1 COMPOSITION & RHETORIC RHETORIC THE ART OF WRITING DAVID TERÁN 12 OCT 2022 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS General foreward………………………………………………………………………….. 3 Writing sample one…………………………………………………………………….. 4 Writing sample two ……………………………..…………………………………….. 9 Writing sample three……………………………………………………..………….. 12 Prewriting sample……………………………………………………………………….. 20 Annotated Critical Reading Sample…………………………………….. 21 3 General Foreward The experience of writing these texts has been a constant learning process. The first essay of rhetorical analysis, I liked writing it because analyzing the article from a communication point of view and persuasive tools made me think about the variety of techniques that exist to formulate a writing and that this comes to convince the reader. On the other hand, the second written work was written in a fluent way thanks to the pre-writing I did, which helped me to clarify my ideas for the argumentative paragraph. The argumentative essay, I did it step by step reading again the material of the class, even though I had experience writing essays, it was difficult for me to write because writing is not my strong point. In the final version of my paper 1, I followed the recommendations of the professor and my partner by fixing the format of the document and adapting it more to the MLA class format and showing a better analysis of the article detailing the use of the persuasive tools used by the author. In the same way, I corrected written work 2, improving points related to the structure of the argumentative paragraph, highlighting ideas and basing the arguments on evidence, and improving the recommendations of MLA formatting, citations and spelling. Finally, I corrected written work 3, strengthening the weakest points which were grammar, spelling and formatting. For the correction I rewrote the most complex sentences that could not be understood in a simple way and I rewrote them in an easier way to be understood by the audience, also I fixed the integrated citations and the works cited section. All the papers were re-read and corrected based on the comments of my correction partner and professor for a better adaptation to the requirements of the class. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrGUw5wAGVc&ab_channel=97_T RIP 4 Writing sample one Luis David Terán Cotacachi Enrique Wong Writing and Rhetoric 21 sep 2022 Rhetorical Analysis of “The poetry of digital life” By Michael Hessel-Mial Nowadays, poetry has adapted to technology and a new form of poetic expression called memes has been created. In this digital era, memes have become a new type of simple and viral form of language. Moreover, memes do not lose their essence and like their roots have the ability to convey different emotions and multiple meanings depending on the point of view of the audience. In the article, HesselMIal analyzes memes in relation to the possibilities and resources that memes offer to creators and audiences. The author makes use of bases argued by researchers, academics, studies, and his own experience to show how memes are the evolution of the art of traditional poetry and they are free for all. He uses an academic tone but with informal traits at times when he tells from a personal experience to connect and convince the reader. Both tones are understandable to the audience without using complex terms that may confuse the reader and using metaphors to attract the reader's 5 curiosity. He also adds in his article questions about memes and their great reach in all aspects of expression, popular cultures and collective understanding arguing his words in data, studies, and authors. In the introduction of the article, Hessel-Mial analyzes poetry from its beginnings to its current evolution of digital poetry in which he supports his arguments by relying on authors that boost the author's credibility and the main idea he has about memes. In the final part of his introductions the author makes use of a metaphor that says the following, " [p]oetry's origin in the universal act of song suggests its rhythms never stray too far from the heart, its beat and its passion[s]" this metaphor impacts on the viewer as a subtle way of understanding what of poetry is, its forms of expression and collective understanding. In the next part of the article, Hessel-Mial addresses the issue of macros. He identifies the words as voice and the image as the form he gives to the superimposed text. The title “[i]n some macros, words articulate a speaking voice and the image shapes the utterance”. Macro means an image that circulates on the Internet and may or may not be superimposed by text. For this part of the article is plausible, understandable, clears and direct for the audience to understand that it will talk about the relevance of macros in the digital world as a form of expression and collective understanding. 