Ong and Oralities

Surprisingly I never thought of writing or the alphabet as something that is new technology. For some reason I have never thought of a time when there were different ways of communicating with each other. Ong brings up the idea primary orality, which means a culture that has no knowledge of writing. Forms of writing including print or even digital sources we see in mass media are a new invention that we have recently started using. In medieval times they had the transcript and it had to be handwritten. Newer technologies have made it easier to use print and words so that is where we are at in our society now.

Once print came into place, we moved to secondary orality and then to electracy. Thinking of the cognitive shift that words and the alphabet have caused is overwhelming. Not only do we have books, we have all forms of mass media. We can now what is happening around the world in seconds. We have advertisements that are made with the intentions of reaching all and selling products. The list may never stop. Lines of communication have opened up to never-ending possibilities. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds slowly over time and see where we are going next.

Carnival of CYBORGS!?!

In this past week's blog posts some are still pondering bell hooks while some are taking on the challenge of understanding what it is to be a cyborg and its significance within our culture.

I fell like brent5722 got hooks point about how mass media, specifically movies, create the ideas we have about race and gender. This is an important point in understanding rhetoric and how we get our beliefs and how we are persuaded.
http://brent5722.wordpress.com/

And now for the cyborgs.....

Orange6677 says makes an important point about traits of women being seen as more emotional and how it is seen as a negative thing. We as society believe that only one way works and that is the one we are used to and that is being strong. Orange6677 comments "not showing emotion which hinders our society’s freedoms and humanisms." The tough facade is a metanarrative used in our culture to show that tough guy is admirable but really may not be the case.
http://orange6677.wordpress.com/

shrtygrlmj notes that Haraway "considers irony a rhetorical strategy and a political method that could be put to use in socialist-feminism." This blog does a nice job of breaking down how we interact with our culture to build cultural constructs and how looking at things through a cyborg POV breaks down gender barriers and ideas.
http://shrtygrlmj2006.wordpress.com/

subliminal piracy's blog also focuses on how ideas and definitions are constructed in our culture saying "This is an inevitability of man/nature because we have made it such." There is few that is "natural" but rather what we have made it. Through all these ponderings, subliminalpiracy seems to have more questions the answers which a piece like Haraway's can leave you with, saying "Perhaps it will be a useful tool to create a more unified world between the masculine and feminine. Perhaps it will destroy us, because we blind ourselves to the real issues. Who knows…"
http://subliminalpiracy.wordpress.com/

The Wilmington Witness focuses more on the solution to our gender based society saying that the author "urges us to reconstruct the boundaries of everyday life, in partial connnection with others, and in communication with all of our parts." in order to destroy gender constructs.
http://charlierox.wordpress.com/

uncwgirl puts it well saying that Haraway's "feminist views show how there is always a male-focused way of looking at things and it will be a long time until that is overcome. She sees it is a form of evolution; a link in time that will change forward to new ideas to benefit humankind." can't sum it up much better than that.
http://uncwgirl.wordpress.com/

kj08 gives a refreshing and creative view of the cyborgin their. I don't fell that I should break it up by trying to pick out the main idea or an important point , it really should be taken as a whole.
see it here... http://kj08.wordpress.com/

Finally to conclude this carnival i will include the comments of Kmoney393: "with the addition of these new technologies, efforts are made to make men and women equal. the key to doing this is to change the way of thinking about male domination. it shouldn’t be attacked with hostility; the hardships should be embraced and the mindset should be based on survival in new areas of society outside of old ideas of women in the kitchen, not male bashing." While changing ideas we have about sex and gender we gotta keep it positive and enlightening.....
http://kmoney393.wordpress.com/

bell hookd and mass media

bell hooks uses her writing to demonstrate to others how some are oppressed in our society or marginalized. Those who are dominant in our society use their power to stay in power. The dominant class is particularly upper class, males, white and heterosexual. This is the norm our society is ran by. bell hooks isn’t interested in who runs our society but the way they stay in power and particularly the way they stay in power through the use of language.

In Teaching Resistance: The Radical Politics of Mass Media bell hooks explore how language used in forms of mass media is used to keep the dominant as the leaders and keep African Americans in their role, as the submissive. bell hooks gives many examples of movies and how they damage the image of the black person. I can think of a recent example that wasn’t taken very well.

