Question: Doesn’t every field redefine time and space for themselves? Latour’s definition is especially confusing to someone that has looked at space and time from other fields. He refers to them as reversible and irreversible displacements measured by machines. It seems that he has it a bit backwards. I always understood time as a man made concept.

Passage: “Yes, but once households, amino acids and inclined planes have been through the logistics above, brought onto a white piece of paper and asked to write themselves down in forms and figures, then their mathematics is very very close; it is literally as close as one piece of paper is from another in a book. The adequation of mathematics with the empirical world is a deep mystery.” (240)

Question: I am not sure what he means by households or that it matters. I can see how amino acids and other inanimate matters are alike on paper, but am very confused by his example.
Why exactly does Latour use households, amino acid, and a moving object in compare and contrast? Are they representative of something else?

Passage 1. (134) First full paragraph– “Facts and machines are constantly changing and are not simply reproduced. He also talks about facts and machines on the pages before 134… and in large separate chapters.

I just need it put in simpler terms. I kind of understand how both are built but I don’t see their similarities. Question: How are facts like machines?
They are built similarly.

Passage 2: pg 28:
As the controversy heated, the discussion shifted inside the brain science; in fact, it shifted literally inside the brain. He goes on and describes how neurologists dissected the brain and so on.

Question: What are the determining factors, according to Latour, that allow a heated argument evolve like that? Is it an appeal to pathos? challenge to logos? Or something else? If we were to dissect the evolution of the argument, what would it look like?

The last paragraph on page 35 is entirely too confusing.

What does he mean when he refers to citations having a life span? That’s impossible.

His writing is very confusing until he gets rolling. His examples are hard to follow– especially when he refers to them in mid-sentence. While Im trying to comprehend what that sentence is saying, he wants me to remember what the last few sentences say. That was hard to do because I am not exactly very familiar with his examples.

Apparently, all facts can be questioned and become outdated like sources unless they are supported by nature. That’s also confusing and discouraging.

Most claims and facts come from laboratories.

How does he interpret objectivity and subjectivity into fact and artefact?

Whats a dissenter and actant?

Summary

Lakoff and Johnson explain that metaphors are concepts gathered from our physical experiences that construct our language in terms of containers, objects, and sending.  Rather our language is a system of  metaphors that is based on experience which can differ from cultures. We have metaphors because it is suggested that metaphors help us categorize things in terms of space, time, substance and objects. Metaphors have purposes too. They only work when they have a purpose, but the way they read seem to suggest that sometimes their purpose is in existence without the sender/receiver. That’s impossible.

There are several types of metaphors:

1. Conceptual Metaphors– Argument is War

For this particular metaphor, I do not agree that all arguments take the shape of some battle. I think there is a lot more to an argument than battling and the ART of arguments have changed a lot since this book was written.  In this case, the Art of War or Art of Argument challenge the metaphorical coherence of Argument is War.

2. Spatial Metaphors–Under control, Happy is Up Sad is Down.. ect.. Reflective of our bodily experiences.

3. Conduit Metaphors– hide a part of the metaphor. Ex– the cooperative aspect of arguing.  “The speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them along a conduit to a hearer who takes the idea/object out of the word/container.

Ex. It’s hard to get that idea across to him.

Conduit metaphors often suggest that words and sentences have meanings independent of context and speakers.

I think words do tricky things but they never have meaning without a person because people are what give something a meaning. hahah.

4. Structural Metaphors– structured in relation to something else like a spatial metaphor is structured to our physical experience.  Structural metaphors allow us to do much more than just orient concepts, refer to them, quantify them, as we do with simple orientational and ontological metaphors; they allow us to use one highly structured and clearly delineated concept to structure another. (61)

But spatial metaphors are also called Orientational metaphors.

5. Orientaional metaphors organize systems of metaphors… If Happy is Up.. every other emotion must be below it or next to it.

6. Ontological metaphors– entity and substance metaphors.. have several purposes and reflect the purposes they serve.

Inflation as an entity– if it is an entity or noun, it is easy for it to reflect our experiences with inflation.

It allows us to refer to it, identify it, quantify it and so forth (26)

Another one is the mind as a machine or brittle object… which helps us to describe what is occuring in our heads, and the quality of our thinking.

Container Metaphors– Substance and object metaphors, again.

We reflect our bodily experiences, abilities and limitations in our language.

Outside of doing your homework, what else do you have to do?

These help describe visual fields, events, actions, activities and states. (30)

We personify and speak of things as people too.

Inflation is killing me. — Inflation as a person and adversary.