6 It is observed that the author makes use of arguments based on scholars for greater credibility and impact on the reader, "[...] In an unpublished talk, scholar Samantha Shorey pointed out that selfies express the personal without being restricted to the person in the picture" (Hessel-Mial). Giving the reader to understand that the image resulting from a selfie reflects much of the personal ambit of the person and not the specific person. The author uses this strategy to elevate his ethical appeal and raise his credibility by relying on other academics and emotional appeal by relating the reflection of shared understanding that a selfie generates when it is published. In the final part of the text the author finishes arguing his idea by relying on the scholar Marshall Mcluhan to conclude that "[o]ur senses and our language are reconfigured" (Hessel-Mial). In this part, the author makes a good strategy by relying on a quote that reflects his main idea, pointing out that language is set to be reconfigured and the senses adapt. In the next section of the article, "[t]hevisual lyricality of image macros adheres to anything taken with one's own camera. Where stock photos are as alien as tarot-deck illustrations, selfies invite us to feel alongside the creator" the author discusses the importance of macros and the revitalization of people in digital media. In addition, the author adds emotional appeals reflecting the experience of social reform in digital media and its impact on people's relationships, behaviors, and actions. Again, Hessel-Mial uses authors to define a 7 digital era in which he points out "[...] Pitchfork aptly named 2015 the year of the "internet hangover". With this strategy the author tries to impart an idea to the public that explains the feeling of jumping into a digital environment with many possibilities but with a risk of it falling apart quickly. In concluding the last part of the article, Hessel-Mial offers his final arguments by making emotional appeals, recalling a past era in which he points out nostalgia. The author comments, "I have a nostalgia for my own leap into digital life, it is not because 2012 was the end-all of art and expression but because it was a utopian moment, fleeting but leaving a permanent impression of the dream of collective life". With this strategies the author aims to relate emotionally with the reader and share the same feeling in the form of nostalgia and the whole article is understood from the emotion and feelings caused by seeing and feeling the evolution of poetry in the digital era. 8 Work Cited Hessel-Mial Michael. “The poetry of digital life” Real life magazine. 13 October 2016. reallifemag.com/the-poetry-of-digital-life/ Accessed 21 august 2022 9 Writing sample two Luis David Terán Cotacachi Enrique Wong Writing and Rhetoric 26/09/2022 Summary of "The Poetry of Digital Life". by Michael Hessel-Mia The Real Life Magazine writer Michael Hessel-Mia, in his article "The Poetry of Digital Life" discusses the evolution of traditional poetry into the digital age as a new form of language and expression conveyed through memes. In his article, he states that the advent of memes has transformed the way people communicate, as memes offer particular characteristics that convey messages, emotions, feelings and interpretation of individual and collective meanings. Hessel comments that "[w]hen image macros circulate widely online as memes, augmented with new words and sometimes re-edited, they accrue unexpected, spontaneous, collective meanings. They become poetry - poetry for the web” He points out that memes can be edited by the receiver which offers memes a wide variety of interpretations and meanings to convey a collective emotion and understanding. He also identifies that, for the moment, memes are the 10 main form of communication because of their speed and effectiveness in conveying a message or emotion. According to Hessel, "[t]he development of new media forms brings forth new forms of vernacular expression and new modes of poetry along with them." However, Hessel explains that this poetry can also only be made up of a single image that is individually perceived as a new form of language. He also realizes that macros offer users multiple communication tools with the ability to offer the user to immerse themselves into the space and understanding of the content creator in order to provide mutual understanding and share a collective meaning in which each user has a feeling that identifies them with the other users, thus generating this new form of digital poetry that has the ability to transmit all kinds of messages and go viral in a matter of minutes, as users immediately receive the macros to create common meanings. Finally Hessel concludes that traditional poetry despite having been left in the past by the development of technology in this digital era, its artistic legacy as a language with the ability to convey feelings and thoughts still stands today as a new form of modern language that was and remains accessible to all users who through this contemporary communication tool seek to make their macros and memes to convey their feelings and messages with total freedom to express and convey their emotions and thoughts through the creation and circulation of memes all over the internet. 11 Work Cited Hessel-Mial Michael. “The poetry of digital life” Real life magazine. 13 October 2016. reallifemag.com/the-poetry-of-digital-life/ Accessed 26 August 2022 . 12 Writing sample three Luis David Terán Cotacachi Enrique Wong Writing and Rhetoric 03/10/2022 Argumentative Essay “Memes are here to help us” by David Terán Nowadays technology and digital media have evolved over the years, offering people the ability to communicate in new ways. Memes have gained strength in the last decade for their ease of creation and dissemination that results in a simple, massive, and instantaneous form of language worldwide. Memes have become one of the most common forms of communication today, which choose to go beyond traditional language by offering the creator and receiver of the meme the ability to create and share a common meaning encompassing ideas, feelings, messages and emotions. It also offers the creator and the audience the chance promote messages with the ability to create great impact on society in relation to struggles and social causes that promote the participation of people to