If the audience had developed enough rhetorical sophistication for critical thinking (the way the Bush adm uses rhetoric, you would think they were selling swampland in Florida and American people are all marks), maybe words would not function as power buttons for speakers.

On the other hand, I don't doubt that "Hasty Generalization" was the most common logic error I marked on freshman comp papers simply because that was what my students HEARD around them most the time: a baldfaced statement without support or evidence, backed simply by the assumption that saying something makes it so.

Aha! We have not been transported to the pre-Enlightenment days of the Inquisition. Oh no, we are actually in the mystical Kabbalah days, where to name something is to control it, and words are magic, literally, magic words.

Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum would be proud.

Miasma

A clinical description of moral aphasia.

"Flag conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Norman Mailer at the Commonwealth Club, Feb. 20, 2003.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]
2:26:01 AM    

Thank you Anne Galloway. Sometimes I think the blog universe thinks they invented the idea of the link, when hypertext pushed on what can be connected associationally far better than some blog software that seems unnecessarily hierarchical and based on outline-driven structures. True, blog technology helps the WEB become more hypertextual in a two-way, dialogic fashion, but it still ain't the Akashic.

Miasma

Can blog trackers step into the same river twice?.

Anne Galloway is thinking about tracking and representing ever-changing meanings among blogs:

...we're looking at constantly shifting contexts, shifting uses, shifting practices, shifting meanings, shifting understandings. To represent that, to nail it down, with only quantities of points of connections suggests that our social experiences of blogging can be effectively, and adequately, defined in terms of linear and causal relationships based on the transmission of data quantities. We always talk of networks and nodes, but didn't hypertext originally offer us more flexible, more rhizomatic possibilities? It seems to me that blog and blog-related software (like aggregators) seek to control - if only by filtering and structuring - the flow. And that's not very sociable if you appreciate serendipity.

This is an important insight. It will be posted on Stir when servers allow. Meanwhile, we might do well to consider how our notions of "content" and "memes" serve to constrict how the possible relations among blogs and the speech within blogs is represented by current tracking products. More to come...

Your thoughts welcome.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]
2:17:08 AM