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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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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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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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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My Digital Brain? The network made of neurons is digital. That’s what I took from this statement about neuron firing: “A neuron can only fire or not fire; there is no ‘slightly activated’ signal from a neuron” (“Neurobiology” 2013, p. 6). I took this activity to be analogous to digital 0s and 1s: a digitally…
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I plowed through all of these readings in a single sitting, which did not help much with comprehension, but which did affect my experience reading. I’m a composition teacher who prefers to grade all assignments in a single sitting, an web manager who prefers to make changes that affect multiple parts of the navigation structure…
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Bateson Bateson, G. (1987/1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. To separate the individual from the society, or the individual mind or thought from the global mind or thought, is to deny the ecological unity of creatura, of the creative self. Individuals…
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I believe I follow the broad strokes of Latour’s (2005) argument in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory pretty clearly, but I find the detail he provides in places extraneous and, to be honest, a bit pompous and flippant. Latour recognizes this about himself, and suggests it’s intentional: “I have completed what I promised…
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Finding common ground in this week’s disparate readings was difficult. More precisely, Latour’s introduction to actor-network-theory (ANT) had almost nothing to do with reading from Joyce and Johnson-Eilola, other than the fact that hypertext as object might be an instantiated mediator within a collective. More precisely, the hypertext itself may function as a trace of…
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Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) opens wide the theory of composition to the laminated materiality, space, and time of rhetoric, elements missing from the classical rhetorical canon that focuses primarily on the rhetor. “CHAT offers a richer map of activity. Where the classical canons mapped the situational, productive acts of a rhetor, this CHAT map points…
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