achieve a goal for the benefit of society. Although the incursion and viralization of memes in this 13 digital era was with the purpose of entertainment and humor since in some cases they do not usually provide something really relevant to society other than to entertain, too often nowadays memes have evolved to become a new form of language totally new with the ability to create and disseminate clear and concise messages so that the public can understand and create an interpretation with a collective meaning that can sometimes be used as a tool for social struggle. The truth is that memes have arrived to society as a very wellincorporated communication tool in this era of globalization. Braham states, "[m]emes are simple ways of sharing yourself, without having to do too much work—perfect for making a self-deprecating joke or responding to political rants online. However, there are different opinions that define memes as not very effective as a communication tool due to their simplicity and ease of writing. On another note, memes are simply more digestibl[e]”. We can access this type of communication with the use of free applications offered by mobile devices with internet access. On the internet where memes are generated and shared with an impressive speed in which each creator has the ability to generate a meme with total freedom of expression and with the benefit that hundreds of thousands of people will be able to observe it massively of different points and geographical locations around the world. Because in addition to all the benefits mentioned above, they offer the public an easy and simple understanding, since being a means of mass communication has a very important feature 14 that makes it easily understandable and is to put or not a superimposed text or simply spread as a macro that breaks the language barrier and can receive and decode the meme only with the personal perception you have and without any prior knowledge but your personal criterio. Therefore, memes have become one of the main forms of communication used by people worldwide due to their versatility, their particular characteristic of breaking the language barrier, and their massive reach in which a meme can be viralized worldwide in a matter of minutes. Although memes have characteristics of informal communication, they also have other effective communication mechanisms to transmit any type of message and emotion. As Thurm states, "[s]ome words name things, of course, but that’s just one of an incalculable number of things you can do with words. Memes are not deposits of exclusionary knowledge and archaic references — at least, they’re not just that. They don’t just name things; they also do the work of creating and collapsing contexts. They don’t reproduce a world but bring one into bein[g]”. However, this new form of language has opened up a wide variety of forms of expression that can be conveyed through memes. Hessel states, "[r]eforming the social online naturally reverberated through IRL as well. Just as online social networks have reshaped art and poetry, they have also reshaped our relationships and modes of performance[…]”. As Hessel-Mial explains, reality has been influenced by the digital space through the 15 dissemination of collective messages and ideas that encourage social participation in real life and in digital life. The memes that circulate daily on the Internet have need a relationship between the mutual understanding between sender and receiver. Since the creator has the ability to create a meme from scratch based on the message he wants to spread, the feeling, the tone, the emotions and the effect he intends to have on the audience. Often meme creators make use of emotional appeals to help them identify more with the audience for greater acceptance, as this guides the meme to a collective understanding which ultimately leads to the creation of a common meaning or interpretation by the audience. Here comes into debate whether the messages conveyed by memes are always useful to connect and identify the audience or there are cases in which a misinterpretation of a meme can generate a meaning opposite to what the issuer intended to convey. This offers recipients the ability to identify with the meme and share the emotion and sentiment that the meme's sender intended to convey. Thus, memes offer a wide range of possibilities before an immense field in which any individual can create a meme that represents and shares a message with which the rest of the people can feel identified by interpreting and decoding it to achieve collective meaning that represents the position of the meme sender and the audience who receives it. 16 Although there is criticism of memes by supporters who believe that memes are not a formal communication channel whats is correct to use in cases of confusion or misinterpretation of the message, nowadays, citizen participation in favor of social causes of unfavorable situations that occur daily in the world has often become a struggle that concerns all societies in the world because memes have the ability to be a mass communication and dissemination tool capable of appealing to emotions and arguments that encourage participation in favor of a social cause. Memes have a characteristic background related to traditional language and and from its beginning its primary function was the ability to convey a message with which to share an idea or a comment among members of the same society to reach and fulfill a common goal. This is reflected since the beginning of mankind in its quest to develop and achieve new goals together with other individuals, they had to support