We also apply human qualities to inanimate things, which is called Metonymy or Synecdoche.This is representing a part of a thing for the whole.

Questions

I am still not sure how structural metaphors are different from orientational metaphors. They seem to do the same thing. Orientational seems to be more related to spatial metaphors.. but still the two seem to act similarly.

What is phrasal lexical item?

What is a experiential gestalt? (81)

What happens when one metaphor replaces another due to evolution and/or technology?

Vocab

Motor–activity

Perceptual

Purposive

Gestalts

“Information wants to be free, in turn, will make people free.” (65)

Summary:

Some theorists have claimed that campus universities will die along with firms because technology is allowing us to transport knowledge through space/distance and time. Much like the prediction of the exchange  of firms for home offices, campus universities face the same threat. Their competition, online universities, like Phoenix and Britian’s Open University, are competing for students that campus universities don’t always appeal to: minorities and people that can’t afford to pay high tuition rates. There is also a discrepancy of which and what is a worthy degree which are often measured by independent organizations that “specialize” in providing that knowledge to the public. In turn, the market can be highly discriminating.

Notes:

Next to religious institutions, educational institutions are the oldest in the world. And so universities have set in place prices they deem worthy and mediums of delivery that aren’t accessible for all people.

So mega universities challenge campus universities by lowering prices, and making the knowledge very accessible nationally and/or globally. But, one of the challenges that online universities have are providing graduate and post grad programs for their students. People also question their accreditation and how the market will interpret its value. So campus universities are preferred in these cases.

Not too long ago universities took on a business-like framework and are changing with businesses as they digitize libraries and such. But there is still a lot to debate over when it comes to paper doc vs. digital.

“A good degree works like a legislative omibus package.” (217)

Often innovators and inventors are the students that fiddle around in other areas like psychology, the arts, humanities and such. It’s a catch 22 because without the accessibility to these other means of information and knowledge, as well as, cultural groups that swap info, these students wouldn’t have been able to produce their newer kinds of thinking. On the other hand, lots of people question the organization of universities that have been set in place for hundreds of years.

“We all need to learn things that we didn’t set out to learn.” As Karl Jaspers said, we need to mingle with people from different fields, different backgrounds, different expectations because it makes a critical contribution to individual education and the institution. (218-219)

So changing the way programs are structured so that students can reach other areas of information is really important for the survival of universities.

Some really doubt the survival of the university like Peter Drucker. But, as stated in chapter 7, people are capable of reflecting on problems and correcting them by researching, planning, restricting destructive behavior and re-educating. (171)

We need to protect our institutions by working together to create degrees that are accessible to ALL people and allow students access to other programs, other ways of thinking, and individual creativity.

Vocab

enculturation

omnibus

GUI

renewable knowledge base

rigidities

complementarities

Questions:

What might happen if education becomes too expensive and inaccessible?

How can universities make education affordable for people that live in slums in places like Indonesia?

A Review of The Social Life of Information‘s  Preface, Introduction  and Chapter 1 : Limits to Information

By Renee Ellen Lindhorst

Introduction to Notes:

Brown and Duguid dramatically appeal to their audience’s sense of  logos by showing us what is occurring during the information and technological revolution. The two revolutions affect several aspects of our society i.e. government, businesses, states, social conceptions, how we treat each other, the economy and much more.

I would even say they appeal our sense of ethos and pathos too as all of these things affect our lives directly in many ways. So I’ve included some personal perspective to show you how this text has affected me and the questions that have emerged because of it.

Reflections and Concepts:

A weight lifted off my shoulders when I began to understand what Brown and Duguid were trying to do because I often felt so confused about what was happening to businesses, the job market, and where I will fit in as a professional writer. They didn’t answer these questions for me but they gave me a better idea of what was happening and how else I can be competitive.

There are major changes that are happening in our economy, in our social conceptions, and how technology plays a huge part in these changes — so do people and the way they think.– It’s a technological revolution.

The industrial revolution is the only model for the information revolution. It’s how we can measure what is occurring. (15)

During the industrial revolution people learned how to process, sort, rearrange, recombine and transport. We built on older models during this time. But that is not exactly occuring with our technological revolution.

To compare the two revolutions you have to look at the information that is received. During the Industrial Revolution we received information in terms of tangible items, trains, buildings, the railroad, buses ect…

Now during our Information revolution we receive information in terms of stories, diagrams, documents and narratives as KNOWLEDGE and MEANING. (16)

*New technology overshadows social needs but better technologies emerge because of social needs.

