• political rhetoric
• public rhetoric

I’m not really sure what I think about this article: We're on the brink of disaster. On the one hand, what Klare says is fairly plausible—the current economic climate could inflame already unstable areas of the world and make any economic turn around that much more difficult and problematic. But, on the other hand, the hyperbolic tone of the title is only slightly qualified in the text. “Global pandemic” and “world at the brink” aren't much better sub-heads.

• 3 comments
• Read more

• political rhetoric

This article is probably a bit past its kairos but maybe not its deixis. I just like to see articles on rhetoric in the public sphere. This time, courtesy of Slate: The Hottest Rhetorical Device of Campaign '08, By Juliet Lapidos.

• Add new comment

• diversity
• politics

George Mason is one of the top two most racially diverse universities in the country (it regularly swaps out the top spot with Depaul in Chicago). But this month they showed a little gender diversity too, voting a drag queen as the school's homecoming queen this year. Most interesting, perhaps, is that this has really created no stir at all, even among student republican groups.

• Add new comment
• Read more

• new media
• public rhetoric
• social networking

Over the past month, Facebook redid their terms of service to give them more rights over the content people post to the site. This created quite an uproar in the social networking site and members created a group protesting the new terms. Facebook finally gave in and went back to the old terms. As Michael Moore notes in Sicko, this is the kind of protest that Americans rarely engage in, compared to the French, and the kind of thing that might happen more via the Internet.

• 1 comment
• Read more

• blogging
• digital rhetoric
• technology

I read Collin Brooke’s “Weblogs as Deictic Systems” for class today. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve read it and it is really resonating well this time around. I really like the way he is bringing together C.Miller and D.Watts to articulate the development and movements of small world networks (such as blogs) as simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. The movement centers on deixis, or the continually shifting now, as a species of epideictic rhetoric.

• 3 comments
• Read more

• digital rhetoric
• music
• political rhetoric
• war rhetoric

I'm teaching an undergraduate digital rhetoric course right now so I've been on the lookout for good video examples. I found this one over at my colleague's blog Arab Woman Progressive Voice. I think it provides a good example of an effective low-fi approach, something that my students could replicate.

• Read more

• digital rhetoric
• media
• racism
• war rhetoric

Here's a new trailer for the most recent version of "Rebirth of a Nation" (which is a remix of DW Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"). RBN is on DVD and DJ Spooky is traveling around giving screenings of it. The trailer is a nice piece of digital rhetoric. While surfing Youtube for it, I came across two other videos of interest. Re Birth of a Nation, a video on Liberia's political strife, and a DJ Spooky lecture from UNC.

• 2 comments
• Read more

• politics
• rhetoric

I don't know how many of you caught Harry Markopolos on CSPAN this monrning, but he was pretty engaging. No Quarter seems to sum up my impressions of his testimony about Madoff and the SEC. The video doesn't seem to be working yet on the CSPAN site, but here's his original letter to the SEC.

• Add new comment

• blogging
• rhetoric
• technology

First I want to thank Diane Davis and Jim Brown for inviting me to come and share this blog space for a little while, and blog about, well, I don’t know what yet. I follow Blogora a bit and have a sense of the discursive space, but don’t yet know who I am in that space. One thing I’ve learned about blogging is that you can’t necessarily police identity and audience boundaries in digital space, even when they are well established.

• Add new comment
• Read more