Go behaves as an agent that enables new viewing practices by forming connections between different parts of the assemblage including viewers, industry, texts and related technology.

This signals a shift in how television is viewed; live television can now be viewed without the need for a television set.

It enables computers, tablets and phones to do what just a few years ago only the television set could do

One of the most interesting aspects of Go is that it incorporates a number of functions that were previously distributed amongst different technological devices such as the television set, the remote control, the set top box, and the Personal Digital

television has always been a hybrid medium

If we understand multiplatform television as an assemblage that is constantly forming new connections between viewers, texts, technologies, polices and practices, we can imagine a virtual realm full of possible outcomes. However, it is difficult to predict which will be actualised and which will remain in the realm of the virtual. This sense of contingency and chance means that social and cultural television formations are open to the new and unthought rather than limited to fixed relations.

exploring emergent properties.

binaries and hierarchies such as production/consumption, producer/audience, industry/consumer and even technologies/text.

Unlike fixed structures that always act in the same way and produce the same outcomes, assemblages introduce new possibilities.

with binary relations

As old connections disappear and new ones form, it changes quantitatively, in terms of the number of connections it has:

It also allows us to consider how agency is reshuffled, as new connections are formed between new kinds of devices, texts, practices and applications.

As Goggin notes assemblage theory ‘questions the constitution, production, and reproduction of the social, pointing to how particular objects suggest different conceptions, ordering and politics

For Joke Hermes television and television viewing is so vastly different than it once was that ‘we are in need of evaluating what television is about and, perhaps also, of updating our theoretical frame-work to understand the medium’

In the midst of this change at least three new and distinct functions stand out: pay per view, search and retrieve, and upload and share.

Empowerment and the agency of audiences has been a contested aspect of digital media.

For example, José van Dijck challenges the idea that online platforms like YouTube signal any shift in media power because they mine the metadata of users in order to target advertising to individuals

can limit their exposure to different kinds of programmes and different perspectives

It enables us to not only to consider current television formations, but to contemplate how these connect and relate to past formations, and possible future formations.

The years of stability that Uricchio refers to could be understood as precisely a set of links that reinforce particular arrangements and by doing so block other possibilities. However, digital technology has enabled new links to form that open up the television assemblage to new forms of production and new forms of engagement.

beckons viewers to become engaged and to become players rather than passive viewers.

This means taking into account that children are not tied to temporal modes of viewing based on schedules and other expectations to do with broadcast television such as high production standards and established genres.

what is lost in this new formation?

If we think about these components as simply the actualisation of a number of possible virtulalities, then it becomes apparent that their actualisation is contingent on a variety of tendencies coming together and not the result of a linear logic.

the actual is always informed and influenced by the virtual and that, while the virtual may have an infinite number of possibilities, only some are actualised

Firstly, agency cannot be attributed to any one component or actant, human or non-human but emerges from the association of different parts.

as the nature of the system changes, its capacities or what it enables, also change. DeLanda discusses this process in terms of emergent properties.

First, because assemblages form new connections with the outside, the social itself becomes open to change.

the concept of assemblages provides a means of accounting for the formation of new kinds of connections between discrete devices, texts and applications, at times across different mediums. It enables us to think about how previous and current devices, texts and medium are reconfigured and adopt new functionalities or are modified, so as to display new qualities.

change and transformation are not simply ‘characteristics of the medium’s current phase but more generally [are] one of television’s integral features’

Internet TV

Fixed social structures produce an impoverished form of agency because agency always belongs to the same components or groups.

This unique function addresses a society as a whole and reinforces a sense of nationhood and citizenship.

This means taking into account that children are not tied to temporal modes of viewing based on schedules and other expectations to do with broadcast television such as high production standards and established genres.

This is no small matter when we consider the scenario described at the start of this essay, where as little as ten years ago not only did viewers have very little control over where and when they watch television, but they also had to deal with incredibly cumbersome technology.