How it overshadows:

Technology has replaced the handshakes, looking eachother in the eyes, hugs, dinners and so on.

Notice how we REPLACE. Replacing is redundant and wasteful.

How it emerges:

When there is an emergency, like a message that needs to be sent right away, this encourages designers to make technologies faster, bigger and what have you.

When a business person needs to meet with someone in another state, but there is no way to reach them in time– this encourages organizations to invest in designing technology that will accommodate that social need.

One of the surprising components of this text was their numerous mentions of futurology and predictions. The authors say that it is always easier to predict than to build because people underestimate what people will actually do. (Preface)

PREDICTIONS

– WIRE Magazine predicted that, “Agents will become economic decision makers in their own right to produce wholesale changes in capitalism.”

– Bill Joy, a writer for WIRE magazine and computer scientist, argued that autonomous technology will wipe out humanity instead of giving it a wonderful future. He saw humanity and bots on a collision course.  (XII)

WIRE kinda fired back at Joy because they saw bots and humanity headed toward the same direction. Bots and people seemed to compliment each other and make up where the other lacks. (XII)

They also make the point that the complementarity of bots and humans emphasize a point of technological innovation.

Question: Why do pundits talk in terms of replacement? Isn’t that redundant?

Since pundits think in terms of replacement of technological inventions, they are basically wasting millions/billions of dollars because they could be building technologies off of old technologies. They could do something like the Linux project where the software was open to the public to improve it bit by bit.

Redefinition leads to standardization. Standardization erases differences.

Question: What does he mean bots are impressive at identifying people as one certain type? What does he mean by that and how is that possible?

Another punditry prediction is that information technology will free us all from the constraints of the industrial society.

I have a problem with this because during that revolution, a lot of people were working. During this revolution, a lot of people are not working.

Another point the authors make is that people identify others as individuals and deal with them in contexts.

They use the term contexts to describe complex, highly situated fors of interaction that computers are unable to replicate.

Replacement thinking is not the way to go. Brown and Duguid are calling for people to adopt new thinking in terms of augmentation/augmenting.

Some of the shocking facts of our technological and information revolution are the following:

—–We produce two exabytes of new digital information a year. That’s too much. What are we doing with it? We are forgetting social interactions, social needs, social relationships.

——Information production is growing by 50% a year which means people are being remarkably productive. BUT SHOCKINGLY consuming is growing by 1.7% a year.

This basically means that supply and demand are no longer parallel to each other.

There is no longer an equilibrium. It’s CHAOS.

Somehow Brown and Duguid find that this imbalance resembles a large central problem of knowledge management in organizations. (XIII)

Question: Why does Brown and Duguid call it knowledge management and not information management? What’s their definitions for knowledge and information? How are they different?

AT THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

–The imbalance of a ton of information means that VOLUME has taken priority over VALUE.

—Issues with meaning, judgement, sense making, context and interpretation.

(All of these are components of communication and writing. We need more writers, purposes for writers, organizations that see our significance)

—- Another problem: While celebrating access to information, pundits undervalue the power of the technology to create and deploy social network. They ignore the fact that technology can help satisfy our social needs. For example, RFCs are just a simple page that requests for comments. But that little pages opens up HUGE discussions. (XVII)

—-Designs that ignore social issues lead to fragile opaque technologies (XVIII)

—- Self organization and formal organization live in tension with each other.

—Tunnel Design Technologies (Edward Tenner Concept) which are technologies that create as many problems as they solve. (3)

It’s like a vacuum software. hahha

—Under tunnel design technology problems lie unintended consequences of design Tenner describes that makes new technologies so frustrating aside from neglecting resources that lie outside the focus of information. (3)

And the paradox is that tunnel desifn often takes aim at the surface of life. (4)

— we all do not seem to understand that WE ARE ALL DESIGNERS and it is very important to know our limitations. We have to know where to look for resources when we need them. (4)

—- Attending too closely to information overlooks the social context that helps people understand what that information might mean and why it matters. (5)

Question: What is the disaggregation of knowledge into data? (12)

The disaggregation of knowledge into data is called datafication.

What’s the difference between their concepts of first, second, and third waves?

The technological revolution doesn’t encourage complacency but rather leaves people isolated and confused. So they really do not know what to do with themselves because they don’t understand their surroundings. (12-13)

So when there is a problem with information, we don’t actually fix the problem. We kind of cover it up with more information. So if a button is not working on your web page, you create a help button, but if that button is not working, you create another button. So we create MORE information to solve our problems with information/technology/data. (14)

Key Concept

Moore’s Law– When information burdens start to loom, responses fall into a category of Moore’s Law.

