Collin G Brooke
@cgbrooke
I’m a rhetoric professor in upstate NY.
Collin G Brooke
@cgbrooke
I’m a rhetoric professor in upstate NY.
The platforms’ business model is dependent on the volume and velocity of the inflammatory content being offered. It is not a side issue. It is the driving metric. The more engaging the content, the more eyeballs. The more eyeballs, the more advertising revenue.
The anthropologist David Graeber once wrote: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” The same is true of the Internet.
depend on an accurate apprehension of the context
The critic Roy Christopher has called irony “the most abused trope of our time, a ‘get out of judgment free’ card, an escape route, an exit strategy.”
Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication. We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. It is quicker to appeal to affect than to rationality. In affective communication, it is not the better argument but the most exciting information that prevails. Fake news is more interesting than fac
... See moreScale suggests that any object appears different—or does not even exist at all—if you change the scale of perception.
the imaginary waxes while the symbolic wanes.
The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it.
Wisdom lies in discernment, and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.