Go’s search and retrieve logic also challenges a fixed idea of a television schedule that is organised by the scheduling department of a television channel with the aim of enticing viewers to immerse themselves in its flow. Go, on the other hand, is defined by a multiplicity of possibilities that may or may not actualise as schedules. Viewing is no longer reliant on schedules as viewing on Go means choosing programmes from a number of lists and menus that can be swiped through, personalised into favourites or arranged into a number of different playlists. This form of interaction removes programming and scheduling as something that is solely the domain of the industry and reconfigures it into a shared arrangement.

By doing so, it literally brings new elements into an assemblage that deterritorialises a number of connections fundamental to broadcast television.

I’m on the bus. I take out my iPad and open Foxtel’s application the Go. I can watch programmes on 60 live channels, or I can choose from hundreds of shows and movies from the ‘on demand’ menu.

a virtualised form of participation.

gender groups at particular times

The concept of reciprocal determination is important for challenging the centrality of broadcast television and the idea of television and television culture as something with a fixed and stable structure based on fixed roles, binaries and hierarchies such as production/consumption, producer/audience, industry/consumer and even technologies/text.

These are properties that arise from the interactions of heterogeneous parts so that the assemblage as a whole acquires new attributes. At the same time, the parts of an assemblage retain their unique properties, and do not lose their distinctiveness.

so that a part may be detached and made a component of another assemblage’

More specifically, in this paper I argue that the concept of assemblages provides a means of accounting for the formation of new kinds of connections between discrete devices, texts and applications, at times across different mediums. It enables us to think about how previous and current devices, texts and medium are reconfigured and adopt new functionalities or are modified, so as to display new qualities.

‘[p]art of the ‘power of television’ lies in its constant transformation process, enforced by a continuous reflection on the ‘appropriate’ use and an ongoing redefinition of television’

The emergence of digital, multiplatform television also puts into question many of the central concepts and theories for understanding television and television culture, such as: appointment viewing, mass audiences, liveness and broadcast-flow

Upload and share practices enable viewers to engage with a show’s interactive material or create and distribute user generated content. These changes have transformed television from a single platform medium into an interactive multiplatform medium that encourages viewer (if this term is still appropriate) participation.

hinking about these problems in terms of assemblage theory, we could say that in these instances YouTube is captured and over-coded by molar ordering that reinstitutes a hierarchical structure and a central agent of power.

customisation and personalisation technologies that enable viewers to select programmes according to personal taste can limit their exposure to different kinds of programmes and different perspectives

By addressing a mass audience, it facilitates a sense of nationhood and enables the spread of important information.

LetsPlay channels can be see as one manifestation of these new links,

In fact, children’s viewing practices should form an important base for how we rethink what television is and what it does, because today’s children have had little or no exposure to television prior to a digital age.

They incorporate a mix of television and gaming elements and cultural practices.

‘we have to reshuffle our conceptions of what was associated together because the previous definition has been made somewhat irrelevant’

At the same time, we could also ask what is lost in this new formation? One possibility is that members of a household act in isolation from each other in relation to planning and scheduling communal viewing.

the Foxtel iQ disrupts appointment viewing or a temporal mode of viewing by enabling viewers, to not only record programmes easily (that is without needing to know the start and end time or date) but also ‘create a personal playlist from the pool of programs they have recorded, which can then be watched at the viewer’s convenience’

mobility becomes an emergent property

At the same time, I am not assuming that prior to multiplatform television viewers were passive, as acts of reading and making meaning are also forms of activity.

While this event may be read through a linear cause and effect logic after it has occurred, it is first a series of heterogeneous tendencies that come together to form an expression.

processes of deterritorialisation

processes of territorialisation

Unlike fixed structures that always act in the same way and produce the same outcomes, assemblages introduce new possibilities.

rhizome, clearly meant a series of transformations, translations, transductions, which could not be captured by any of the traditional terms of social theory’ (Latour, 1999:15).