– Gordon Moore is cofounder of the  chip making intel.

– Moore predicted computer power available on a chip would approximately double every eighteen months.

So whenever we buy a new computer, we know in a year or so it will be sold for half the price and they will already have a computer that is faster/better.

This is another example of how we just build on top of stuff, fix things in a way that’s not really beneficial to our environment. (14)

We are encouraged to embrace dumb power. (15)

SOLUTIONS

Plead for a design that takes into account resources that people care about. Such design produces tools that people care about.

Conclusive thoughts on this chapter:

I learned a lot about the differences of the revolutions. There is some funny stuff going on with the overload of information that we have and what is going to be done with it. We’ll constantly be uploading and googling for information, but until the organizations and businesses turn flat, release their crazed obsessions with control, I rarely see glimpses of humanity in technology.

It’s the collaborative writing, the narratives, the things that pundits say will go obsolete  are the resources that I think Brown and Duguid are speaking of.

Connecting with one another and using each other as resources and building relationships through technology is a good idea.

Halloran’s states his purpose as a critical analysis of Watson and Cricks 1953 paper on the double helix dna structure.

Watson and Crick’s unusual tone and appeal to ethos stimulated a lot of thought for our ENG 505 class. Halloran says that their genteel tone was an appeal to ethos. But not only was their tone an appeal to ethos, it was what Halloran described as a distinctive move. I suggest that it was a distinctive move on their behalf because they understood at that time that science is a form of rhetoric. It is rhetorical in the sense that we use science to describe what something does, how it works, what it looks like. And though science has a special discourse and common protocol for how it is expressed, things like a slight switch on tone or appeal to ethos may help the purpose of a scientific document.

One of the biggest points in our conversation was to explore how Science is rhetoric and what made Watson and Crick decide to use that specific approach to their audience. We guessed that maybe Watson and Crick had already identified a missing appeal to ethos in normal scientific writing.

On any hand, Watson and Crick’s paper was not only a revolution for science but it was also quite possibly a scientific revolutionary point for scientific rhetoric.

Halloran says that the rhetoric critic is to discover what is the particular case where the available means of persuasion, and judge whether the rhetor managed them well or badly. The particular case commands his or her attention as something worth knowing in itself, apart from general principles that might be abstracted from it. (1)

Halloran also suggests to draw attention to  the fact that very few scientists pay attention to particular cases of scientific rhetoric.

He goes on and says that Watson–Crick establishes a ethos, a characteristic manner of holding and expressing, ideas rooted in a distinctive understanding of the scientific enterprise. (2)

Scientific communities hold specific beliefs, they hold the logos of the discipline– may be crucial to a scientific community, their identity as a community may rest equally on “styllistic proclivities and the qualities of mental life of which those proclivities are tokens to ethos. (2)

Walter and Crick’s paper had a striking genteel tone. The effect gave the paper a highly personal unusual tone for scientific prose. (4-5)

Other writers use a impersonal tone because it is presumed that the work of the scientist is to simply give oneself up to the facts.

Questions:

What does it mean to speak from a pre-kuhnian view of science?

What is weetanscauungen?

I noticed that Halloran does not have a generating principle. Why not?

Terms:

Paradigm

Rhetorical topos

An argument from elegance?

topos of explanatory power

reportorial

Summary of Notes:

I’ve reconstructed the text as I understand it.

There was a lot of backlog for this chapter to get to their several points:

They argue that the fair way, I guess, shown by Machiavelli in The Prince, to understand social and scientific change requires us to abandon several things: 1. the dichotomy of science as truth and politics as power because science is politics by another means (p.4), fear and favour because the idealisms of morality can blind a person in the study of how society takes shape and is transformed from its strategic loci (p5).

In other terms, it is important to follow the actors of science closely, when the enter the strategic loci, because it is the interests of the forces at work to conceal the way in which they act.

QUESTION: What does “FORCES AT WORK” mean? Sounds a little mystical to me. I question their motives on this one because they clearly state that their intent is to make things less OPAQUE.

MY GUESS: Forces at work may mean the temptations of sociological reductionism or ideas of scientific genius. Special people have access to determining the nature of the world. (P. 7)

In particular science and technology students, et al. have been particularly unwise when analyzing social and scientific change. I guess the authors mean that students all too easily contribute social and scientific change to only a select few. That’s what they were taught to do.

Students’ counter argument is that their starting points are the links in their articles making connections between scientific developments and other social institutions.