Norbit, in which Eddie Murphy played several roles including the leading role of a black lady, could have cost him his academy award for Dream Girls. Norbit was an obese older African American lady and played into many stereotypes about black people. Some enjoy this movie while many were taken aback by its blatant racial stereotypes that the movie put across. Eddie Murphy should have thought about this role a little bit more and tried to portray a positive image instead of perpetuating the same old myths about his race. In the end, the academy saw this serotype being portrayed and didn’t like it and this played a major role in Eddie Murphy not winning the academy award that year which I think is an important step in getting people to realize stereotypes like this seen in mass media everyday and change them.

Ideas about Post-Modernists

I feel that Richard Rorty puts a main idea of post-modernism the best in the short phrase: “our task in the U.S. is to keep ‘the conversation going rather than to find objective truth’” (Smith 377). Perceptions of each person are put into perspective and this completely changes things. Objective truths that so many have argued for can now be seen as something that may work for some but not all. Lyotard makes arguments against metanarratives or how these stories don’t all sides of the story but are frequently used.

An example of a metanarrative would be Freud and his belief that human history is a narrative of the repression of sexual desires. Also, Christians believe adamantly in their religion and see everyone else as sinners. In a postmodern view, there is no one real answer or no one way to live out one’s life. It is what is appropriate at that moment or what sounds they best given a certain situation. Generalizations are conforming. Baudrillard adds other ideas about steering away from one objective truth.

Baudrillard argues that we are a culture of the “simulacrum.” As Saussure introduces ideas of the sign/signifier/signified, Baudrillard refutes this by introducing the simulacrum. The classic example of simulacrums is saying that someone owns and orginal Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa CD. Baudrillard would say that Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa is just a simulacrum. This CD is not really the one and only copy out there (or original) and the person who purchased the CD really doesn’t own it. To see the CD as an “original” is no longer true. The “distinction between the original and the copy is destroyed” (Storey 133). There are a million copies out thre that mean something different to each owner. Another example is that Andy Warhol paintings can be seen all over the place now. His paintings are on t-shirts, bags and notebooks to name a few. These paintings were once originals hanging on museum walls but now they reprints mimicking the original. The paintings have deviated from their original intended meaning from the author and now have thousands of meanings.

These ideas all play heavily into rhetoric because this creates multiple perspectives to which one can take. And to understand your audience in order to articulate yourself most effectively, all the perspectives that an audience member might understand should be taken into account and the post-modernists give us new ways of understanding these.


Storey, John. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. An Introduction. 4th ed. The University of Georgia Press: 2006.

Thoughts on Cultural Constructs

I have always thought that our society has too many hang-ups about sex and the naked body. With pornography flourishing, the naked body had become taboo and something that shouldn't be seen, which is just ridiculous. Everyone male has the same parts just as every female has the same parts so what the big worry here. This ridiculousness might have came to a high point when a TV network was fined millions of dollars for obscenity because of Janet Jackson's nipple showing a split second during a Superbowl performance. Who has never seen a nipple before and why is this obscene?

Although aware of these things that are natural to all humans beings, sex and anatomy, and knowing that some unnaturally think that these things are crude and shouldn’t be seen or discussed I have never been able to articulate our society’s hang-ups in a way that Michel Foucault does in “The History of Sexuality.” Foucault bases his ideas around constructivism. He says that sexuality and sexual conduct is not a natural category. Rather these ideas have been constructed by a particular culture and given their meaning. Just as the words “homosexuality” and “coming out of the closet” have recently been constructed to describe the behaviors of a particular group of people many ideas about sexuality have been constructed by our culture.

So nipples, as seen by tribes that live in the jungle and do not wear clothes, is just part of everyday life. It is American culture that has made sex forbidden and taboo. Just as many hold hatred towards homosexual behavior because it is a preference different than theirs, this too is just a construct of our society. I really wish our society could progress a little faster and try to get away from the ideas stemming from the Victorian ages that talking about sex and seeing nipples is forbidden.