each other by exchanging information and ideas to progress and evolve as a species. One of the great attributes that memes currently have is the importance that they have for people in relation to the dissemination of relevant messages for the society that them to promote social participation in favor of a cause and social struggle that is harming a specific sector or community with the sole purpose of making a social change that is empathized and supported by citizens in order to change the reality of countless social, political, economic inequalities, among others. This new form of language gives society the possibility of making changes 17 in society through communities in favor that can be generated through a message that transmits a meme and the impact it has on people to conclude with a social participation as a whole, therefore memes have also become a tool for social struggle with which you can promote support for social causes in order to make a highly relevant change in society. In conclusion, memes have arrived in society in an unexpected way with a beginning focused on humor and entertainment shared among internet users, digital platforms, and social networks. The proliferation of memes today have offered people multiple benefits according to the current needs of communication, which today has its relevance in the ease, simplicity of use, and understanding that this gives users who daily connect through the internet to communicate with other users who are on digital platforms. In addition, memes have gradually evolved into a new form of language that anyone can use and in which each user has the ability to create and disseminate one from scratch that can have a high impact on the public, thanks to the possibility that memes offer people to convey feelings and emotions linked to a message that gives meaning to the meme in order to generate among the audience a meaning and collective interpretation that brings the audience and the creator of the meme closer. In summary, memes have provided society with a variety of tools in relation to the forms of communication that we use to 18 transmit messages and ideas between people to the point of becoming a tool with which each person can spread their own messages and emotions through a meme that can generate a great impact within society and change unfair realities that exist in day to day in the reality in which the world is immersed. 19 Works Cited Braham, Emma. “Memes of comunication”. Mediablaze. 14 November 2019. mediablaze.com/insights/memes-of-communication Accessed 01 October 2022 Hessel-Mial, Michael. “The poetry of digital life”. Real life magazine. 13 October 2016. reallifemag.com/how-to-do-things-with-memes/ Accessed 01 October 2022 Thurm, Eric. “How to Do Things With Memes”. Real life magazine. 16 January 2018. reallifemag.com/the-poetry-of-digital-life/ Accessed 01 October 2022 Photo of Buzzlight year and Woody in the Toy Story movie “Know your meme”. 10 june 2010. . knowyourmeme.com/memes/x-x-everywhere Accessed 01 October 2022 20 Prewriting Sample Luis David Terán Cotacachi Enrique Wong Writing and Rhetoric 01/10/2022 Pre-Writing • Emphasize the importance of memes in the digital era as a simple and easy to understand means of communication for the public. • important to include and take into account the importance of the evolution of language to what we know as memes. • Emphasize the characteristics of memes as a form of expression to convey emotions and feelings to the audience. • Include ideas that relate the importance of the digital world to the physical world and the advantages that memes offer. • Give opposing points of view, but without asserting that it is true and then refute the argument with quotations. • Include ideas of the relevance of memes in the collective identification of people with the meme and its creation of common meaning that encompasses a collective of individuals who feel closely related to the memes. • Include the most relevant details of memes today as a tool for social change and dissemination of messages in favor of the fight against inequality and social injustice. 21 Annotated Critical Reading Sample Luis David Terán Cotacachi Enrique Wong Writing and Rethoric 03/10/2022 How to Do Things With Memes Galaxy-braining the galaxy brain meme Eric Thurm January 16, 2018 Image: Headspace by Mike Winkelmann. Courtesy the artist. “What does your tweet mean?” This is one of the more chilling messages a person can receive, especially if they already feel as though they are too online. Though anybody who carries a phone with them is, in a sense, always online, only some identify with that as an identity — largely because we’re hyperconscious of how much time we spent on platforms like Twitter. So the question implies that maybe you’ve gone beyond simply using the internet, and are now just spewing nonsense. The best brains of a generation destroyed by memes, exploding, cosmic, galactic. When “being online” feels like “being incomprehensible,” it can seem like a social and emotional dead end, a cul-de-sac with no other Comentado [DT1]: This image visually guides the reader and gives an idea in the form of an analogy of how people have a lot of things, thoughts, emotions, among other Comentado [DT2]: It uses a clear and concise language that invites you to read about the topic 22 houses in sight. No wonder people increasingly feel the itch to leave the neighborhood altogether, and consciously shut out online. When should one consider this change? I was asked the question when I tweeted the following image: To “get” this joke, one must know the context of “corn cob” and “binch” — respectively, a