P.10 Texts make possible the construction of linkages between existing entities and the formation of novel entities and thereby constitute an important method for attempting to control the environment.

Texts are agents to build a world to persuade others.

P.13 By Following the texts the analysts may trace the appearance and disappearance of forceful words and durable linkages and so build up a picture of the area of science in question.

Corresponding gain– converting texts into skeletons of words makes it possible to handle larger databases and to use statistical and graphical methods for the display of features of the Worlds of Science. P 13

(The authors don’t make this all very clear. I have to fill in a lot of blanks because they themselves are very opaque. )

We need one thing in order to complete a analysis of science/social change or to analyze anything really: AUDACITY.

I kinda read this like you have to have the gull to abandon self serving idealisms and ask questions that will not serve either side of the princes or the subjects, or in lamans terms, a special few. You have to take a non-partisan approach.

(Im not sure if my interpretation is right there.)

MACHIAVELLI’S ANTI-REDUCTIONISM

Don’t use reductionism when analyzing social and scientific change because people all too often like to reduce the evolution of societies to the actions of a few “special” people.

–Abandon the western culture notion that SCIENCE IS PURE and does not partake in profane activities.

There are Marxists and writers influenced by Weber that claim that the nature of science and technology is that they are constituted as a form of domination. P.7 Thus also incompatible with humanistic and egalitarian social relations.

* The problem is to understand scientific power and where it is taking us.

* Scientists are building a structured world and the attempt by analysts to force it to conform w/ criteria of demarcation tends to distort if not destroy the coherence of that world. P. 9

MYTHS

There is a gap between science and politics.

There is a special scientific method, a realm where truth prospers in the absence of power.

Science is pure and set aside from profane activities.

Notion- society can shape science w/out itself being influenced is as false as the converse image of a science and technology that find themselves able from their own resources to impose a structure unilaterally on their social environment.

TERMS

Priori grounds

Strategic loci

Proverbial

Political Efficacy

Audacity

Despotism

Usurpation

Priori distinctions

Questions: Why are the authors intentions to make “the force of Science” less opaque but seemingly throughout the text they are opaque.

Why have they not constructed more categories for this text in order for the audience to have a better idea of how they PUT it together?

Abstract

Bitzer refresher on what a rhetorical situation is, what it does, and how to identify it. Bitzer uses a deductive technique to make his points clear. He argues that rhetoric is “situational”. Although, rhetoric is situational and it persuades,  it is not equal to a persuasive situations. Rhetoric’s purpose is to change something.

Summary

Bitzer argues that rhetoric is pragmatic and is existent because its purpose is much bigger than the rhetoric itself. It helps change realities. Although, I am not sure if that is always a moral or just thing.

Rhetoric is an energy expressed through thought and action. It is situational because it comes into existence because it is a response to a question. Rhetoric is also a reaction to a situation. It is a counterpart to a discourse like a question is to an answer. (6) Discourse and rhetoric are like conversations about a problem– they help to alter a reality. The situations control the rhetorical response. (6) And it is my understanding that all rhetoric should positively impact reality for it to be ethical.

Questions–

What does Fahnestock mean by higher and lower stases?

How does a Rhetorical piece have more than one stases?

Is there a way to illustrate stases in a rhetorical piece?

Vocabulary

Exigence (7)

Constraints (7)

Big Ideas

Abstract

Burke’s invention of the five master terms (Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose) are used to create a way to identify and anticipate motives. All motives contain and need the elements of the pentad of  the five terms.

Big Ideas

Traditionally we use philosophy or psychology to identify motives. But Burke makes it easy for us to skip the long process of Shoepenhauer’s reduction of terms/psychologies to identify best methodology for identifying motives.

For example, Naturalistic philosophies treat experience in terms of agent and scene interacting but it skips the other three elements that identify motives. Behavioralism treats all conduct as a response/ scene. It reduces all 5 terms to one term, therefor it is skipping steps.

Our reality is shaped by these examples of skipping over steps to identify motives and the rhetorical situation. Which maybe why Burke was compelled to provide us with his deep thoughts on how we are to identify motives.

Burke says that one of these philosophies do not contain the system to identify, but all of them together do.

Materialism: Scene, Idealism-Agent, Pragmatism-Agency, Mysticism-Purpose, Realism-Act.
Questions

How is knowledge possible?

How do we identify purpose?

How do we identify paradox?

Terms

Nominalism (8)

Panspernia (?)

Pragmatism (7)

Rationalism (7)

Mysticism (6)