Criticism of Toulmin

I have to admit I was shocked to read that Toulmin attacked formal logic. A professor of mine, Dr. Altrichter, has told me as well as other teachers that formal logic will probably be the most important class I ever take and Dr. Altrichter is a genius himself so whatever he says must be true. Formal logic deals with absolutes and things that cannot be disputed. So how is this irreverent to the everyday world in which we should be seeking truth?

I understand what Toulmin is trying to say. Formal logic is mainly something that isn’t based on what an argument is saying but on the form of an argument. If an argument is in a particular form then it stands to be true unless you have a false premise or conclusion. Then the argument would be unsound. Unsound arguments are given no merit. I also don’t think that Toulmin’s criticisms stands true for mathematical arguments and arguments from definition which are logical arguments.

A logical argument would say that taxes are “an amount of money levied by a government on its citizens and used to run the government and the country or state.” A rhetorical argument might say that taxes are merely “revenue enhancements” which make them sound pleasant and nice but nonetheless obscure the actual meaning or lead a reader away from truth. I just don’t see how one can criticize formal logic when all it does is seek things that we can be absolutely sure of.

Syllogisms can be criticized because the form of the syllogism make the argument right but this really isn’t about truth. I do admit that logic is hard to use in everyday life. No one can logically explain emotions but logic is still vital in many discourses and with dealing with absolute truths. I just cant agree fully with Toulmin about this.

Our Chancellor is Hiltler ( or just fellow user of evil rhetoric)

For this week’s blog I feel that it is appropriate to discuss a situation that occurred recently that relates to ideas discussed in Plato’s Phaedrus. Not too long ago I attended and on-campus “open forum” that was bought together to discuss the issue of plans to build new dormitories but many tress would have to be sacrificed to do so. First I must discuss this idea of an “open forum” as our chancellor and others in administrative roles define it. Basically, you write your question down on a piece of paper and someone reads it and then decides if it is appropriate to be answered by the chancellor. With a system like this one would think that questions like “When are we going to get a football team?” would never get through at a forum about trees, but this wasn’t the case. I think that this “open forum” is a great illustrative example of, as Socrates’ describes it, evil language or rhetoric. It only considers one side of the point of view so listeners must stand there helplessly and be told what to think about a situation. It would have been much more appropriate to hold a meeting where students could freely ask the chancellor questions that they had and be engaged in a dialectical conversation so that we could each play off one another’s ideas and have a conversation that had the greater good in mind. Instead our dictator like school held this “open forum’ and it really seemed like the Q&A session was going around in circles. Students wanted to know why they chose to tear down the forest that had near endangered species such as the pygmy rattlesnake and why they would tear down their real life science labs that students use on an everyday basis. But the only answer administration had is “ You define education as you want to and we will define education the way we want to. We have studies showing that students who live on campus make better grades and we feel it is more important to have on campus housing.” I just can’t believe they can say this when they are starting a new conservation biology program next year and when many science classes and the whole environmental sciences program are held in trailers. I have heard no plans as to where these classrooms will find their permanent home and my question was not answered at the forum either. So much for dialectical, or noble rhetoric.

Message Manipulation

Smith says, “If Freud is the therapist for the individual psyche, then Marx seeks to be the therapist for the world’s political psyche” (302). Karl Marx was concerned and wrote many texts of the political nature and is famous for his arguments supporting a “collective community” and criticizing a capitalistic society. Surprising to me, only knowing Marx for his political and cultural ideas, he also deals with rhetoric.

One idea he deals with is freedom of speech and who should be allowed to speak or who will speak the truth to their audience. When concerning politics, Marx understands that sometimes a situation can be more about politics than meaning what you say. For example, lobbyist account for many laws that are passed today. If a law has no money behind it to enforce it (such as funds from a lobbyist group) then the law cannot be enforced. For years, an equal rights amendment for women has been shot down due to political forces (money) that a fundamental Christian lobbying group has.

I think the more important message that Marx is saying here pertains to the “message manipulation that dominates our society” (304). When a politician wants to look good he can make himself look good with rhetoric, which can be seen in speeches made everyday. It can also be seen in all advertisements made today. Advertisements seen in fashion magazines would have you believe that all women are young, skinny and beautiful which is so not the case. Another example is a Nike commercial that leads you to believe that you will not have that competitive edge over an opponent unless you own a pair of their athletic shoes.

