Pittsburgh-Paris Climate Rhetoric Returns

As is now tradition in American politics, the first days of the Biden administration have brought the initial efforts at reversing Trump-era policy positions. Many of these opening salvos have to do with signaling a recommitment to acknowledging climate change. The president has issued several executive orders related to environmental concerns, and the White House website has reinstated mentions of the climate crisis. These measures have also sparked the return of Pittsburgh-Paris climate rhetoric.

Last week Ted Cruz tweeted that the Biden administration’s climate policies signaled allegiance to the citizens of Paris rather than those of Pittsburgh. In response, Pittsburghers took to social media to lambast Cruz’s pandering, and Greta Thunberg congratulated America for rejoining the “Pittsburgh Agreement.”

This discourse stems from 2017 when president Trump justified his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords by asserting his responsibility “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Trump’s invocation of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy is at odds with the city’s contemporary economy. The city reached its economic and population peak in the industrial era, and this period of the city’s history remains the age most associated with its image and identity. In the 21st century Pittsburgh sought to reinvent itself as a center of post-industrial technological innovation. The city has since attracted technology-oriented entrepreneurial investment and been a site of many smart city policies and technological innovations. Trump’s reference to Pittsburgh had less to do with the actually-existing city than with its place in U.S. urban imaginaries.

(Trump’s evocation of Pittsburgh may ultimately be the result of a speech writer’s inclination toward alliteration, a proclivity to which I am prone myself.)

Back in 2017, I absorbed Trump’s announcement of leaving the Paris accords with mixed emotions. I was visiting New York at the time, and caught the press conference live on TV in my Midtown hotel room. On the one hand, the willful aversion toward any environmental action filled me with an abiding existential dread. Yet when Trump uttered the now infamous “Pittsburgh-not-Paris” bon mot, I jumped for joy: I knew the president’s remarks would make a great anecdote for the Pittsburgh-centric dissertation I was writing.

The resurgence of the Paris-Pittsburgh kerfluffle also gives me occasion to relate my favorite personal anecdote about Pittsburgh mayor William Peduto. Peduto had positioned himself as a progressive mayor pursuing policies of technological innovation, environmental sustainability, and economic modernization throughout his mayoral tenure. His political vision for the city received global attention after Trump’s Paris accords press conference. Trump’s apparent invocation of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy prompted Peduto to distinguish the city’s modern economy from its polluted past, and to distance his own political commitments from those of the president. In a New York Times interview conducted in the wake of the president’s address Peduto promoted a range of environmental and innovation initiatives in Pittsburgh including the city’s medical centers, research universities, and local renewable energy industry.

That New York Times article also contained an off-hand aside about a neighborhood bar in Shadyside where Peduto reportedly went for a drink every day after work. A few days after the article was published I happened to be running an errand in Shadyside. When I realized that the errand would be finished shortly after 5 PM, I suggested to my partner that we have dinner in that bar so that I could verify the Times’ reporting. Sure enough, there was Peduto sitting at the bar. This must have been a Monday, because the local evening news playing on the bar TV did a story on the previous evening’s John Oliver program, which had dedicated a segment to the Paris-Pittsburgh exchange and to Peduto’s public response. From our table in the corner I watched Peduto watching news coverage of another TV show’s coverage of Peduto...it remains one of my favorite Pittsburgh memories.

Sick of Serial Killing: The Virulence of Hate in a Time of Contagion

The following reflections were originally written several years ago for a graduate seminar. I’ve decided to share these thoughts here because they seem highly resonant with the current moment. For one thing, the essay links metaphors of contagious disease with activist rhetoric deployed against public apathy and racialized violence. These connections take on a renewed relevance in the context of the massive ongoing demonstrations against police violence which are occurring amidst the COVD-19 global pandemic. Secondly, the brief essay develops the connection between virulence and hate by thinking through the polemical rhetoric of Larry Kramer’s AIDS activism. This provides another confluence with current events in light of Kramer’s death two weeks ago on May 27th.

Larry Kramer’s association with AIDS activism stems not only from the duration and determination of his involvement, but also from his impassioned rhetorical style. Erin Rand identifies Kramer’s style as polemical, and identifies four rhetorical features unique to the polemical form: alienating expressions of emotion, non-contingent assertions of truth, presumptions of shared morality, and the constitution of enemies, audiences, and publics (p. 301). Rand distinguishes Kramer’s polemical style from other uses of anger in rhetoric or public address in that Kramer does not “attempt to elicit anger from the audience, unite the audience through their shared sense of anger, or move them to action based on emotion; rather, Kramer performs his own anger at what he perceives to be the audience’s failure to behave in the way that he desires” (p. 302).

