Rhetoricus Algorithmica: Persuasion in the Age of the Database

The latest issue of WIRED has a column by Eli Pariser called “Mind Reading: The new profiling technique that learns exactly what makes you tick–and buy.” In it, Pariser explains how internet advertising is moving beyond the state of simply suggesting products you’re likely to be interested in (determined by browsing habits, purchase history, and so on); soon, thanks to folks like Stanford communications grad student Dean Eckles, we’ll be subjected to targeted advertising pitches for those products. Swayed more by appeals based on ethos (your favorite author endorses this book, so buy now!)? A sucker for argumentum ad populum (hey, everybody else is getting one, so how about you?)? Easily influenced by emotional appeals (buy this DVD or the kitty gets it!)? Now marketing execs won’t have to trouble themselves with the hard work of figuring out the complexities of effective ad pitches… computers will do it for them. Wasn’t this how Skynet got started?

Read the article here.
Visit Dean Eckles’ site here.

Family Matters: Issue #6 is LIVE!

The Harlot Family is excited to bring you Issue #6, specially themed on family rhetorics.  Much to our delight, our call for this special issue on family rhetoric attracted a record number of submissions.

For some, the connection was deeply personal; for others, cultural representations of family and/or the role of various communities on family drew shrewd attention.  Ultimately, the pieces in this issue were selected not only for their brilliant and creative insights about family rhetoric (how family members communicate with each other) and the rhetoric of family (how culture and society inform us about the meaning of family), but also because they represent an array of perspectives, experiences, and forms of expressing our connections and disconnections with family.  They teach us what “runs in the family” means and how family is manufactured, lived, understood, and reproduced.

Join us in the fun and help us make Harlot’s family even larger by submitting your work for consideration in our upcoming general issue (Issue 7), to be published Oct. 15th, 2011.  As you’ll discover in this issue, Harlot is not a print-biased publication.  We accept and encourage multimedia submissions.   After all, rhetoric in every day life exceeds the boundaries of print. 

The deadline for submissions for Issue 7 is July 15th, 2011.

Star Wars is Terrifying for Women

This is too good not to pass along. . .

More on the Problematic Hipstamatic

For those who haven’t yet read Mary Lord’s thought-provoking piece on nostalgia and photography in our current issue, I encourage you to check it out now.  The questions it raises are becoming increasingly relevant as the iPhone becomes more prevalent (especially in the wake of shifting to Verizon) and app-culture continues to burgeon.

But the import of these questions is elevated, it seems, when the hipstamatic application is used in the realm of photo-journalism.  Damon Winter of The New York Times was recently awarded a third place commendation from Pictures of the Year International for a series of shots published alongside an article on the mundane aspects of war.  The conversation that followed wasn’t about what the images depicted, but the medium with which they were taken.  Many cried foul.  Some suggested that such a drift toward mobile apps was inevitable.  Few welcomed it wholeheartedly.

Winter has weighed in on the matter; his full-length statement can be read here.  Some of his comments are rather interesting, especially when considered in light on Lord’s “Imag{in}ing Nostalgia” and the rhetorical dynamics of photo-journalism in general:

The problem people have with an app, I believe, is that a computer program is imposing the parameters, not the photographer.  But I don’t see how this is so terribly different from choosing a camera (like a Holga) or a film type or a processing method that has a unique but consistent and predictable outcome or cross-processing or using a color balance not intended for the lighting conditions (tungsten in daylight or daylight in fluorescent, using the cloudy setting to warm up a scene).

People may have the impression that it is easy to make interesting images with a camera app like this, but it is not the case. At the heart of every solid image are the same fundamentals: composition, information, moment, emotion, connection.  If people think that this is a magic tool, they are wrong.

Each photographer uses a technique or tool that helps him or her to best tell the stories and all of their work has been acknowledged and celebrated.  None of these techniques are grounded on the idea of visual accuracy but they are effectively used to tell stories, convey ideas and to enlighten, which is the real heart of our work.

Harlots in a Saloon: The LXD

Art is interesting. To me, at least. Dancing as rhetoric is also interesting to me. Shows specifcially dedicated to dancing as a metaphor for fighting and war is also neuron-firing. The LXD is a web-show from Hulu that I have discussed previously. I feel obligated to point out that the story lines’s a bit cheesy and the acting leaves a lot to be desired, but what they lack in acting ability, they make up for in pure dancing talent. At times, though, I can’t quite figure out the kind of symbolism that they choose to use.

