Collin G Brooke
@cgbrooke
I’m a rhetoric professor in upstate NY.
Collin G Brooke
@cgbrooke
I’m a rhetoric professor in upstate NY.
“Each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.”
The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it.
when people place value on the role of evidence as a means of updating their beliefs, they are less likely to believe misinformation and conspiracy theories.
But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est— “that
... See moreIt has become increasingly possible to give almost continuous access to politicians—or that's the illusion. Think of our phones, these totemic objects we all carry—the intimacy of sitting in bed with the screen close to your face, watching a politician record a video or a livestream of themselves with their own phone. That's different from sitting
... See morepeople keep coming back to social media because they help us do something that makes us distinctively human: create, revise, and maintain our identities to gain social status. Social media allow people to present different versions of themselves, monitor how others react to those versions, and revise their identities with unprecedented speed and
... See moreMuch of our capacity to ‘use’ the world depends, not on an attempt to open ourselves as much as possible to apprehending whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, but instead on apprehending whatever I have brought into being for myself, my representation of it. This is the remit of the left hemisphere, and would appear to require a
... See moreIt is also a broader cultural sensibility composed out of the steady drip-drip of bureaucratic acts, a loose constellation of practices and postures that is diffused throughout society via the legal and executive branches of the modern state. In short, suspicion is less heroic and more humdrum and routinized than we might think.
Scale and Conspiracism
To succeed in today's media environment, “political leaders must appear as accessible, authentic, and relatable,” she argues,