reference to a @dril tweet used to suggest that someone is trying too hard not to lose an argument, and a mocking variant on “bitch” developed to get around Twitter’s content filters. You must also have seen the specific tweet in which pundit John Stoehr, facing a veritable Space Jam’s worth of dunks, blithely asked about the meaning of both terms. And you must have seen the episode of Game of Thrones from which the screen cap is taken, in which the schemy character Littlefinger realizes he has been tricked into his own execution. Comentado [DT3]: In this part of the text, the author uses a strategy (phatos). He makes the reader feel identified with his words. Comentado [DT4]: The author gives examples to give a better context of what he argues in his paragraph, thanks to this relation of an everyday example the author can get closer to the reader. When “being online” feels like “being incomprehensible,” it can seem like a cul-de-sac with no other houses in sight This is a high threshold to get a joke. And even if you get it, the joke may not be that funny to you. In a sense, the confluence of hyperspecific prerequisites to understanding the joke is the joke. In the same way a sitcom gag relies on a set of conventions for how people act and conversations unfold, online jokes often rely on combining references in an order that surprises. But are such jokes worth the trouble? Given that online speech — including allusive, self-referential memes — is shaped by corporate platforms for profit and has contributed in open and obvious ways to our current societal turmoil, might there be some intrinsic benefit to construing oneself as a person who isn’t online, who steps away from all of it and implicitly (or explicitly) brags about how little they know? Put another way: Is being “extremely online” — that is, being invested in maintaining a fluency in online tropes — inherently toxic? Comentado [DT5]: The author questions whether it is worth using memes as jokes, to always be connected and emphasizes to promote these questions in the reader. 23 There are many reasons a person can wind up being extremely online. It could be that they’re antisocial, a troll, or simply like showing off their knowledge. (This is annoying, but not necessarily worse than the other million ways a person can be annoying.) Or it could be that, like many people in gig-based creative fields, they feel a crushing obligation to self-promote or make industry connections. Or it could simply be that they have found a community online. In any case, very online people find themselves entering a carnival of language where different games, booths, and attractions beckon, each with their own chaotic energy. Comentado [DT6]: The author shows different points of view, and does not favor one or the other, he simply questions the benefit or harm caused by this extremely online. How to make sense of this sensory overload? If we are going to “be” online, how should we do it? Turning the cacophony of online discourse into intelligible sound is a task well suited to the work done by ordinary-language philosophy, a branch of thought that developed from the late work of 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It starts from the premise that speech — written or spoken, images and memes — does something rather than represents something. In his book How to Do Things With Words, ordinary language philosopher J.L. Austin offers the example of a wedding: When someone says “I do,” they aren’t describing something about the world, they’re changing something about their lives. The same is true of promising, daring, and retweeting. Some words name things, of course, but that’s just one of an incalculable number of things you can do with words. Memes are not deposits of exclusionary knowledge and archaic references — at least, they’re not just that. They don’t just name things; they also do the work of creating and collapsing contexts. They don’t reproduce a world but bring one into being. If the meaning of the word comes from the way it is deployed rather than some ineluctable “truth” about the world it is supposed to capture, then the relevant question is not what does this word mean, but what does this word do here? What is its use? This approach allows us to more effectively examine important questions, like “What is binch?” Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, itself a meme-like series of hard-to-parse prose poems, is littered with concepts equally difficult for newcomers to grasp. What does Wittgenstein mean by “languagegame” or “family resemblance”? What is to be “corn cobbed”? In Comentado [DT7]: In this part the author makes use of analogies to give a better understanding of what he explains about how memes open up and create worlds. 24 particular contexts, even familiar words can suddenly seem meaningless, or worse, give us the wrong idea. In Revolution of the Ordinary, Norwegian philosopher Toril Moi gives the example of Spanish bullfighting jargon, in which ordinary Spanish words are repurposed to indicate minute bullfighting nuances. To translate such language, a Spanish to English dictionary is of no help — you have to be imbricated in the technical use of the language. The same might be said of Know Your Meme, or Urban Dictionary, or overly serious essays explaining memes at-length. A meme — an endlessly replicable joke format that becomes repeated to the point where it loses any original meaning outside of the repetition itself — is a condensed form of “use” as ordinary-language philosophers understand it. Moi describes use as “a practice grounded on nothing” and whether you love