Available Means of Persuasion, The. David M. Sheridan
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institutionally sanctioned spaces of education (e.g., first-year writing).
In an age of rapid technological change, new rhetorical options become available daily. We can chose to ignore them, to rely on established traditions and practices that have become comfortable to us, but this runs counter to a kairotic approach. According to Eric Charles White, a commitment to kairos demands that we be willing to suspend accustomed habits of thinking and interrogate the moment to see what new possibilities it contains:
[K]airos regards the present as unprecedented, as a moment of decision, a moment of crisis, and considers it impossible, therefore, to intervene successfully in the course of events merely on the basis of past experience. How can one make sense of a world that is eternally new simply by repeating the readymade categories of tradition? Tradition must answer to the present, must be adapted to new circumstances that may modify or even disrupt received knowledge. Rather than understand the present solely in terms of the past, one should seek to remain open to an encounter with the unforeseen spontaneity we commonly describe as the “mother of invention.” (14)
Honoring kairos, then, has a destabilizing effect, forcing us to question past practices in light of new possibilities. In an age of rapid technological change, these new possibilities include things like 3D printers, wrap-around virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and other options that at first seem strange, newfangled, irrelevant.
Diana George, in “Wonder of It All: Computers, Writing Centers, and the New World,” eloquently captures the stunning effect of rapid technological change. George observes that “[c]hange is difficult, mostly because we just don’t know how to change” (331). Drawing on the work of Stephen Greenblatt, George suggests that our encounter with new technologies is analogous to Europeans’ encounter with the so-called “new world” (332). The “wonder and amazement” that accompanied this encounter induced a kind of cultural and intellectual paralysis, akin, as Greenblatt puts it, to “the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole momentarily convulsed” (qtd. in George 332). Likewise as we encounter the new world of emergent technologies “we are in danger of either recreating the old or staring at the new in wonder” (333). The only cure for this paralysis the hard intellectual work that enables us to make sense of this “new world.” We need “theory building” for without it, “we have no way of understanding the New World—the world of marvels, of wonder” (334).
This chapter heeds George’s call for theory building. We offer a four-part heuristic aimed at supporting a kairotic approach—an approach, that is, in which we experience each moment as a moment of crisis, full of possibilities that might not be self-evident. Our heuristic derives from analysis of earlier moments in history when new rhetorical technologies, namely the still camera and the movie camera, emerged as tools potentially available to public rhetors. Before we turn to these old new technologies, however, we want to establish a more general understanding of the dynamics of access and the way recent developments in media technologies are shifting those dynamics.
Two Technological Divides
In recent years, it has become common to refer to the “digital divide”—the gap between the technological “haves” and “have nots.” Discussions of this divide often suffer from simplistic, acultural understandings of technology and from an uncritical reliance on problematic constructions of race and class. As Barbara Monroe and others demonstrate, much “digital divide” discourse relies on “bootstraps” narratives in which success is the simple result of an individual’s hard work. In this formulation, once the “have nots” are given computers they will automatically secure lucrative jobs and a high quality of life. And if they don’t, it’s their own fault (Monroe 5–30).
The issue of access is further complicated by another kind of “divide.” The rise of technologically-intensive mass media (e.g., TV, film, print media, and the Web) has meant that culturally important channels of communication have increasingly been owned by large, centralized, for-profit media firms. These firms command resources of capital, technology, and talent that far exceed what ordinary people possess. We now take it for granted that media conglomerates (e.g., Time Warner, Disney, and News Corp.) have access to vastly more resources than ordinary people, but this system is not inevitable, nor is it universal throughout human history (see, for instance, Hauser, Vernacular 14–24).
Many media scholars have explored the problems of a system that relies on centralized, conglomerated, and commercialized media institutions (see Bagdikian; Eberly, “Rhetoric”; Habermas, Structural; Hauser, Vernacular; Herman and Chomsky; Howley; Keane; Louw; McChesney; Norris). Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, for instance, argue that the post 1980 period, marked by neoliberal politics of deregulation and globalization, has resulted in a significant erosion if not wholesale annihilation of the public sphere. The centralization of the media industry from fifty companies in the early 1980s to eight transnational conglomerates in 2002 has allowed what Kevin Robins and Frank Webster refer to as “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture” (qtd. in Herman and Chomsky xviii). Robert W. McChesney draws similar conclusions in The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century, arguing that neoliberal policies of deregulation and globalization have strengthened the cultural power of advertising and marketing, thereby allowing consumerism to overtake public interest.
As Fraser observes, the cultural marginalization of some groups is “amplified” by the reality that “the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit” (64–65). Similarly, Eberly alludes to this problem when she quotes a lengthy passage from McChesney that is worth repeating here:
The market is in fact a highly flawed regulatory mechanism for a democracy. In markets, one’s income and wealth determine one’s power. It is a system of “one dollar, one vote” rather than “one person, one vote.” Viewed in this manner, the market is more a plutocratic mechanism than a democratic one. In communication this means that the emerging system is tailored to the needs of business and the affluent. . . . The market is assumed to be a neutral and value-free regulatory mechanism. In fact . . . a commercial “marketplace” of ideas has a strong bias toward rewarding ideas supportive of the status quo and marginalizing socially dissident views. Markets tend to reproduce social inequality economically, politically, and ideologically. (qtd. in “Rhetoric” 297)
As solutions to the problems of corporatized and centralized mass media, a number of theorists have proposed more effective governmental regulation and the importance of publicly owned media (see, for instance, Keane; McChesney). These are important components of a solution, but there are other possibilities to consider as well. Without buying into the myth that “[t]he Internet . . . will set us free,” we would like to summarize the ways new technologies potentially open up new forms of access to various and overlapping publics and counterpublics (McChesney 10).
Shifting Dynamics of Access: Can You Remember the Twentieth Century?
At heart, industrializing communicative processes (beginning with newspapers, but reaching its zenith with television) led to mass communication, which is inherently top-down and manipulative. Industrialization reduced the spaces for ‘ordinary’ people (non-professional communicators) to engage in meaning-making as anything other than audience.
—Eric Louw
Many new developments in rhetorical practices that have been enabled by emergent technologies—despite their newness—have already become so naturalized that it’s easy to overlook their significance. Think, for instance, of how routine the posting and sharing of videos has become in the era of YouTube. It requires serious effort to recall the pre-Web, pre-home computer era. In this context, it is interesting to revisit works like Richard A. Lanham’s The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, which attempt to record important shifts in access brought about by digital technologies. Lanham’s work is suffused with a kind of wonder that emerges from the way new digital technologies make available forms of visual, musical, and multimodal expression that had previously been reserved for highly trained specialists. “Digitization,” Lanham writes, “has rendered the world of music-making infinitely more accessible to people who before had