term assignments, however, I started thinking about the network ecology I’ve created in the mindmap in order to identify some trends. So I pulled out what appear to be…
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Reading Notes: The Rise of the Network Society

organizational chart visualization

A text about network connectivity offered quite a few connections to aspects of my “real” (really virtual?) life outside of academe. Higher Education OK, so this isn’t exactly part of life outside academe. It’s the staff side of my professional position that drew a connection to the economic value of higher education in Castells’ (2010)…
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Mindmap #11: The Network Society

global society illustration

Castells represented 500 page of network goodness, and I savored (quickly) every morsel. I struggled to limit what I planned to include in this week’s mindmap, settling on a tried and true method: I use the table of contents to organize my new nodes. I linked Castells to Foucault, Latour, and aspects of ecology. I…
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