As Latour argues, social theory privileges stability and tends to structure the social around fixed terms and binaries such as ‘actor and system, or agency and structure’ (Latour, 1999: 16)

The concept of assemblages takes into consideration the way television culture can be deterritorialised and reterritorialised, so that new functionalities and qualities are introduced.

LetsPlay channels put into question the idea of television as a stable medium, and invite us to rethink what television is and what it can be.

LetsPlay

Viewers are therefore no longer bound to the television set to watch live television.

However, unlike mobile phones and tablets which promote mobility, I would argue that these home based technologies attempt to maintain the television set as the privileged site for viewing and the home as a central location.

Go and apps like it offer new lines of connections that potentially reformulate television culture by deterritorialising appointment, mass and home viewing.

Foxtel Go is one of a number of television applications (or ‘apps’) that enable viewers to watch television on different devices.

broadcast television offers viewers very few opportunities to actively participate in the media texts that they are directed to consume

broadcast television is a highly organised structure that revolves around a centre of significance, tends toward homogeneity and produces images and representations for viewers to consume.

reciprocal determination

deterritorialisation

rhizomatic assemblage

social as a constantly stable structure

television once had a stable identity that is now being called into question

1950 and 1980

[p]art of the ‘power of television

viewers can access their favourite shows in a number of different ways

assemblages

ex falso quodlibet

symbolic placeholders for binary switches: on/off, +/-, yes/no, is/is-not

The age of media is over, for there is now only one medium

aphorism

hypomnesis

amamnesis

Digital ontology is the event of the end of media

full-blown metaphysics of ‘being

web 2.0 practices

displacing ‘the human’ from the centre of action

ever-growing excess of data

When modulating some digital data into a display state and experiencing it as an image (say, in order to show a picture of your child to a friend on your phone),

Later, we will see how this could help us also understand immanently digital entities and their relationship to the world.

there are no longer any media, saying, “with numbers, everything goes […] a digital base will erase the very concept of medium”

technics

Or, to put this differently, we have argued that: logic is the medium of being, insofar as it inscribes the necessity of pure minimal differences before contradiction; mathematics the medium that concretises minimal differences into consistency-without-phenomenal-identity as the possibility of any actualisation; technics the actualising medium of modulating these consistencies in turn. This tripartite distinction—difference, consistency, modulation—entails that all phenomenal presentations are at once infinitely variable as they are entirely constrained in specific ways.

otiose

Yet our point here is that, at base, the digital is a model of logic, not a specific technology (Chun, 2011: 140). Second, and just as importantly, because the physical reality of the computer is an electronic and magnetic enactment of this logic, it is impossible to ever identify any specific being of digital data, since the ‘movement’ of data back and forth between disks, RAM (Random Access Memory), caches and registers on the CPU (Central Processing Unit), is in fact a constant process of modulation between states of magnetic polarity or electric charge in these physical objects. Because of this, it is impossible to say that any given bit of digital data is even the same as itself, or point to its localisation or appearance in the world as a criterion or determinant of its identity, laying bare the fundamental spuriousness of the concept of a ‘copy.’ Data’s ‘identity’ is a pure, non-phenomenal, distributed-cohering-across-materials. And, ‘underneath’ that, there are simply absolutely minimal differences or pure binaries—which are thus differences-without-identity, not subject to the laws of non-contradiction.

ferromagnetic

digital ontology as founded on pure differences established by the primacy of excluded middle, data should be considered a hyperdifferentiated consistency without identity. We thereby reiterate and extend our fundamental point about digital data, which is that it scrambles inherited metaphysical polarities. The principle of excluded middle rules the foundations of the digital universe, not the principle of non-contradiction. Digital ontology is paraconsistent, not classical or intuitionist.

