Digital Rhetorics 2: Electric Boogaloo

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself-- that is to say, risking oneself.     -- James Baldwin, "Letter From a Region in my Mind" So, why are our worldviews so precious to us that we'll engage in all the mental hijinks that Manjoo discusses, selectively engaging with information and molding perception of sensory evidence to what is most comfortable with our sense of the world? Ideally, our ways of identifying ourselves politically and socially are simply handy labels that indicate what we see as the pressing issues and how we think they should be addressed, an umbrella term that indicates what opinions we hold. Ideally, we form them in service of trying to apprehend what's true and good, and s...

I’ll start with chapter 6, since that was my favorite. It touched on the comic inhumanity that I see with some of these developers’ attempts to improve the world: But systematizing inevitably involves a tradeoff-- rules give you some sense of control, but you lose nuance and texture, a sense of deeper connection. And when a strict systematizing sensibility entirely shapes social space (as it often does online), the results aren’t always pretty. (173) I’d extend his argument to say that this outlook also risks seeing human beings and our social worlds strictly in terms of their instrumental value, which means their value as means to an end. One example that sticks out in my mind is the startup “ Bodega ”: The latest unwanted tech “innovation” aims to make the bodega obsolete, and Twitter is not having it. A startup, boldly called Bodega, has invented a vending machine that would house non-perishable convenience items, which sounds fine . But, the two ex-Google employees behind...