Okay, an example would be nice, right? Let’s use the costumes then. In season 2 of LXD, we learn that there is not just one bad guy (the doctor), but multiple villains with the addition of this, um, shamrock guy?

Okay, not really. He’s supposed to look like a dapper wild west character–you know, very rich man in a saloon and all that, but don’t you think it looks a little Lucky Charms? Anyway, the wild west saloon motif is the style that he and his crew take on.

The evil doctor on the other hand makes even less sense. He himself dresses kinda like a PI from a film noir. See:

His crew seems to change with each episode. In “The Greater of Two Evils,” his band of thieves dress in a late Victorian Era-esque way–bowler hat and umbrella included. In this episode, then, we have the Wild West fighting the English “gentleman” (albeit modernized) with an always interesting dance sequence.

Now, it would make some sense if this kind of symbolism were consistent. On the one hand there’s the really wild and sporadic dancers–they crunk, they run up walls, their arms and limbs flail in wild directions and they wear saloon like gear in order to represent that wildness; that rebelliousness. The other bad guy, the doctor, is methodical, right? So his crew wears bowlers, they work as a team with specific choreography and have more restrained movements. Here’s the thing, though. This isn’t always the case with the doctor’s crew. He works in some kind of abandoned prison/insane asylum/hospital and he runs experiments on people who end up just as wild as the Wild Westers. Is this merely a case of it-seemed-cool-so-we-did-it?

Even more confusing is why the good guys, the LXD, would choose to dress western themselves when they go to face the Wild West Crew in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ra Part 1.”

What are they trying to convey with the costumes? Why would the good guys try to adopt the identity of a bad guy? What am I supposed to take from this? What is this costume trying to say to me? I’m just not so sure. Overall, this may be why this show is only okay. The dancing and choreography is amazing, so I keep watching, but if it weren’t then this inattention to story development would have me running for the hills. It appears that they aren’t conscious of their own rhetoric and that might be part of what creates these other problems. I’ll keep watching if I can, though. As long as the dance sequences continue to take up the majority of these episodes.

2011 Banished Words

It’s that time once again, where someone bring up words that have been overused and want banished into obscurity. According to Yahoo News, Lake Superior State University releases this list every year. This year’s list-topper is “viral,” which is more than fine with me if people stop saying the phrase “going viral,” but could run into some problems when trying to explain your next cold to your doctor. Other seemingly innocent words include epic, fail, and the American people.

Within a traditional context, these words probably wouldn’t bother anyone, but when put into the internet context, well, yes, it gets old extremely fast. I do find that so many of these words are anti-internet, though. Or, at least, the internet culture? Terms such as epic, fail, (epic fail), viral, and using google or facebook as verbs are specifically linked to the the way we’re using them within an online environment. Frankly, until google goes out, I don’t think I will stop googling searches and I don’t know anyone who finds the use of this perplexing or aggravating, so why ban it? Would banning these things also be denying a part of ourselves–the part that we choose to express online? Or would it be underestimating or not acknowledging this kind of culture that exists online?

data, information, knowledge, wisdom

Thanks, Kate, for the great post on McCandless’s animated visualization.  (Information is Beautiful is also the title of a truly terrific book of visualizations that I highly recommend checking out.)

The use of the word “problem” set me thinking.  If there is a problem, what is it and where is it?  One could argue, I think, that the sheer selection of certain numbers to work with posits an argument of sorts (opting for these categories instead of others suggests their relative importance, in other words).   There’s even a bit of narrative quality to the piece, with the credit crisis debt trumping all others and set in the sequence such that the music dramatically picks up as it’s dropped. So perhaps the piece does have an argument; it’s just not clear-cut.

Which suggests to me that if there is a problem, it does not lay with the piece–but with us.  Our problem is that we are asked to interpret the information and construct an argument of what it’s arguing.  Our interpretation–what does it mean?–is then automatically pitted against other interpretations, which is to say, argument against other arguments.

McCandless actually has another visualization that provokes a similar line of questioning using different terms:

Using this vocabulary, the problem we’re presented with is transforming information (the simple story of linked debt-centric elements) to knowledge.  This transforming act is no doubt affected by the natural trajectory towards wisdom (us rhetoricians may think phronesis would fit better here than plain old “wisdom”), which makes the entire interpretative process infinitely more complex–and interesting.