incommensurable

Yet recent developments in logic—those broadly denominated ‘paraconsistent’—have attempted to construct logical systems in which contradictions are not necessarily ‘explosive.’ In traditional propositional logic, everything follows from a contradiction, but variants of para-consistent logic propose otherwise. As Greg Restall explains: Paraconsistent logics are distinctive in that they do not mandate explosion. […] Instead, for paraconsistent logics the entailment fails […] in the semantics for these logics there are interpretations in which A and -A may both be taken to be true, but in which not everything is true (Restall, 2006: 76). - 36 - It is essential here to understand that paraconsistency separates out contradiction from consistency, such that certain contradictions might be true, without all of them being so. Whereas consistency and the foreclosure-of-contradiction are identical in classical and intuitionist logics, this is not the case for paraconsistent ones. Moreover, this situation establishes the actuality that there may well be many different modes of constructing logical systems, even a kind of logical pluralism. This reopens the old question regarding the foundations of logic in a radical new fashion. - 37 - What we want to underline is that the instantiation of Boolean logic in post-war computing led very quickly to the appearance of a vacillation in the data computers were handling, such that paraconsistent logics initially came to be developed “to prevent computers, such as expert medical systems, from deducing anything whatsoever from contradictory data… because of the principle of ex falso quodlibet” (Meillasoux, 2009: 76). [12] Unlike regimes governed by classical logic, then, such a digital ontology would render pure difference (not identity) fundamental; unlike intuitionist logic, digital ontology could also affirm actual infinities. One corollary is the possibility, even actuality, perhaps even necessity, of true contradictions; another is the patency of contingency in any modulation.

But we, four, disagree that ontology must be classical, as well as, five, that logic can only describe (and therefore does not prescribe) existents. So it is time for us to bring together all the points we have made above into a clear and distinct summary of digital ontology.

they are ideological in this new sense, that they are produced on the basis of absolute binary operations whose operations vanish in the presentation of numbers, thereby also remodulating the data they present. The very organisation of data through various forms of modulation puts all sorts of pressures on the numbers that numbers themselves cannot say (Mackenzie, 2012: 335–350). We are thus committed here to understanding the digital as prior to number. Above all, we use this fact as a hint in our construction of a digital ontology. We maintain that it is vital to understand that to construct a digital ontology is to have recourse to a logical and not a mathematical ontology. But what does this mean?

The move to pure quantities is far easier to understand when we accept the numerical as simply another parameter in the modulation process between data and its display, and may help us move closer to an understanding of the relationship between the contemporary technical interdependence of virtual/material and the Deleuzian interdependence of virtual/actual (Nash, 2012).

it is that the unprecedented powers of thought and action that derive from the electrification of Boolean algebra first established by Shannon, and now incarnated globally in the form of contemporary computing, must have some fundamental anchoring in ‘being’ for it to function at all (Shannon, 1937). Second, this means that to speak of ‘digital media’ is not simply to speak of a set of hardware and software components developed by a particular species on a particular planet at a particular time using particular materials: it is rather to be given a new access to being itself, and one which must thereafter guide our thinking of natural processes more generally. Third, if there remains something unthought in the Wolfram-Fredkin hypothesis, it is simply that there is something preprogrammed, indeed too representational, about the direct projection of a contemporaneously-dominant media paradigm onto being itself. Moreover, if the social conditions of such a projection are occluded, then we should expect such an occlusion to create certain symptoms too; not least the immediate carrying-across of a number of features of contemporary computing to nature itself in an unjustified manner. What we wish to do here, then, is radicalise the Wolfram-Fredkin hypothesis along logical lines. Above all, we agree that when we speak about the ‘digital,’ this must have an extension far greater than simply referring to the actualities of new media, at the same time that these new media must simultaneously function as our primary mode of access to this recognition. But we disagree that the universe is a computer. We believe, rather, that being is digital, if in a very particular sense.

