Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 11/24/2009 09:10 PM: > I am not at all sure what it means to have my rhetoric rejected. My facts, > yes; my logic, sure. But my RHETORIC?
Rhetoric is the language we build up around and/or to explain facts. Logic is merely a formal type of rhetoric. The implicit persuasive attempts in what you said earlier about a confusion of trust, is rhetoric, not fact (or logic). I reject rhetoric when i can imagine other, different rhetoric built up around the same facts. I think it would be trivially easy to build up a different structure of language around the facts you (and MacLuhan(?)) are building yours around. My rhetoric is that we need not extend, ham-handedly, the coarse trust relationships wielded by our ancestors. Trust relationships can become articulated and more fine grained (and can also become thicker and more coarse grained) if the need arises. So, my rhetoric is that we haven't been _forced_ into more associations. We've actually _grown_ more associative power in the form of an extended physiology. Prior to technologies like sophisticated language, the telegraph, air travel, cell phones, and facebook, our "dunbar number" may well have been limited to the size of our neocortex. Nowadays, though, we've outsourced part of our neocortex to the tools around us and, hence, have a much larger "dunbar number". After society collapses again, trust will coarsen. But for now, it's very fine-grained and includes a bushy extension into Facebook "[un]friending". Those of us who know how to use the technology have more associative power than those of us who don't. Celebrity is NOT, then a confusion between "village" trust and "world" trust. It's a mechanism for categorizing the larger population of people with which we associate. E.g. Do you like Country & Western music? No? You don't LUUUV Garth Brooks!?!? OK then, that helps me determine where you lie in my (complex) trust matrix. Of course, by saying it this way, I make it very clear that you are equally capable and justified in rejecting my rhetoric, because there are no facts in the rhetoric itself. The rhetoric is built up around the facts. And you don't have to reject the facts in order to reject the rhetoric. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