I’d be curious to hear what you think of this chart: its basic assumptions, what might get added, how it might be altered for teaching, etc.  And I’m sure McCandless would, too.  In his posting of this he actually links to a rhetoric blog run by Catherine Schuler, Assistant Professor of English and Professional Writing at East Stroudsburg University, so he’s demonstrated that he’s linked to our community in some fashion.

On a final note, I was intrigued by McCandless’s mention with “Debtris” that we should expect more “motion infographics” in 2011.  Interest in infographics has exploded in the past several years (even though it’s been around for a long time), but the move towards animation and video is taking new routes recently.  Check out this fascinating video by the dynamic Hans Rosling, for example:

Cat Wrapping

I have often wondered what I should do when cats, dogs, and various other animals lay on my wrapping paper  (or school work or books) and won’t move. Now, I have an answer.

I’m not saying that this is particularly rhetorically savvy or anything, but, I mean, look! The cat just lays there!

(And, yes, my brain is good and fried at the end of this semester. ;)

Seen any carnies around?

Did anyone see any zombies at the mall this weekend? Smell any stink bombs? Was there a special Critical Mass in your neighborhood? Trickster performances? General harlotry?

I’m curious, because today concludes Carnivalesque Rebellion Week 2010:

A few people start breaking their old patterns, embracing what they love (and in the process discovering what they hate), daydreaming, questioning, rebelling. What happens naturally then, according to the revolutionary past, is a groundswell of support for this new way of being, with more and more people empowered to perform new gestures unencumbered by history.

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy – a week of pieing and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will put up posters in our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience. And on November 26 from sunrise to sunset we will abstain en masse – not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.

“Buy Nothing Day” has been celebrated for over a decade now, a protest against the celebration of consumerism known as “Black Friday.” I’m a fan of the alternative, and not just because of how much this scares me:

Buy Nothing Day has a lot of appeal, and I know plenty of people who observe it for reasons more or less anti-consumerist but not necessarily proactive. This year, though, Adbusters seemed to be kicking it up a notch.  Then again, carnivalesque rebellion doesn’t come from a journal, but from local jammers…

So, my fellow local rhetoricians, what did you see?

Is failure really an option?

Another cool new digital project, coming out of the University of Cincinnati this time, is The Failure Project:

The Failure Project is a digital public archive of failure narratives that aims to generate and circulate healthy conversations about failure. Too often in our schools, our workplaces, and our community organizations, failure is stigmatized to such a degree that students, teachers, artists, musicians, scientists, and innovators are unwilling to take risks in their intellectual and creative endeavors. This is the wrong attitude.

What would our schools, workplaces, and communities look like if we weren’t afraid to fail? What would our world look like if we took bigger risks?

The Failure Project is about conversation. It’s about taking risks. It’s about you connecting with others over shared experiences of failure, making failure a speakable, de-stigmatized part of our lives. Our hope is that, through this archive, we can begin to see failure as something to celebrate rather than fear, as something to experience productively rather than as a final pronouncement of who we are and what we’re capable of.

I love the idea of this, and not just because it feels somehow akin to Harlot.  My research and teaching are all about how individuals and communities construct and share rhetorical narratives, stories with a persuasive bent. This project made me recognize how rarely I’ve encountered stories of failure, or rather, stories that conclude with failure. Indeed, even this call for failure narratives seems to imply that they are/should be angled in the direction of success.

The subtitle of the project page is that popular Samuel Beckett line — Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — which got me thinking about whether, or at least how often, we can let a story actually end without some compulsion towards any kind of happy ending. Even Beckett, not the most cheerily optimistic guy, seems to be suggesting progress, improvement through persistent effort.

But I’m not sure I buy it — Beckett was more likely, I’d guess, to be advocating failure on a more massive scale (epic fail?) than to be suggesting baby steps towards success. But then, again, does his line becomes a narrative of progress, of success at failing? Before I get any more tangled, my question is kinda simple:

How often do you come across or tell a story of failure
that doesn’t get a positive spin, even just “lesson learned”?

Are there some communities or cultures
in which failure narratives are more/less allowed?

And, well, why?