11/15/11

What is dialectic in the modern era?

Modern day dialectic is very different than dialectic of the ancient days and even of the classical times.

Today we have Facebook, Twitter, email and a myriad of other social networks all focused on what we consider to be important to share with the world in that moment but will probably not matter even five minutes later. Most of us probably don’t even remember our last update to our favorite social network.

Modern dialectic is more focused on the now, kairos being the most important thing. Our state of mind now will be different in five minutes, so the kairos changes.

I guess we’re just more ADD today than the Ancients were. Quality in dialectics is suffering for it.

11/10/11

Because today’s reading had to deal with Frederick Douglass, the question of how class effects rhetoric has come up.

Since ethos is a huge part of rhetoric, your class standing is definitely a major part of your effectiveness as a rhetorician. In the days of Frederick Douglass, because of his race, he wasn’t well respected, despite his intelligence and education (though that education was not realized in the traditional ways). Douglass really had to work to get any point of his across to his audience, something he was successful in doing because he was such badass. We talk about him today, after all.

Today, anyone with a computer and a connection to the internet can spout their words of wisdom, rants, and raves for everyone or no one to read. Class standings are somewhat non-existent, though if your name is well-known, you tend to get more re-tweets than your average 14 year old does.

11/8/11

Today we address the question: Is the decline of natural memory a bad thing?

I say no, because memorizing stuff like the Ancient Rhetoricians did would be impossible.

Back then, it was possible to read everything that was out there and remember it. These days, you couldn’t read everything that was written today, let alone everything written ever.

So, today, we do rely on artificial and external memory storage, depending on our natural memory for only necessary day to day things such as driving, instinctual reactions and very distinct memories. Things like telephone numbers, books, and our Angry Birds high score are all stored externally. Artificial memory comes into play when we enact things such as mnemonics and summaries in order to temporarily memorize something.

Things to be permanently memorized that are forever necessary are written down to be remembered.

The Ancients would also perform their speeches this way, going strictly from memory using a more spatial system of memorization rather than the linear memorization we use today. Their speeches were different every time they were given, but still had the same basic points because the house or other object the used for key points was the same every time.

Today, our speeches will be pretty close to the same every time they are given because they are written in full first. If they are memorized, they are memorized from a previously written thing, called secondary oration.

Because we think so linearly today, I think it would be really hard to go back to the way things were in the Ancient times, unless someone was brought up to think that way.

I don’t think the loss of natural memory is necessarily a bad thing, simply because the amount of information out there today would be impossible to remember.

On the other hand, I don’t even have my parents’ cell phone numbers memorized, which might be a bad thing.

11/3/11

Every day we as humans must find the balance between order and chaos. Some people are more comfortable when things are ordered while others of us like our chaos, though it is an organized chaos.

In rhetoric, this is also the case, as definitions of what was rhetoric and what wasn’t fell into place.

In the old world, order reigned, incorporating science, classical rhetoric, a quest for certainty, and acknowledgement that there could be a god out there, but we haven’t found him yet.

In the modern world, chaos was the preferred mode, focusing on human concerns, modern rhetoric, and an acknowledgement of uncertainty, taking more sophistic approaches.

Finding a balance between the two today is a task.

Of course, we must define “order” and “chaos.” There are 7 billion people on this earth and you would get 7 billion different definitions of those words. Order and chaos are both relative. As mentioned before, yes, my room looks like a tornado hit it, but I know exactly where everything is and that is an order to me. A neat freak, however, would see this as a disaster area and be so overwhelmed that finding anything would be impossible. Meanwhile I have a hard time finding something in a too-organized space.

Order and chaos are two concepts that will never truly be defined, since there are so many perceptions, much like many other vague words in the English language. Oh well.

10/25/11

As literacy became more and more present, society became more and more centered around intelligent conversation, especially as the middle class grew and upward mobility was an available option. This prompted the emergence of Salon Societies, wherein those in a similar class standing would get together and discuss anything and everything. You were expected to participate, and even women could partake, upping a woman’s place in society.

Sure, she was still considered lower, but she was now seen as an intelligent being, rather than some fragile thing that was only good for reproduction.

In Salon Society, there was a constant flow and movement of ideas, a throwback to the Sophists.

These were also a many to many kind of communication model. This was a change from the previous typical one-to-one or one-to-many communication models. That model is still very apparent today, through our social media in Facebook and blogging.

Salon Societies were the early online chat rooms and also broke down class barriers even further.

10/18/2011

When we write papers, we’re told to never express our own opinions unless they are backed up by solid facts and evidence. We turn to the library, inhaling every that contains our usually vague key word, searching frantically for anything that agrees with our point.

These, however, include other authors’ opinions, renamed “testimony” to sound like a more reliable source. True, some support their opinion of why they think Elizabeth Bennet is actually in love with Mr. Darcy with actual factual evidence, later re-quoted in our own papers.

But, really, a lot of the time, we will take what another author has said and use it to support our point, using borrowed ethos to make our papers and arguments sound more reliable and trustworthy.

But is this borrowed ethos really a reliable resource? Well, in a way, yes. Not every resource is going to be a very detailed scatter plot graph of the number of times Elizabeth mentions love in relation to Darcy for each chapter and then charting the path to their eternal love, no. Yes, this person agrees with us, yes, we may take their argument a little out of context to make it fit into ours, but by using borrowed ethos we can make our papers and arguments stronger.

The authors of these essays and texts are experts in their field. They know their shit. Now, if someone wanted to quote one of my papers, I feel that their paper wouldn’t be as accurate or reliable. But testimony from an expert is a reliable resource.

10/13/11

So, basically, the development of the printing press changed everything. Too bad poor Gutenberg wasn’t able to reap the benefits of his perfected combination invention since copyright or patents weren’t around then. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to ignore the huge impact the printing press had on the world.

When the first printed books hit the shelves in 1450 and the availability of the written word exploded, so did literacy. Before, just the elite and the clerical could read, and even then the test for literacy was the ability to write your name. But as more and more books were mass produced and there was more and more to be read beyond the Bible and sermons, the ability to read soon dripped down to the middle class and, eventually, the lowest class.

Literacy meant an increase in upward mobility, increased communication channels, and made the Protestant movement entirely possible. The class system, rather than being a pyramid, became more bulbous as the middle class expanded. A primarily oral culture became a written culture, ancient stories finally written down and posterity possible. People were learning much more and education became a priority.

Of course, true universal literacy didn’t really happen until the early 1900s.