Rhetoric is the purposeful use of written, spoken, and visual text.
Digital means we get to [re]mix those elements in a way to tell better stories. Our stories. And digital means we get to share them with more people. Digital allows for the exponential growth of culture, of a collective experience. Of a collective memory we get to [re]mediate infinitely. And so we are challenged to look at who owns culture. Who owns experience? Digital opens up challenges to oppression. But we still have significant issues related to access.
While freeing, most is not free. There is a price point to access.
The take aways from this class, focused on and conducted through digital means have changed me. It is an interactional process. Both with all of you and with technology. I am different. The technology I engage with is different.
This semester has been both a divergent and convergent experience. I feel like I have both more to focus on and am more focused on specific aspects.
Stigma and the act of stigmatizing others has been a primary focal point, both in this class and in my other course this term. I focused on that as my final paper there…Psychotherapy as a Rhetorical Practice. I am grateful for all our discussions around access, fairness, [dis]ability and the like. They influenced the direction of that work immensely.
I also have [re]visited artifacts from my other courses last semester with the frame of digital rhetoric. I think there is an immediacy to all this technology that I didn’t realize to such an extent. I feel like I am always aware of the fact I am using technology when I am using it. But it really can disappear.
The visuals I have created have highlighted the immediacy experience for me…and yet having the digital color box and pen/brush/marker box all within a flick of a digital pencil is full of hypermediacy.
The top image is a bricolage of images from in my photos app. Most are from this class though a few are from past projects. It gives a representational reflection, a mirror if you will, of my change during and because of this class and the interactions.
This last image is one I created during writing block on my Psychotherapy as a Rhetorical Practice.
This week’s topic led me to do some serious introspection…mostly on the idea of mimicry. At what point does a mimic, an impersonator, a copycat, a forger, etc. become real or authentic in their own right.
In the art world, if someone can copy the style (or styles) of the great artists to a degree that experts are fooled, is that person a forger or an artist.
Imitation is the highest level of flattery after all.
Some of this week made me revisit ideas related to our discussions on [re]mix and re[mediation] as well as the issues with copyright and authorship. Where is the line really drawn between emulating something and donning a patch, pirate, and affinity to the letter “R”.
We are in so many ways a copy-culture. Trends and fads and crazes. We want to belong. We want to look like and talk like and be like our heroes (whomever they are).
We are all hung up on this question of “Who am I?”
Ego.
So what happens if we meditate for a bit on the question? Make it a mantra for 5 or 10 minutes.
Some interesting things can start to happen. We can start to see how “I” is nothing without relation to other. How we are more other than not. More similar than not.
So are we so different from AI. Maybe AI isn’t so much Artificial Intelligence, but rather Alternative Intelligence.
And how opening is that as a concept? There is plenty out there on multiple intelligences…IQ and EQ and the plethora of others. All of them alternatives to each other, but related. Different ways of thinking. Different way of interacting with the world around us. Different approaches to whatever we face. Diversity and unity.
So I am not very good at determining the difference between human and computer writing. Not sure what this means but I feel like maybe my best friends are bots?
Just ’cause. Toad and Fox
Confession: A major part of the reason I am in the CACT program is becoming disenchanted with therapy and mental health. There is a lot of back story to this that I won’t go into, but there are more and more question [not just in my mind] about the future of the profession. Some of this is based on the idea that more extensively trained professionals don’t significantly do better than those with less training. Some of it has to do with self-help and group-help being equal in many circumstances to training professional help.
And then there is ELIZA. [And brother MYLO]
ELIZA was born in 1966 and trained to be a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school. She is excellent at reflective listening, patient, and available. Many of the people who first interacted with her viewed her as intelligent and understanding [good qualities for a therapist]. She passed her exams, the hardest being the Turing Test.
If you’d like to meet ELIZA she is waiting in her office. Just knock below.
