From within a carefully constructed protocological network, volunteers received procedural arguments from the Obama campaign, arguments that aimed to shape how volunteers encountered potential voters and how they recruited other volunteers.
This sort of reminded me of the Lipson reading where she talks about how letter were supposed to be formatted in a certain way to be effective and meaningful.
In both cases, procedures are authored in response to the predicament of hospitality
Could this relate to Bitzer? In that they saw a problem with hospitality when connecting with voters so they sort of started a new rhetorical procedure.
“Processes like military interrogation and customer relations are cultural. We tend to think of them as flexible and porous, but they are crafted from a multitude of protracted, intersecting cultural processes.”
This also reminds me of the Vygotsky reading. People within a community have shared learnings of language and communication, just like these cultural norms for different cultures.
the ubiquity of software, a relatively new medium of expression as compared to text or speech, asks us to consider the role of rules and processes in digital environments.
I had that same question. Do we interpret information differently or is it based on how we get information?
but (perhaps more important) procedural rhetoric also allows the volunteers themselves to move through and write back against and, in some cases, resist networked power.
This sort of reminds me of the Lipson reading where the lower class could write to the nobels to improve life for them and in turn everyone else. In this case volunteers had the power to go against the scripts, which helped cater to the audiences needs and wants. Not the same kind of power structure, but I found this interesting to note.
the Obama campaign deployed procedural arguments, providing volunteers with scripts for the telephone calls they would make to potential voters and with procedures that expressed what kinds of activities were most important. These scripts were not necessarily followed verbatim, and volunteers authored their own procedures.
I like this comparison on how some ancient Egyptian texts were messages from pharaohs/kings, but were delivered by scribes. The volunteers for the Obama administration could ideally form the content/message for the specific receiver of the message making it more effective. But the overall message is still coming from Obama.