or hate Chewbacca mom, that’s a rather apt description of her existence. “Dictionaries struggle to keep up with use, not the other way around,” Moi writes, a sentiment that will ring true to anyone who has had to read a story about a dictionary declaring some months-old piece of internet slang the “word of the year.” These words and phrases often have legible uses before they are pressed into service by different online communities. They simply acquire new ones — or, it might make more sense to say, the same set of letters becomes a different word, a different move in the game. But the point here is not to say that being up on “online” requires traveling to some alternate world and learning totally new norms distinct from those of “real” conversation. It’s that online conversation is like all conversation, which consists of what Wittgenstein calls language-games. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein gives the following examples of language-games: reporting an event, speculating about an event, forming and testing a hypothesis, making up a story, reading it, play-acting, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, translating, asking, and thanking. Here are some additional examples: dunking on someone, signal boosting, virtue signaling, shitposting, pulling receipts, reading someone for filth. Many of these language-games originate in gay or black American vernacular, which adds “appropriating” to the list of games already being played. And while these language-games originate online they can also be played in offline spaces, as anyone who has interacted in the flesh with friends they connected with online, laughed at the opening strains of “Never Gonna Give You Up” in a bar, or wordlessly directed a friend’s attention to an image on their phone will know. Comentado [DT8]: It presents arguments based on academics but at the same time asks questions that make the reader wonder. Comentado [DT9]: At this point of the text, he emphasizes how memes, due to so many reproductions, come to have another meaning than the original and how words can acquire new meanings. 25 “Online,” then, is more a cluster of related language-games than a single overarching one capable of being catalogued. In fact, the use of the word online as a noun makes fun of the idea that it could possibly be one mode of speech or one place you could visit. I use the phrase “extremely online,” but even this will mean something only to a segment of people who spend a lot of time using specific online platforms in specific ways. But you don’t have to recognize yourself in the term to be playing these language-games. To learn a language-game, even as an observer, is an ongoing matter of understanding specifics, complexities, and nuances. It requires, Wittgenstein insists, a “training of our attention as much as of our vocabulary and style.” For better or worse, being extremely online is a form of this training. It is to be attentive to the interplay of these different language-games, to put in the time to start to understand how they are played, and to learn how to speak to other people in different contexts. Like it or not, we’re not always there when the internet calls, but we’re always online. Comentado [DT10]: The author explains how being online is entertainment just by being online and how to learn a new language online you must be thorough and observant. Being extremely online means being sensitive to these languagegames in action and knowing how to effectively spoil them It’s possible to be good at being extremely online, and it’s possible to be bad at it. It’s possible to suffer unhealthy side effects from being extremely online (as many, many people will tell you), but it’s also possible that it could blend seamlessly with the rest of your life. This will largely depend on other, individual factors about your life beyond the internet. As Wittgenstein says, “explanations come to an end somewhere.” What, then, does it mean to “get” a meme? And why should it embarrass anyone? Consider the internet language-game of deploying the word nice in response to any possible appearance of the number 69. (Nice.) A practice that began as an intentionally buffoonish reference to the existence of the sex number, replying to 69 with “nice” has become almost totally divorced from the original joke or sexual context of the number, to the point where it’s as conventional as blessing someone when they sneeze — a practice with religious roots that is now simply part of standard etiquette. As Wittgenstein puts it, “If I have exhausted Comentado [DT11]: The author supports his argument by quoting academics and continues with his idea 26 the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” (Nice.) That explanation, however, probably did nothing to make the practice at all funny to someone who doesn’t already get it and enjoy it. Trying to explain why something is funny often drains a joke of all comedic value; on the internet, where something can strike thousands of people as funny one minute and painfully trite the next, trying to force explanations is lethal. Is a meme simply a fad, where instead of carrying around pet rocks or going glamping, we feel giddily seized by the thought of staring at someone’s shoes and asking, “What are those?” In many cases, the context of who is using a meme changes the landscape for other people interested in using it — consider how quickly a meme dies when a branded account starts deploying it or, God forbid, your parents. Being extremely online is a willingness to speed up this process of churn, to tear through all of the possible permutations of one game in order