Hope you all feel better. Looking forward to reading some amazing rough drafts. Look for a link to mine in the main menu. Or click below.
first, I want to give everyone the link to my bibliography.
second, I hope everyone is doing well. I look forward to seeing rough drafts in the near future and to see how everyone’s projects are coming together.
and third, I have again ventured into the graphic commentary of the facilitation this week. There are a few more words with some of the images this week. I look forward to the feedback. I am trying to find the balance I need to best communicate and push inquiry.
We draw before we write. We understand visuals and symbols before we understand words. Images for me have greater emotive power. There is greater interaction and association. It is the reason metaphors can be so powerful. If a metaphor allows us to hold two ideas in one, then visuals allow us to hold myriad ideas in a single image.
So we start with image, maybe even think in images more than words. And really we just change the medium of the language…a visual symbol for a more abstract one. Letters in many ways have great utility. 26 symbols (52 if we go for uppercase) plus some punctuation and we can communicate thought and feeling and imagination.
…
Still, a stick person gets the job done in fewer strokes. And while writing and words work for expression, images can often do so in a quicker manner.
Infographics in many ways try to capture the usefulness of both words and image, but as simple as it would seem to combine them it often ends up in a mess. Even most of the stripped down versions displayed in theTufteexcerpts still remained visually overwhelming. The exception would be data set with cancer survival rates. This gave a subtle visual clue to enhance the information, which is the reason for graphic display of data.
The 13 Reasons sliding infographic was too distracting for me to really process the information in a meaningful way without effort. If the purpose of infographics is to make information more digestible, fun to share, and extremely engaging, then for me this presentation failed.
The article, cited in the 13 Reasons, on the use of brain images having a persuasive aspect in regard to articles on neuroscience was enlightening. It speaks to the idea of how images can be used to elevate the credibility of what is being said, even if they may in reality may not be relevant to the discussion. Chartjunk could at times fit into this category and become a base form of digital rhetoric, used to deceive and manipulate.
I enjoyedDavid McCandless’s TED Talkand agree with his idea of how data presentation can be beautiful. I was intrigued by how infographics can be useful in changing mindset by presenting vast amounts of information in more accessible formats that even allows for better analysis of the information. In a brief perusing of the website information is beautiful, there were many examples of infographics used to great effect. While the interactive nature of many of them increases their usefulness and demonstrated attention and consideration given to the end user/audience, I still found them data-dense and question how much information I would take with me after viewing them. Still, they do have an appreciable aesthetic.
Here is an infographic I made a number of years ago for my counseling practice. While it isn’t necessarily great, it was received well by my target audience and kept things simple enough to be useful.
I have been trying to recall my first encounter with a modern infographic and can’t. I can imagine thinking they were amazing and a unique way of communicating because some still elicit this response. But only some. Most don’t. They are just so much noise and I tune them out. They have become so common and mainstream that they barely register as information. Maybe I am craving simple, or maybe what I am craving is more interaction with the information. Generally speaking though I have the same shudder when seeing an infographic as I do when someone pulls up their powerpoint presentation.
Going along with my project I was playing around with spark just for a bit of fun and made this graphic. I was trying to hint a bit at the old punk posters of the day and to keep a simple and brief message: “Rise Up” and “Destroy Power Not People”
People tend to want to fix, to solve, to make better. This is a human aspect, but one that requires people first to identify a problem, or find a flaw. This has led to great accomplishments, innovations, and advances in technology. Wonder after wonder at the hands of people.
Not all people can see, or hear, or walk, or talk, or…
People have fantastic and amazing abilities. They though, are not their abilities.
Yet people are defined by their abilities, and by the accomplishments their abilities bring forth.
People obsess over this idea of productivity and fixate on achievement.
It’s a race that must be won.
The chorus only of We are the Champions by Queen
A race where to not be first means to be forgotten. Where if you don’t win you’re a loser, an outcast, a reject. Defective. A less-than. A glitch.
And people have become so very good at seeing differences as wrong or bad. As abnormal.
