English 583: Digital Rhetoric

So, I’m a little late to the blog, but here are my thoughts:

I was really sparked up by the Human Lobotomy video. Growing up in the eighties conditioned me to a small degree of paranoia because it was still the cold war era. Then, pop culture was littered with the idea that our freedom was threatened on a daily basis. Movies like Red Dawn foretold of a time when there would be a sudden and total loss of freedoms, and the only option besides giving in was to run to the hills with your gun and fight for those freedoms. This is an example of an external threat, but there were plenty of shows and movies that hinted at the idea that our own government could not protect us, and in some ways, would not protect or secure us. I’m sure there are many other examples, but The A-Team, Magnum P.I., and The equalizer are just a few of the vigilante type shows that come to mind. The overall theme of shows like these was that it was alright to bend or break rules, laws, social constraints, etc. in order to preserve your safety, because ultimately the government was too overbearing and too distant to really care about you. Big brother was in the back of everyone’s mind.

Really, all this points to the idea of an individual’s relationship with authority. Like the video mentioned, that one way stream of information was only manipulated by the authority of the corporations, the media, the government: all organizations and guardians of knowledge. But as Weinberger mentions, the internet produced a decentralization of the order of things, knowledge became accessible to everyone at any time, and the stream suddenly flowed both ways. That is a threat. The new miscellaneous order “is changing how we think the world itself as organized, and—perhaps more important—who we think the authority is” (Weinberger 23). I think that the control that AT&T and its counterparts crave is just a symptom of the power struggle that the internet represents. They want authority; they want to reassert their position as the holders of knowledge.

Throughout the Weinberger reading I saw what I think of as a theme of a challenge to that authority. On page 31, Weinberger discusses the encyclopedia Britannica and the great book list, which felt to me like a prime example of the banking concept of education, where knowledge from the authority is force-fed to the learner. Adler and friends sat with their huge bowl of knowledge, spooning it out to the masses. The authority inherent in the possessors of knowledge becomes undisputable in such a system, but the internet can destabilizes the idea of that kind of authority. Suddenly, “Every idea is browsable and ideas are instantly assembled …relevant to each person’s particular needs and way of thinking” (32). Who needs Adler and his lists now?
Apparently AT&T does. They need to resurrect the Adlers so they can remake those lists, reset the structure of reality, and redraw those lines, “maintaining the power of the existing elite” (32).

Since the new delivery of knowledge depends on the third order of a shapeless, multidimensional tree (Weinberger 83), someone has to build and maintain the tree. Power and authority will have to reassert itself in some form, because implied order is a social convention. Weinberger goes into detail discussing how we have a need to organize everything from our groceries to our schedules, so I won’t go into it here. Even this idea that the list can reshape itself to our whim implies that a list is needed in the first place. At some point, there will be a number 1 on the list, whatever the list turns to to look like (Weinberger 54-55).

And because there is a need for order, someone will be the decider of that order. I personally hope it’s a string of computers somewhere, but, being the child of the eighties that I am, I’m going to go buy some more ammo and camping gear.