- Feb 2016
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quod.lib.umich.edu quod.lib.umich.edu
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Elise’s parenthetical statement about how the caller “sounds” is a kind of “if-then” statement, a fork-in-the-road moment in the discussion where the caller decides which path might work best. Procedural arguments in the form of phone-banking scripts were distributed by the campaign, but Obama volunteers were not rigid, unwavering machines. They did not always execute the campaign’s code, or at least not in the way that we normally imagine the process of execution.[57] They interpreted it, changed it, and made it their own.
This idea that the callers would make the calls but somehow make it "their own" goes along with the idea that power is given to volunteers through the website but there is still control over the processes. For example, they aren't ditching the phone calls and going to people's houses, rather they improvise as much as is allowed. This shows that rhetoric is always based on context, which is what we have talked about throughout the course so far. If these volunteers had set-in-stone scripts that they couldn't change at all, it wouldn't make sense when talking to various people. Each person needs to be persuaded in their own way, and being aware of the context is very important.
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Bogost argues that processes can have complex relationships to ideologies and cultures: “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 reminds me of what was mentioned in Rountree's piece about the social and cultural factors that play into the rhetorical situation and influences how rhetorical discourse effects people. Rountree's idea of relational meaning weighs into the cultural context and it dictates how we apply meaning to things in our surroundings.
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The fact that the player must feed his character to continue playing does draw attention to the limited material conditions the game provides for satisfying that need, subtly exposing the fact that problems of obesity and malnutrition in poor communities can partly be attributed to the relative ease and affordability of fast food.
This is such an interesting type of rhetoric. The game is being used interactively to argue the point that there are problems with obesity and malnutrition in the inner city.
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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.
How is software different than text or speech?
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By tracking the arguments embedded in the Obama campaign’s software and its phone-banking scripts, we can gain a more complete picture of its complex, conflicting, and contradictory messages, and we can see how contemporary campaigns must continually engage the complexities of a hospitable network.
This multi-layered and complex network related to Roundtree's mentioning of the complexity of simulations and computer programs. Websites and networks have a lot of moving parts, which calls for good management and control in order for it to be "hospitable" for users.
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How does the administrating entity of a network balance freedom with control?
This is an interesting question, because the complexity of a network includes both a large amount of freedom for users, but needs some control just like other aspects of a campaign.
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my focus in this chapter will be to explore how procedures, computational and otherwise, express arguments and how they shape and constrain writing and political action.
This type of focus in which the procedures themselves express arguments ties more into Roundtree's theory of rhetoric, rather than Bitzer's more "simplistic" theory of rhetoric. This statement that procedures express arguments is a complex concept.
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