at all other times it exists as unmodulated digital data with no clear ontological state. This is true of all digital data. These may perhaps be termed ‘immanently digital entities,’ and could be said to be true of any and all of the excess of data created by the use of digital data and networks. ‘Likes’ and ‘friends’ and ‘photos’ and ‘text’ and ‘links’ and ‘Tweets’ and ‘followers’ and all other ostensibly differentiable digital phenomena–some of these may have identifiable provenance in the non-digital world, and some may be uniquely generated by and in the digital sphere, but all can be said to be ‘immanently digital entities.’ It is this problem, unique to the non-medium of the digital, that leads thinkers such as those mentioned above to concepts of ‘inorganic life’ and technogenesis, as well as scientists like Stephen Wolfram and Edward Fredkin to posit—in a move emblematic of Kittler’s assertion that “media determine our situation”—an hypothesis of the universe as a digital computer (Kittler, 1999: xxxix; Chaitin, 1999: 108).

chimeric

the ‘experience’ of the digital becomes one of process, a performance (Groys, 2008: 84). As we have already implied, being qua data proceeds from its operations. When modulating some digital data into a display state and experiencing it as an image (say, in order to show a picture of your child to a friend on your phone), you can no more say that it is the same, or even a copy of the image you showed a different friend yesterday than you could say the D flat played by Martha Goldstein in her 1970 performance of Chopin’s “Etude Op.25 No. 8” was the same D flat that Hermann Scholtz played in his 1879 performance of the same work, let alone the same D flat that Abel Tesfaye sang in The Weeknd’s 2011 performance of their song “The Knowing”.

phenomenological

the grand assertion

ontology

They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from the centre of action, multiplying the sites and forces and functions that are to be analysed, at the same time that these factors are simultaneously treated as part of a sole and single natural world.

proprioception

corporeal

Hayles does not go quite as far as Bernard Stiegler, who repurposes the Epimetheus myth in order to show that humans have no essence separable from the technologies they require for life (Stiegler, 1998). Stiegler complicates temporality even further by asserting that technics, “far from being merely in time, properly constitutes time” (1998: 27). The logical conclusion of this train of thought is that ‘the human’ emerges as a post-facto image from particular technological situations (and not from all of them!), a conclusion that Hayles’s version of Simondon’s and others’ approaches does acknowledge without fully accepting, by insisting on the adaptive approach of epigenetic evolution (Hayles, 2012: 90). Francisco Varela’s work with organic living systems, abstracted to apply to the assemblages formed between technical systems and organic beings, also strongly informs this mode of thought. Varela talks of “embodied cognitive structures” and models of understanding based on “microworlds and microidentities,” as well as of knowledge that is “built from small domains” (Varela, 1992: 334). He defines embodied cognition as the experience of a body with sensorimotor capacities that are “themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological and cultural context” (Varela, 1992: 329). Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s concept of a body is available to apply this theory to digital environments, and many contemporary theorists of new media and affect have done just that, including Anna Munster, Claire Colebrook and especially Luicana Parisi in her book Abstract Sex. Parisi uses such readings to move beyond the dichotomy of embodiment and disembodiment. She also calls on Donna Haraway’s famous explication of the cyborg, reminding us of the need to revisit Haraway’s thesis in the light of the contemporary era of cyborgian digital networks (Parisi, 2004: 135).

ather he understands mediation purely as the process of interactive communication between the two structures, a process which always amplifies (Simondon, 1992: 304).

“modulation is molding in a continuous and perpetually variable manner” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 562 n92).

it is rather to be given a new access to being itself, and one which must thereafter guide our thinking of natural processes more generally.

Unlike broadcast television, multiplatform television can be understood as a rhizomatic assemblage as it contains no centre of significance and cannot be unified into a whole. Multiplatform television consists of a number of different media sites, services and devices where viewers can access the programmes of their choice at any time.

The concept of reciprocal determination is important for challenging the centrality of broadcast television and the idea of television and television culture as something with a fixed and stable structure based on fixed roles, binaries and hierarchies such as production/consumption, producer/audience, industry/consumer and even technologies/text.