to exhaust it and move on to the next one. Understanding the blur between the way words are used in highly specific online language-games and the way they’re mistakenly deployed by dupes has also become crucially important political work. “Astute” political commentators are fond of observing that polarization has created “different realities” based on the demands of whatever tribe you happen to belong to. But it’s not that hyperpartisanship has made people “disregard” facts — language never had the ability to contain facts of the kind your dad’s friends publicly mourn in Facebook posts. This, specifically, is what the “battlefield of ideas” implies: the fight over which use of certain phrases will come to dominate. Terms like “identity politics,” “intersectionality,” “political correctness,” and “neoliberalism” all originated in the academy with specific uses, articulating particular frames for social conditions and in turn suggesting potential political responses. But these terms have been repeatedly appropriated, watered down, and deliberately stripped of their efficacy by right-wing sophists and terrified white liberals, who have pressed them into service as often-sarcastic, intentionally obfuscating scare words, where the original use has been drowned in the fear and confusion the word is intended to provoke. The academic who insists on the “real” meaning of these terms may be technically right, in a sense — but they are also missing the point. Being Comentado [DT12]: The author convinces the audience by giving clear and specific examples that anyone can identify with and thus follow his argument and compare how the term 69 in the past was related to something sexual and nowadays it is something very common to say without any kind of prejudice 27 extremely online means being sensitive to these language-games in action and knowing how to effectively spoil them. Comentado [DT13]: Really interesting, the author points out how being extremely online affects the common language and can have interpretations oriented to the use that is made of it online Consider the phrase “free speech,” which ostensibly implies some sort of inalienable right to expression but has been manipulated until its primary deployment in certain contexts is to express fear of and belittle college students. When it comes to understanding what “free speech” means to those getting marching orders from white supremacist message boards, it won’t do to insist that that term “really” means this or that, and that they are misusing it — that is simply willful ignorance about what is actually happening. That it’s possible to ignore your phone for an hour and come back to a wildly transformed landscape of expression is a testament to how easy it is to find oneself adrift Imprecision abounds in public dialogue, but it’s not quite right to say language is “misused” by those with whom we disagree. Instead, we must understand how they are using words and expose the repellent belief system they are attempting to mask or launder. We must invest our energy not in loudly insisting that everyone stop getting it wrong and use “correct” definitions, as if that will be inherently binding to everyone who uses language. As Moi argues, “The more adept I am at ferreting out your hidden ideological agenda, the better I demonstrate my grasp of the finest nuances of your way of speaking. The more astute my critique, the better it demonstrates that we share both the words and the worlds we are fighting over.” The closer words are shared and the deeper they are held, the harder it becomes for their users to back away from the things they are doing when they speak. Applied to the nonsense rampant in the public sphere, Moi’s project feels like a breath of fresh air. To internalize an ordinary-language philosophy approach is to lose interest in much of what passes for discourse — the constant insistence on speaking as I speak, doing as I do, memeing as I meme. Being online, and understanding the ways that we’re all constantly online whether we want to be or not, opens us to the winds of change and makes it difficult, maybe impossible, to impose a “correct” meaning on the words and phrases we deploy. You can only try to make your usage more compelling, more immediate to others, all while remaining opening to the ebb and flow — what Moi describes as the “constant transformation” of language. Comentado [DT14]: He argues his paragraph by quoting more academics, his main idea being that words will not have a common meaning for all people who may interpret them differently. Comentado [DT15]: The author uses LOGOS, to argue his guided paragraph with a quote from an academic and his project to argue his idea that the "correct" use of words is not something you can do, but you can try to get the best words to convince. 