Fischer

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Samuel Fischer
ENG 497
Dr. Wilkie
05/2016
An Argument for Rhetoric and the Application Modern Technology

Technology has become an ever present and utilized tool within todays society. The

rate at which it is developing is increasing exponentially as time continues to pass. Parents

now question the ultimate effect it will have on their children who have grown up with an
unlimited access to the entire history of human knowledge. Doctors and psychologists
question the correlation between smart phones, computers and attention deficit disorder,
and teachers debate whether the inclusion and allowance of calculators and tablets impede
or assist learning in the classroom.

It was over two-thousand years ago that Plato transcribed Socrates critique of

writingbeing a new technology of the time. Through the invention of the myth of Thamus
and Theuth, Socrates showed how writingtechnologywould create forgetfulness in
the learners souls, because they will not use their memories (Plato 165). In the debate
between philosophers and sophists, Socrates argued against the utilization and democratic
nature of technology. He saw that the artificiality of it would be an extreme detriment to
the mind, impairing memory and weakening the nature of the human. Where in an oral
culture information had to be remembered and passed down, technology eliminated the
need for remembering and allowed unrestrained access to once privileged information.

Where without access to technology, and within an oral culture, a person would

have the ability to rationalize, clarify, and argue information. Now technology limits that

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ability and brings about the predicament where static information might be
misunderstood, false, and the consumer acquires a limited understanding which in turn
perpetuates the problem. This argument has been propagated throughout time, and
modern society fears the artificial nature of technology and its influence on the human.

While our fears concerning the influence of modern technology are rational, we

have proven over the course of Western history that Socrates notion concerning the
negative influence of writing to be minimalif not completely false. Rather, writing has
allowed us to build a database of human thought and information, perpetuating memory
and expanding our ability to increase our knowledge as a society over the course of
thousands of years. Writing, and technology, rather serves as a memory aid and allows us
to access an entire species worth of knowledge that would not otherwise be able to be
remembered.

Socrates fears the static nature of text, and modern critics hold similar reservations

concerning new technologies. Richard Lanham argues against these contemporary notions.
He argues that in addition to being a rhetorical device, it also turns out to be a logical one
within the platonic sense of the idea. He writes,
I argue, at the same time, that this fixation on logic has so bemused us that
we have failed to notice the extraordinary way in which the computer has
fulfilled the expressive agenda of twentieth-century art. It thus fulfills at the
same time a very new visual agenda and a very old verbal one. (Lanham 31)
Lanham explains the orality and interactivity of computers and on screen text as compared
to traditional print. He notes that as the text moves from page to screen, it becomes
unfixed, the reader can change it and become a writer. Where the book is traditionally

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viewed as static, slow, and linear, arguments against the medium and technology become
contested. The new form is dynamic, collaborative and quick. Subsequently, the nature of
oral rhetoric is returning in a new form.

The electronic worlds capability to play with images, symbols, and the arrangement

of text helps to resurrect what is lost in merely print-based text. Lanham explains,
proverbial wisdom, for example, becomes visual. Digital expression has resurrected the
world of proverbial wisdom, but through vast databanks of icons rather than words
(Lanham 37). Where we are able to supplement speech with actions and visual responses,
text is without that capability, but with technology and through electronic mediums that is
returning. We buy what are, in effect, catalogues representing commonplace situations
and appropriate responses to them: faces, hand gestures, signage of all sorts (Lanham 37).
While Lanham uses the currently outdated example of the icon based font, Dingbats, we
now have even greater evidence of modern technologies expressive visual capability
through the rising popularity and use of Emojis.

Furthermore, Lanham describes how all of classical rhetoric and classical education

was built on the exercise of modeling. In terms of oration, and coinciding with Socrates
methods, speech was performed and rehearsed over and over in various forms and
contexts. Declamatio, as the modeling of speeches came to be called, stood at the hub of
Western education, just as computer modeling is coming to do today (Lanham 47). Here
we see that the electronic text has reinstated the emphasis on modeled reality. The
computer has aided in the exercise of dramatizing experience and ultimately positively
influenced the world of work. We use computers to model everything into digital existence
from architectural designs and manufactured products to policies and sales programs. The

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computer has reinstated this ancient rhetorical practice after a time where it had no longer
existed.