Different is frightening and anything different is a threat.
And so people work to solve the problem. To fix the glitches. People want to make the problem go away. Make it inconsequential. Invisible. So they don’t have to be scared.
But what happens when people identify a person as the problem?
What happens when we identify someone as the problem?
Well, we shift uncomfortably and then identify lack of access as what needs fixed.
And the solution is technology. And, we get to feel better. We high-five and clap each other on the back. We praise the technology that has opened doors and broken barriers. And technology has done that.
But it isn’t enough.
It doesn’t address what we choose to ignore. That lack of access is not the underlying problem.
We ignore that the person who has the concern or problem isn’t leading the conversation. That we need to be invited into the conversation by them. That we need to listen to their experience.
Instead we close the gate and deny access, perpetuating the underlying problem.
There are three basic patterns or approaches for person-to-person interaction.
Doing to
Doing for
Doing with
Focusing on lack of access as the problem in regard to disability results in doing to and doing for, with technology as the tool. From a psychological stand, doing to and doing for both send a message that the person is less than, incapable, or incompetent.
Focusing on lack of access as the problem regarding disability sends the message that the person is incapable and technology is the savior.
Doing to and doing for continue the kind of thinking that leads to oppression and suppression. It leads to ablebodied privilege and associated rhetoric. Bonnie Tucker talked about reading into phrases like giving a voice to the voiceless and giving hope to the hopeless. These phrases ring of good intention and sound sweet, but the core of the phrases are bitter. They label the object of the sentence as voiceless and hopeless.
It may be better to say…return the voice to those who have had it stolen. But this still seems to have a privilege angle.
If I have the power to return your voice then I have the power to take it again. It still places me in power over you. It implies that I own your voice. I still am doing something to you or for you. I maintain my privilege.
It also alleviates me of taking responsibility of stealing it in the first place. I don’t have to look at the way I have stripped another person of their autonomy, their freedom, their choices. It means I get to retain my position. I get to maintain my sense of superiority.
And we do this. Regardless of our status or our position. Regardless of how “woke” we proclaim to be. We identify those who we can deem less-than and prop up our position in relation to them.
We give lip service to tolerance but we continue to do to others. We talk about acceptance but we continue to do for others.
But we can change this. Elise Roy in her Ted Talk discussed moving from a frame of increasing tolerance to a frame of becoming an alchemist or magician focused on the real problem. I felt this was similar to Justin Hodgson’s idea of being a tinkerer and engaging a willingness to play. Both talk about the willingness to fail and fail often. To essentially fail forward.
Roy’s idea of design thinking has five steps.
identify the problem
observe the problem
brainstorm possible solutions
experiment with prototypes
implement a sustainable solution
Roy goes on to highlight design as an interdisciplinary and multiperspective experience.
Roy hints the best approach is what I understood to be a “beginners mind” common in dialogues on mindfulness and meditation. Practices that can help us to loosen our egos and what Roy calls premade solutions.
These premade solutions are the ones Tucker discusses as part of the technocapital disability rhetoric, which mistakes fixing access with addressing the civil rights and social justice issues present in society.
Roy and Hodgson’s ideas of becoming alchemists and tinkerers are much better positioned to foster a doing with approach that can begin to address those issues Tucker identified.
And I think another entity needs to be included into the dynamic. Technology itself can be part of the process rather than seen merely as a tool or as a means to an end.
Hodgson proposed the interaction between humans and technology is collaborative. Each is affected and changed by the interaction. Adopting a design thinking approach including technology as a partner, could have an impressive result. One allowing us to “look sideways,” as Warren Berger might say, at the social problems we continue to face despite all our success in improving access.
I found the image above by searching Creative Commons for an image of a pirate. It has a CC license. To use it a person must give attribution, use it for only noncommercial purposes and it has a share alike tag meaning that derivatives must have an identical license as the original work.
Here’s a bit of an interesting video. It’s like they’re speaking my thoughts.
Creating Dissonance 
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