28 The mere fact that it’s possible to ignore your phone for an hour and come back to a wildly transformed landscape of expression is a testament to how quickly language-games can move without us, how easy it is to find oneself adrift. But that doesn’t mean we should split memeified online language off from “real” language, or that offline speech should be taken as an effectively stabilizing counterpart to the fluidity of online speech. To think of the world without online language is to think of it without the letter “e” — you certainly could live that way but it wouldn’t be easy to navigate, and at the very least, you would be denying yourself a clear view of things. We must instead put the work in everywhere to understand how language use is changing and how we can participate in that process, which is precisely the use of one of my favorite memes: the expanding brain. Comentado [DT16]: This part argues how language is constantly changing and how people should be involved in this process. Like many instances of the meme, this one is used to mock a tendency to over-intellectualize online. In the spirit of ordinarylanguage philosophy, though, it’s worth asking what else the meme can do. Where it originally was about comic escalation into absurdity (“whom’st”), the best uses of the expanding-brain meme make real arguments — albeit with a form of distance. The existence of online jokes that require an extraordinary level of context to grasp trains us to re-consider what we think is obvious The meme typically represents the progression from a basic, uncomplicated opinion — this TV show is good, I like this film, etc. — through an increasingly complex series of ideas about the subject and then back to a gut-level, earnest, simple reaction, as in this example about following artists in social media. But all the components of the expanding-brain meme can be (and often are) true at once. This allows it to, for instance, condense a reasonably sophisticated criticism of American capitalism into a single image. And it accommodates problematic affinities: Its format corresponds to how it can be true that, say, the Indiana Jones franchise is frequently racist and proud of its colonialist bent and that watching Harrison Ford blow stuff up and shoot Nazis can be pleasurable. It’s not a coincidence that a frequent target of this meme is the academization of discourse around gender and sexuality. It’s a sort of hero’s journey through language and the mind, from an initial Comentado [DT17]: This part is interesting because it covers memes as a form of language that starts from the basics and follows a process where it gradually becomes more complex, showing that memes can have important connotations within important aspects of society. 29 unmooring from the way we have been raised and trained see the world, through a dizzying array of ways of thinking about it that can be useful, clarifying, and/or nonsensical, and finally back again, transformed and capable of changing the world. The penultimate brain — the wokest, most byzantine, most self-assured brain — is unable to grapple with this infinite texture, the way many things can be true at once, that any given slab of language is going to grasp at best a piece of the reality. But this doesn’t mean we should double down on returning to the earliest world of single, unitary “truth,” one that somehow existed before some mysterious force sent us into a “post-truth” world. There was never any “truth” like that to begin with, at least not in the way its most strenuous defenders think. Instead, moving through what we perceive as layers of description allows us to return to the original context, armed with firmer and more clear-sighted knowledge. This path may seem circuitous, but it puts us in a better position to see and to do things with our words. Similar meme formats can act as funnels for the play of contexts, the texture we must grasp if we want to learn anything. They allow us to see the world not as an inflexible product of laws that can be discovered by careful reading and observation but as a series of intersecting clouds and constellations, what Wittgenstein might refer to as “family resemblances.” The existence of online jokes that require an extraordinary level of context to grasp continually trains us to pay attention to the way that context is demanded even in using what might appear to be commonplace language, forcing us to consider what we think is obvious and what is only obvious to us — and that what might seem obvious might really be totally obscure. Playing language-games that originate online has many effects, but playing with an openness to everything people attempt in those games makes it difficult to hold on to only one of those pictures, only one brain, freeing us to begin thinking about how no thinking occurs in isolation. It’s okay that not everything conforms to a given idea of what it’s supposed to be, even if that rule-of-thumb definition has “worked” for most cases in the past — especially because what “works” is often “common sense” used to prop up systems of oppression and inequality. We simply have to be willing to admit that each case might, in large part, be its own case. Comentado [DT18]: The author invites the reader to be more self-critical and to know that the way to arrive at the original meaning is not an easy task, but it can be achieved by analyzing everything through layers of description. The author uses Ethos, since from its credibility he argues the paragraph 30 If it seems dubious to claim that memes as a form do important philosophical work and do it better than many who are paid to produce long-form opinions, consider the source: Wittgenstein, who allegedly said that “a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” At the outset of Philosophical Investigations, he writes that most of the problems of philosophy emerged because “a picture held us captive.” He could not have known another picture — a near-endless series of pictures — could free us, and that those pictures just might be stock photos of an abstracted human form moving through the cosmos, unceasingly seeking enlightenment. Comentado [DT19]: The author ends his article by emphasizing the importance of memes that goes beyond entertainment. And he argues that memes have contributed a lot to society and how they also have a philosophical aspect. The author continues to make use of LOGOS, supported by an academic. 31 THANK YOU DAVID TERÁN 12 OCT 2022