This approach means that the actual is always informed and influenced by the virtual and that, while the virtual may have an infinite number of possibilities, only some are actualised. It also implies that ‘the determination of every actual being by the virtual past in its entirety remains contingent for Deleuze:

constantly being reconfigured according to the introduction of new elements and components. This essay turns to assemblage theory because it specifically focuses on open and dynamic systems.

challenges a linear determination based on a cause and effect logic,

‘[T]hey have helped to mask some of the medium’s fundamental transformations, and they have continued to shape key assumptions about television’s interactions with its audiences,

These changes have transformed television from a single platform medium into an interactive multiplatform medium that encourages viewer (if this term is still appropriate) participation

the first being a dystopia and the second a promise that as yet no one knows how to fulfill.

But, if I dare say so, the fact of the mat-ter is that matters of fact are in great risk of disappearing, like so many other endangered species

Earth as a quasi-organism

cosmos

ommensals

an association between two organisms in which one benefits and the other derives neither benefit nor harm.

This is precisely the point where compositionism wishes to take over: what is the successor of nature?

Progress is fully reversible and that it is impossible to trust in the clear-sightedness of anyone—especially academics.

iconoclash

With critique, you may debunk, reveal, unveil, but only as long as you establish, through this process of creative destruction, a privileged access to the world of reality behind the veils of appearances

stop going further in the same way as before toward the future.

The thirst for the Common World is what there is of communism in compositionism, with this small but crucial difference: that it has to be slowly composed instead of being taken for granted and imposed on all.

eikos

a metanoia of sorts

The increase of disputability—and the amazing extension of scientific and technical controversies—while somewhat terrifying at first, is also the best path to finally taking seriously the political task of establishing the continuity of all entities that make up the common world.

the notion of matter is too political, too anthropomorphic, too narrowly historical, too ethnocentric, too gendered, to be able to define the stuff out of which the poor human race, expelled from Modernism, has to build its abode. We need to have a much more material, much more mundane, much more immanent, much more realistic, much more embodied definition of the material world if we wish to compose a common world.

They simply transform this discrepancy (which would make their worldview untenable) into a radical divide between human subjects and nonhuman objects.

concatenations

This conceit has the strange result of composing the world out of long concatenations of cause and effect where (this is what is so odd) nothing is supposed to happen, except, probably at the beginning—but since there is no God in these staunchly secular accounts, there is not even a beginning. . . . The disappearance of agency in the so-called “materialist world view” is a stunning invention, especially since it is contradicted every step of the way by the odd resistance of reality: every consequence adds slightly to a cause. Thus, it has to have some sort of agency. There is a supple-ment, a gap between the two. If not, there would be no possible way of discriminating causes from consequences. This is true in particle physics as well as in chemistry, biology, psychology, economics, or sociology. Thus, although in practice all agencies have to be distributed at each step of the whole concatenation, in theory nothing goes on but the strict and unaltered transportation of a cause.27 To use my technical language, although every state of affairs deploys associations of media-tors, everything is supposed to happen as if only chains of purely passive intermediaries were to unfold.28 Paradoxically, the most stubborn realism, the most rational outlook is predicated on the most unrealistic, the most contradictory notion of an action without agency.

One of the principal causes of the scorn poured by the Moderns on the sixteenth century is that those poor archaic folks, who had the misfortune of living on the wrong side of the “epistemological break,” believed in a world animated by all sorts of entities and forces instead of believing, like any rational person, in an inanimatematter producing its effects only through the power of its causes.

proliferation

neologism

the agreement that created the Bifurcation in the first place now lies in ruin and has to be entirely recomposed. This is why we seem to experience a sense of familiarity with the times before its invention and implementation.21

For we have simply conjoined the worst of politics and the worst of science, that is, the two traditional ways of producing indisputability. We have been here already

We compositionists want immanence and truth together. Or, to use my language: we want matters of concern, not only matters of fact. For a compositionist, nothing is beyond dispute. And yet, closure has to be achieved. But it is achieved only by the slow process of composition and compromise, not by the revelation of the world of beyond.