Lanham recognizes the utility of modern technology in aiding human thought and

expression. As it continues to develop, rather than straying away from Socrates ideal oral
culture, it has begun to circle back and amplify the capability of human communication.
We are still bemused by the three hundred years of Newtonian simplification
that made "rhetoric" a dirty word, but we are beginning to outgrow it. Digital
expression, in such a context, becomes not a revolutionary technology but a
conservative one. It attempts to reclaim, and rethink, the basic Western
wisdom about words. Its perils prove to be the great but familiar perils that
have always lurked in the divided, unstable, protean Western self. (Lanham
51)
Rather than considering technology to be an external source, merely a tool for
accomplishing a task, the level of technological integration within society only strengthens
the applications of technology. Where at one time we might have considered writing to be
an alien, artificial technology, and without proper historical context, one might now even
find Socrates argument against it to be ridiculous. It has been ingrained within our culture
over the past few thousand years to the point where it is a natural human activity. Writing
has become merely a natural extension of human thought and an integral part of society.
Today, both speech and writing go hand-in-hand within education and daily life.
In building the case for the applications of technologies, N. Katherine Hayles writes,
The more one works with digital technologies, the more one comes to
appreciate the capacity of networked and programmable machines to carry

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out sophisticated cognitive tasks, and the more the keyboard comes to seem
an extension of one's thoughts rather than an external device on which one
types. Embodiment then takes the form of extended cognition, in which
human agency and thought are enmeshed within larger networks that ex-
tend beyond the desktop computer into the environment. (Hayles 3)
Just as writing once appeared foreign to humanity, modern technologies will soon too
become as commonplace and naturalonly improving with time and further integrating
itself within our understanding of how we process thoughts, communicate, and express
ourselves.

In addition to advanced levels of communication, the distance and ability that we

are able to disseminate information is greatly improved with the application of technology.
With the invention of the internet, scholars and students no longer spend hours in the
library searching for texts, rather they take to the web and accomplish a task in minutes
that would have traditionally taken hours. Hayles comments on the state of digital media in
academia noting the increased availability of information, news, and articles. Internet
publications and blogs versus traditional print journals command a much wider readership
and claim a higher citation rate within the humanities. She writes, Perhaps most
significant at this level is the feeling one has that the world is at one's fingertips. The ability
to access and retrieve information on a global scale has a significant impact on how one
thinks about one's place in the world (Hayles 2). Technology brings us together and opens
up new avenues for conversation, ones feeling of isolation in the world is diminished with
the ability to remain connected. That database of human thought and information which
writing has allowed us to build is only more accessible through modern advances.

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When taking into account the normalcy associated with writing we now hold, it is

obvious to assume that both human evolution and technologywhile separatehave

evolved together. So too will modern technology evolve along with the human species.
Hayles suggests that, The proposition that humans coevolved with the development and
transport of tools is not considered especially controversial among paleoanthropologists
(Hayles 10). Just as the ability to walk on two feet allowed the freedom to use two hands,
the ability to use and manufacture tools also evolved at the same time. The adaptive
advantage that the use of tools gave humanity only further accelerated bidepdalismit
would seem that modern technology would also have this same effect.

Bernard Stiegler also suggests that technology can be thought of as an independent

object from the natural world with its own active process and evolution. He focuses on the
question of technics as time rather than technics in time. The evolution of the human has in
itself always been technical. It is the nature and purpose of humans to use technology.
Stiegler writes, to make use of his hands, no longer to have paws, is to manipulateand
what hands manipulate are tools and instruments. The hand is the hand only insofar as it
allows access to art, to artifice, and to tekhn (Stiegler 113). This furthermore accelerates
the argument against the Rousseauian notion of returning to nature and conceptualizing
the human prior to prostheticityand subsequently Socrates critique of technology.

Were we to devoid ourselves of technology, we would be misrepresenting ourselves

as humans and losing everything that separates us from all other Earth species. To remove
writing and neglect the advancements of modern technology would be to destroy
everything that describes us. In Stieglers perspective,

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This process would lead today to something inhuman, or super- human,
tearing the human away from everything that, hitherto, seemed to define him
(language, work, society, reason, love and desire and everything deriving
thereof, even a certain feeling of death and a certain relation to time: to all of
this we shall return), a process by which the realization or the "actualization"
of the power of man seems to be as well the derealization of man, his
disappearance in the movement of a becoming that is no longer his own.
(Stiegler 133)
The evolution of technology has surpassed humanity in and of itself. Among many traits
that we associate with humanity, to renounce technology would be a feat not attributed to
man-kind.

While humans have a close-knit relationship with technology, modern critics

assume this relationship to be at a level near captivity. Byron Hawk criticizes Giorgio
Agambens notion considering our relationship with technology:
Agamben sees almost no moment in which living beings are not oriented by
these processes, extending management and control beyond the traditional
prisons and schools to anything that has the capacity to "capture, orient,
determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors,
opinions, or discourses of living beings". Any object, from cigarettes to
fountain pens; any technology, from to phones; any practice, from agriculture
to navigation; any discourse from literature to technical documentation,
carries with it an apparatus with a corresponding subjectivity. (Hawk 201)

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He deduces that Agamben has no other place to go with his assertions other than a
romantic, Rousseauian version of nature and individual freedom. His relationship with
technology is that its only purpose is to exploit the humans desire for happiness through
the captivity of this energy and vitality. He fails, like many modern criticisms, to show how
a retreat from technology would be productive in any way outside of a mere flight from
them. Rather we should argue that technology is imbued within nature, and presents a
mechanism for change, transition, and transformation within the natural order of the
world. In place of the assumed notion that technology is controlled by, or controlling,
humans; it rather acts as a natural agent circulating throughout the biological world.