I say the remedy for these message manipulations is read into everything you see (which is easy for an English major), don’t be a cultural dupe and don’t use these tactics in your own speech and writing. Sadly, if a politician acted by these guidelines he would loose his edge over opponents and modifying speech to make oneself to look good will always exist in that realm.




Bibliography

Smith, Craig R. Rhetoric & Human Consciousness. 2nd ed. Waveland Press, Inc: Illinois. Pg. 278.

Modernists vs. Existentialists

I have taken a logic class before and learned that the only arguments we can be sure of are ones based on mathematics, definition and various types of syllogisms. Assuming that each premises of an arguments is true means the conclusion must be true. Inductive arguments, on the other hand, are about debatable topics, which an absolute truth cannot be found. A few examples of inductive reasoning would be our opinions, how we explain things (this happens because of this), or illustrations of what we are describing by various methods.

For me the modernists fall into the deductive reasoning category sticking to strict logic to think about the world. It’s hard to argue against Kant’s categorical imperative that each must “act according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that is should become a universal law” (Smith 273). That idea would be great if there weren’t people who exist that are crazy and fully believe that marrying their pet horse is just fine. I would say that is where the inductive reasoning comes in. Some may live a good life and they might see that life fit for others but that doesn’t make it right. Those using rhetoric must deal with topics that not always logical but specific and cannot be defined. As Smith puts it in our textbook Rhetoric & Human Consciousness, “Reality evades definitive and adequate explanation; however, such uncertainty gives one freedom of choice” (Smith 269).

I like how the chapter starts with the modernists to show what ideas the existentialists revolted against. It helped facilitate my understanding of the existentialists and there thoughts on rhetoric. For them “language is the stuff of an ultimate art that is better able than any other to help us reach a sense of spirit through creativity and to hear the call of conscience through its making-known function” (Smith 290). I can see how rhetoric should be absolute and logical but that only applies to a short spectrum of ideas. It is healthy to have topics open for debate so they we are always improving on them and getting better.



Bibliography

Smith, Craig R. Rhetoric & Human Consciousness. 2nd ed. Waveland Press, Inc: Illinois. Pg. 269-290.

Thoughts on Rhetoric, Ethics and Existentialism

I have always found existentialism interesting because it relates to each and every human individually. It is just interesting to hear highly intelligent philosophers explain their views on how we interact in our environment and their thoughts as to how human beings can better themselves. It is an optimistic way of thinking that we will get better as a society and learn from our wrongs, as I don’t completely agree with. I agree with Kierkegaard that we are constantly practicing and improving because I find myself doing this over the years, or I guess you could also call it growing up. I don’t think this is a case that would apply to everyone and this isn’t necessarily true.

For example, many who go to prison, according to statistics, will be highly likely to return despite the fact that they first hand know how bad it is. I also think that it is almost impossible to transcend the evils of money (especially is a capitalist society). Money seems to define a person, not only in the United States but worldwide and acts as a vehicle in gaining power. Just as many politicians in the past have been corrupt, I think there will be many more in the future. This is where ethics plays an important role in rhetoric and everyday life.

We must learn to live our lives for the greater good, which Socrates argues in Gorgias, which I am currently reading for another class. By reading the dialogue, one can sense that Socrates is skeptical of rhetoric because he thinks it is flattery or only saying something because that is what you think that person wants to hear, which is to an extent true. Rhetoric is used for personal gain. Even if you are raising money for cancer research to benefit other people, the concern may stem from a family member dying from cancer or fear that you may get it in the future. We must always keep the concern for the greater good first and leave our own interests behind.

Kierkegaard argues that we must work to improve ourselves and others by practice. Practice is defined as learning how “we use language to help ourselves and others destroy the illusions of the inauthentic life ( money and power) and embrace an authentic sense of self – a self that is free to choose, a self that accepts responsibility for choice, and a self that uses its freedom creatively to reinforce its individuality” (Smith 278). I agree with this completely I just don’t have faith that everyone’s ethical standpoint is where it should be.


Bibliography

Smith, Craig R. Rhetoric & Human Consciousness. 2nd ed. Waveland Press, Inc: Illinois. Pg. 278.