es extensa

The idea was that the more natural we became, the more rational we would be, and the easier the agreements between all reasonable human beings. (Remember the big bulldozers and warships of Avatar in their irreversible—in fact, fully reversible—advance to destroy the great tree of life?) This agreement now lies in ruins, but without having been su-perseded by another more realistic and especially more livable project. In this sense, we are still postmodern.

his was the time of the great political, religious, legal, and epistemological invention of matters of fact, embedded in a res extensa devoid of any meaning, except that of being the ultimate reality, made of fully silent entities that were yet able, through the mysterious intervention of Science (capital S) to “speak by themselves” (but without the mediation of science, small s, and scientists—also small s!).

Nature is not a thing, a domain, a realm, an ontological territory. It is (or rather, it was during the short modern parenthesis) a way of organizing the division (what Alfred North Whitehead has called the Bifurcation)13 between appearances and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, history and immutability. A fully transcendent, yet a fully historical construct, a deeply religious way (but not in the truly religious sense of the word)14 of creating the difference of potential between what human souls were attached to and what was really out there.

Which is another way of saying that we don’t wish to have too much to do with the twentieth century: “Let the dead bury their dead.”

But when there is nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenly looks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed beneath? This is precisely what has happened to postmodernism, which can be defined as another form of modernism, fully equipped with the same iconoclastic tools as the moderns, but without the belief in a real world beyond. No wonder it had no other solution but to break itself to pieces, ending up debunking the debunkers. Critique was meaningful only as long as it was accompanied by the sturdy yet juvenile belief in a real world beyond. Once deprived of this naïve belief in transcendence, critique is no longer able to produce this difference of potential that had literally given it steam.

iconoclasts

veil of appearances

compositionism takes up the task of searching for universality but without believing that this universality is already there, waiting to be unveiled and discovered. It is thus as far from relativism (in the papal sense of the word) as it is from universalism (in the modernist meaning of the world—more on this later). From universalism it takes up the task of building a common world; from relativism, the certainty that this common world has to be built from utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a whole, but at best a fragile, revisable, and diverse composite material.

Zeitgeist

a new search for hope on condition that what it means to have a body, a mind, and a world is completely redefined.

People typically view disability through the medical model, in which diagnosed conditions present obstacles to be cured or overcome. But according the social model, while many people may have all kinds of medical conditions, people are disabled by the lack of accessibility in our society.

The message should be that people with disabilities can set and achieve goals, not that thin equals beautiful.

Why is Qdoba not accessible to disabled patrons in the first place?

Did Jones ask permission before objectifying this woman in his quest to praise Quarles?

I’d love to read a story about Lapkowicz and her social world or perhaps something on the significant challenges faced by people with intellectual disabilities as they transition out of high school and look for work or college.

They all feature people doing good things. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the content of these stories, of course, but the way they’re told conceals the real issues faced by the disability community. We need stories that illuminate instead.

so her work continues.

inspiration porn sometimes shames the viewer by showing a disabled person overcoming basic obstacles, implying that anyone less disabled has no excuse.

exploring the various ways that disabled people were used to make other folks think mostly of themselves.

Perhaps Plato is right—storytelling is the foundation of rhetoric, and I am above all a storyteller.

My goals have evolved from just get in, get the most practical knowledge, and get out to more thoughtful academic pursuits

As a rhetor I am obligated to create a new, more vibrant, and sustainable truth for the emerging New South.

I began to think in a much broader sense about communication and how unconventional platforms could ultimately provide a voice for traditionally marginalized groups, e.g. women, the elderly, African Americans, and animals.

I used expository writing, Google timeline application, and virtual modeling

The CTW assignment exploring the possible causes of Alexander the Great’s death reflected Plato’s theory that texts can indeed be misleading when the authors are long dead and conclusive evidence no longer exists, if it ever did.

divine inspiration

Kenneth Burke’s

concept of rhetoric