Delving further into the nuances of technology and computers, Geoff Cox discusses

the means through which code can function as a form of speech through which our actions
are ultimately influenced and determined by the programmer. His argument is split into
two parts: the first pertaining to speech as a form of action, and secondly, code as a method
of speech. Cox writes,
More than simply writing, program code is a special kind of writing and,
unlike a score that is followed but interpreted, it follows its script quite
literally. It holds on to its script and does not let go, but in so doing it also and
importantly holds on to the inherent special qualities and paradoxes of
speech, its predeterminations and its sense of excess. (Cox 11)
Here we begin to recognize the influence of code and its relation to rhetoric. The code is
unseen by the typical user, although it dictates what is viewed on the screen and the
eventual actions performed by the user.

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Socrates feared that the democratization of knowledge through technology would

lead to vast problems in society, much like modern parents fear the unlimited access their
children possess with the internet. Similarly, his critique of rhetoric lies in the falsities it
can come to representmodern technology falls within the same line of criticism. Steve
Holmes discusses the issues of rhetorics in both critical revelation and persuasive
concealment in relation to computer code and its frameworks beneath the interface of the
screen. Neither the programmers or the code itself can account for the world it creates
which ultimately exists beyond the limits of human design.

Using the example of FreeCiv, an open-source version of Sid Meiers Civilization II, he

discusses a predicament where players have created a loophole in order to cheat the game
and ultimately win by means outside of the intended gameknown as Infinite City Sprawl,
or ICS. Holmes clarifies, Ontological concealment nevertheless confirms that any isolated
part or extractable rhetorical meaning within FreeCivs code only takes its bearing and
individuation from the particular way in which it is given in the wholethe entangled
thing-ness of code, coders, player communities, mediums, networks, and many other
material factors and temporal relations (Holmes 3). In other words, while code, rhetoric
and technology, exist as they are, they are subject to the means by which one uses them.
Just as rhetoric is subject to pandering and manipulation, technology is a means waiting to
be exploitedsuch as the example by which players extorted the freedom presented by the
code of FreeCiv.

Despite attempts at fixing the code, players were still able to work their way around

and ultimately cheat the fundamental dynamics of the game. Thus, the only fix found for the
problem of ICS was through a single community agreement:

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It is actually a core part of classical rhetoric in Millers sensedecorum and
consensuswithin the player and coder community to agree not to play ICS
that actually stemmed the flow. By dubbing ICS a serious breach of playing
etiquette, FreeCivs code was finally able to produce happy players
alongside appropriately happy citizens. This recourse to social and discursive
solutionsthe historic domain of rhetorical persuasionoffers further
confirmation of Chuns most significance point: code never fully determines
its results. (Holmes 13)
Where rhetoric and technology present means for manipulation and ill-use, it is human
morality and social agreement which define that wrongful use of the medium is followed by
serious consequences and community disapproval. Technology, while it has the ability and
ensuing examples of misuse, does not go reign freely or go unmonitored in society. Along
with the democratization of technology, informed citizens now have the ability to
comprehend misuse of both rhetoric and technology.

While we view Socrates claims about the influence of writing to be seemingly

incongruous, so too can we view the influence of modern technology. Technology,

stemming back to the invention of first the spear and then writing, has been an innate
aspect of human evolution and existence. While we fear the potential capabilities of
rhetoric and new technology, we find that through the communal instinct of human
natureonly strengthened further by technologyand the democratization of knowledge,
does the threat posed by the seemingly independently advancing realm of technology lose
its captivity and rule over the human. It is easy to disregard the immensely positive

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influence technology has had on our species, but new developments only more strongly
assert the positive capabilities it offers us.

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Works Cited
Cox, Geoff, and Alex McLean. "Double Coding." Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and
Political Expression. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013. N. pag. Print.
Hawk, Byron. "Vitalism, Animality, and the Material Grounds of Rhetoric." Communication
Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks. By Jeremy Packer
and Stephen B. Crofts. Wiley. London: Routledge, 2011. N. pag. Print.
Hayles, Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago:
U of Chicago, 2012. Print.
Holmes, Steve. "Can We Name the Tools?': Ontologies of Code, Speculative Techne and
Rhetorical Concealment." Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies 5
(2016): n. pag. Web.
Lanham, Richard A. "Digital Rhetoric and the Digital Arts." The Electronic Word: Democracy,
Technology, and the Arts. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.
Plato. "Phaedrus." The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical times to the Present. By
Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford of St. Martin's, 1990. N. pag.
Print.
Stiegler, Bernard. "Technology and Anthropology." Technics and Time. Stanford, CA:
Stanford UP, 1998. N. pag. Print.