ENGL 4275/WRDS 4011: “Rhetoric of Technology” » January 18th: Technology and Meaning, a Humanist perspective

January 18th: Technology and Meaning, a Humanist perspective

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Rhetoric of Technology Introduction

Today we’ll go over the following (but not necessarily in this order):

Quick Recap from Tuesday

  • Technique, Technology
  • Non-instinctual Techniques/Technologies
  • Expressive Behaviors
    • Non-human species (mating)
    • Humans (dating/mating)
  • Artificiality/Sociality
  • Posthumanism

While we won’t argue that most artifacts are technologies (from hammers to satellites), it’s more difficult to consider most techniques or systems (from throwing to political organization) as technologies. If we consider ourselves from a posthuman perspective, one where homo sapiens fully embraced artificiality, we might be uncomfortable asking “are we just tools?”

Charles Bazerman on Rhetoric of Science and Rhetoric of Technology

Important components of “The Rhetoric of Technology” (pages refer to article pages)

  • p. 381: “rhetorical productions that surround a material technology”
  • p. 381: “The electrical technology must make its presence felt in all these discursive arenas, must take on value and meaning in the language and discur­sive interaction of each.”
    • Could we delete “technology” in the above sentence and have no meaning change for commonly* understood technologies?
    • *Did we have that discussion on defining technology?
  • p. 383: Scientists have biases and are products of a culture
  • p. 383: “…technology has always been fundamentally designed to meet human ends. Thus, technology, as a human-made object, has always been part of human needs, desires, values, and evaluation, articulated in language and at the very heart of rhetoric.”
  • p. 384: “The technology, as in the case of Edison’s incandescent light and central power, must often enlist the support of numerous publics (financial, legal, corporate, public, technical) long before it becomes anything like a material reality.”
  • p. 384: “Technology for the most part produces objects and material processes;”
    • “…science for the most part produces symbols…[and] claims as its end product–mathematical, graphic, or verbal symbols…those symbols are rhetorical”
  • p. 385: “…ultimately, it is the material object that conveys the primary rhetoric and not the language that went into forming the technology and conceiving its uses and meanings.”
  • p. 385: “There is a dialectic between rhetoric and the material design as the technology is made to fit the imaginably useful and valuable, to fit into people’s understanding of the world. Technological discourse is a special coalescence of the many discourses of the world.”
  • p. 386: “The rhetoric of technology shows how the objects of the built environment become part of our systems of goals, values, and meaning, part of our articulated interests, struggles, and activities.”
  • p. 387: The rhetoric of technology “is the rhetoric of all the discourses that surround and embed technology”

Consider how the following discourses might surround and embed technology?

  • Technical documents
  • Traffic signs
  • News reports on new technologies (e.g., newest smartphone)
  • YouTube “How To” videos
  • Science fiction

Kuhn, Thomas. “The The Route to Normal Science.”

We are only scratching the surface of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark essay The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Our discussion should not attempt to understand the sciences that Kuhn brings up; instead, we ought to think about how Kuhn says science, in general, produces paradigms under which scientists work. The following three phases will help us understand Kuhn’s argument:

  • Pre-paradigm stage
  • Normal Science (the paradigm)
  • Scientific revolution(s)

Ever heard the word paradigm? In what context? Please remember, though, we may be simplifying Kuhn’s ideas in order to grasp his understanding that sciences are socially constructed disciplines that require communication and acceptance of discourse communities in order to arrive at consensus. Although this work is from 1962, the process of creating knowledge and validating new knowledge hasn’t changed. What Kuhn doesn’t discuss is political and other purposeful (willful ignorance) denial of scientific authority.

  • p. 10: Normal science–“research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time supplying the foundation for its further practice.”
  • p. 10: Achievements (e.g. the example on light):
    • 1) “attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity”
      -and-
    • 2) “leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve”
  • p. 11: Scientists who share paradigms also share “the same rules and standards for scientific practice”
  • p. 11: Paradigms are a sign of maturity
    • Why?
  • p. 15: Some social sciences have yet to acquire “universally received paradigms”
    • Then how does the field communicate with itself?
    • How is knowledge established?
    • Pools of facts open to casual observation and experiment.
  • pp. 15-16: Technology and the emergence of new science
  • p. 16: Casual fact gather–one working outside a paradigm–is seldom critical
  • p. 17: Collections of facts and externally supplied belief
    • Different scientists “confronting the same range of phenomena…describe and interpret them in different ways.”
  • pp. 17-18: Paradigm acceptance
    • Codification of experiments
    • Special equipment designed
    • Out with the old, in with the new
  • p. 19: External needs of technology, medicine, and law coming to be
  • pp. 19-20: No need to build science anew under an established paradigm
  • pp. 20-22: Communicating knowledge to others in the field

Locating American Values

We might not get to this. One thing to be aware of is that I always plan for more than we can get through. Therefore, you should NEVER expect to get out of class before 3:45 pm.

Because this course is a theoretical exploration of how we can locate a society’s values by “reading” its technologies, we ought to think about what those values are. This page asks you to think about American values. The goal of this next exercise is to identify values that we might be able to “read” technologies from American society.

Keep up With the Reading

I have the readings for the next few weeks on Canvas. Please read Langdon Winner’s “Technologies as Forms of Life,” which we’ll discuss on Tuesday (1/23). If you’re really feeling ambitious, please read ahead for Thursday (1/25) and finish Langdon Winner’s “Do Artifacts have Politics?”