Technology and Culture

In the latter half of the 1990s the digital
image became prevalent, easy to manipulate, and consequently, easy to recontextualize,
meaning that now just about any image is available to any computer user for any occasion. To use Bolter's terminology, the "interpenetration" of textual and pictorial space in digital environments, especially on the Web, has increased
markedly, so that the predominance of the digital image now rivals that of the digital word. Indeed, a number of thinkers have noted the digital image's ascendancy in communicating
information via the computer. But how are we to think about, to analyze the rhetorical dimensions of these images? This essay focuses on using classical rhetoric 'as a way of
thinking about the persuasive power of computer-based images.

There are numerous avenues for engaging in electronic discussion. The classroom practice I shall describe below could be done on the Internet via environments known as MOO's or MUD's, which are accessible to anyone via 'virtual classrooms' on the Internet (one I have used, because it is big, and easy to access, is the University of Texas Internet site called Diversity University). In my classes I was not involved in distance learning, and so was not seeking a surrogate for oral discussion, but a means of enhancing it. Hence, rather than using an Internet site, I used an ENFI program installed on our Local Area Network (LAN), and I brought my students to the computer lab for some of our discussions of literature.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) tends to erase power structures because such communication somehow undermines or escapes discursive limits. Online discussions seem to promote rhetorical experimentation on the part of the participants. Finding a way to explain disparities between electronic discussion and oral discussion has proven difficult. Those in composition studies have tried to theorize CMC by reference to postmodern theory, but another form of theory that might help in the investigation of the nature of online communities derives from cybernetics and from information theory. Cybernetics' wider implications have led to the advent of a second-order cybernetics or systems theory--self-organizing, self-making, or autopoietic. Reflexivity provides an implicit reason for the difficulty of controlling electronic class discussion. Third wave cybernetics can be used in conjunction with social applications of systems theory to think about what happens when machines, teachers, and students are all "spliced" into one grand system. It seems that traditional approaches to class discussion with the instructor controlling the flow and order make it natural for teachers to view electronic communities as the early cyberneticists did, as allopoietic mechanisms whose goals can be set and observed. Though control of a system with multiple, dynamic elements may be somewhat difficult, a lack of control does not, in terms of systems theory, preclude an instructor's valuable involvement in an online community.

In his essay "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," J. Hillis Miller defines the goal of Geoffrey Hartman's writings as representative of what Miller sees as the mission of any deconstructive exploration. Such analysis exists, he says, "for the sake of an interrogation of the logos, ...

Section Four, "Recursive Use of ENFI Transcripts Helps Students Write about Literature," gives specific, useful suggestions about how to make online discussions an effective component of a literature class. The article also offers a short list of particular chat software features essential for good discussion.

In his article "Do Medieval and Renaissance Androids Presage the Posthuman?" Kevin LaGrandeur analyzes the relationships between literary images of artificial humans associated with medieval alchemists and alchemy, their modified reemergence in the Renaissance, and how such androids may forecast the idea of a posthuman subjectivity that is connected with their present-day descendents. For example, the talking brass heads in Robert Greene's two Renaissance plays, The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Alphonsus, Prince of Aragon have their roots in Arabic sources, and the former derives specifically from legends concerning the thirteenth-century alchemist and philosopher Roger Bacon. These early instances of the artificial anthropoid also anticipate, in a broad sense, the kinds of philosophical issues regarding subjectivity that cyborgs bring up for our "posthuman" society. For instance, the literature of the earlier era represents a fear that humans will be diminished-all of the creators in the fictional literature examined are in danger of losing control of their creations, and thus of having their agency called into dispute.

There are numerous indications in his own writing that Aristotle may not have been completely convinced of his own arguments in support of slavery.  One example is the fact that, in his _Politics_, he ponders the possibility of creating artificial slaves, such as looms that would operate themselves.  It is clear upon careful reading that he ponders this because of the dangers that human slaves present.  But, besides this, there is also his ambivalence about the propriety of enslaving certain classes of people, and his difficulty explaining how some humans can be considered “natural” slaves.  Indeed, the very need to defend the idea that “natural slaves” exist points to qualms about his compatriots’, and perhaps about his, views of slavery.

This article surveys and analyzes the pre-industrial history of artificial humanoid servants and their historical persistence. The idea of artificial slaves—and questions about their tractability—is present not only in the literature of modern times but also extends all the way back to ancient Greek sources; and it is present in the literature and oral history of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as well. Furthermore, at each of these intervals, this idea is connected with an emotional paradox: the joy of self-enhancement is counterpoised with the anxiety of self-displacement that comes with distribution of agency. The idea of rebellious and dangerous artificial slaves is an archetype that spans Western history and persists not only in the pre-modern and modern imaginations, via stories about rebellious AI servants, but also in ancient scientific accounts and in modern systems theory, which is the basis for real AI.

(NOTE: CLICK ON LINK ABOVE FOR COMPLETE ARTICLE) ABSTRACT: Composition teachers need to pluralize their notions of what constitutes viable discourse to enrich their own rhetoric and to "listen" more effectively to students' writing, so that their notions of written discourse may come to reflect the rainbow of international influences that exist in the United States. A good first step would be to move beyond the causal, deterministic framework within which composition teachers now view student essay writing toward an "I-Thou" relationship where the student is encountered in the full freedom of her or his otherness. Instead of gazing at student discourse, seeing it as a product to be weighed, marked for what separates it from an ideal concept of "the Paper," and kept or thrown overboard, would it not be more profitable to keep the focus on the student paper-as-Thou--as the expressive extension of the self that Michel de Montaigne's model implies it is?

This book explores the creation and use of artificially made humanoid servants and servant networks by fictional and non-fictional scientists of the early modern period. Beginning with an investigation of the roots of artificial servants, humanoids, and automata from earlier times, LaGrandeur traces how these literary representations coincide with a surging interest in automata and experimentation, and how they blend with the magical science that proceeded the empirical era. These representations eerily prefigure modern robots, androids, and artificially intelligent networks, and the art that is responsible for their creation blurs the edges between magic and science in a way that resonates especially with modern notions of cybernetics. In the instances that this book considers, the idea of the artificial factotum is connected with an emotional paradox: the joy of self-enhancement is counterpoised with the anxiety of self-displacement that comes with distribution of agency. In this way, the older accounts of creating artificial slaves are accounts of modernity in the making—a modernity characterized by the project of extending the self and its powers, in which the vision of the extended self is fundamentally inseparable from the vision of an attenuated self. This book discusses the idea that fictional, artificial servants embody at once the ambitions of the scientific wizards who make them and society’s perception of the dangers of those ambitions, and represent the cultural fears triggered by independent, experimental thinkers—the type of thinkers from whom our modern cyberneticists directly descend.

As the field of Artificial Intelligence continues to make progress, there is a question of what protocols should be developed to make sure such developments are accomplished in a responsible way.  [Download paper here, see original link here: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Technology/2012/08/30/Outside-View-The-Mars-Landing-and-Artificial-Intelligence/11341346322600/]