Rand cites as characteristic of Kramer’s polemics the building through a succession of factual statements that culminate in “a climactic display of fury and frustration” (p. 302).

“Hence, polemics refute dominant ideologies and modes of thinking by rejecting the primacy of reason and invoking explicitly moral claims. In polemics a moral position is not simply advanced through rhetoric, but morality actually does rhetorical work.” (p. 305)           

Similarly, West considered the function of emotion in productions of the Kramer-penned play The Normal Heart:

“To realize a future different from the past, the producers had to take steps to motivate their audiences to translate their emotions into action once they had left the show. If the play was merely cathartic and enjoyed as a terrible chapter of history, then surely they had failed.” (p.100)

“Through the explicit targeting of younger audiences and distributing Kramer’s plea for help, the producers enabled rage, anger, and outrage.” (p. 101)

Feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde also saw anger as potentially productive. According to Olson: “Lorde distinguished between anger and hatred, and she salvaged the former as potentially useful and generative” (p. 287). Lorde’s distinction between anger and hatred is developed in a quote from her remarks: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (p. 298).

In a quote from her “The Uses of Anger,” Lorde uses the metaphor of the virus to describe hatred:

“We are working in a context of oppression and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people - against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.” (emphasis added)

Other authors have connected hatred with disease. This thematic link is made, for example, in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. While the film’s characters never state the distinction between anger and hatred as explicitly as Lorde does, the film makes many associations that establish a difference between the two. The action of the film takes place in a roughly 24 hour period, during the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, New York. The temperature is referenced throughout the film, and the link between the heat and character’s emotions is made early on. Anger is associated with heat: characters talk about “getting hot” as a euphemism for getting angry. By extension then, the hottest day of the summer could also be understood as the angriest.

Hatred, on the other hand, is continually linked with sickness and disease. Early in the film, when pizzeria owner Sal arrives with his two sons to start business for the day, his son Pino says of the pizza shop:

“I detest this place like a sickness.”

Sal admonishes his son, saying: “That sounds like hatred.”

This connection returns at the end of film, again in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which at this point has been reduced to a smoldering shell. Mookie seeks Sal out to ask for the wages he is due from the previous week’s labor. Angrily, Sal throws $500 in $100 bills at Mookie, twice as much as he is owed. Mookie leaves $200 on the ground, telling Sal that he only wants what he has earned. There is a stalemate as the two men stare off, the $200 between them, and each of them waiting for the other to pick it up. Apparently not understanding why Mookie would leave the money lying on the ground Sal asks him:

“Are you sick?”

Mookie: “I’m hot as a motherfucker; I’m alright, though.”

Mookie’s response here should not be understood merely as a comment about the weather. Yes, he is hot because of the summer heat, but the associations presented by the film make clear the deeper meaning of this exchange. Mookie is angry, angry as a motherfucker; having endured the ordeal of the hottest day of the summer, culminating in his throwing a trashcan through a shop window, and now he finds himself the following day with his various responsibilities still in place, but now without a source of income. But he does not hate Sal. He is not infected by hatred. He is not sick.

If the film associates hatred with sickness and disease, how does it relate or portray love? The radio DJ character, Mister Senor Love Daddy, seems like an obvious connection. Another important component is the name of Senor Love Daddy’s radio station: We Love Radio 108 (“Last on your dial, first in your heart.”). The name of the radio station not only presages Clear Channel Communications’ eventual rebranding to I Heart Radio, it also establishes a connection between love and another of the film’s characters: Radio Raheem.

Radio Raheem is arguably the character most closely associated with the concepts of love and hate. Raheem has custom brass knuckles on each hand: the word “LOVE” on his right hand, and the word “HATE” on his left. Through the presence of these words on his knuckles, and his performance of the accompanying story about the struggle between love and hate, “the story of life,” Radio Raheem recalls Reverend Harry Powell from the 1955 film Night of the Hunter. Reverend Powell has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles: love on the right hand, and hate on the left. He also tells “the story of life,” which, although using different language than Raheem, tells essentially the same account of a struggle between hate and love, where hate has the upper hand for a while but is eventually beat out by love.

In Night of the Hunter, Reverend Powell’s performance of pious geniality conceals a dark secret: he is a serial killer, traveling the country seducing widows whom he soon murders before absconding with what wealth he can steal. In Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem is not revealed to be a serial killer, but he is done in by a sort of serial killing: the recurring killing of men of color perpetrated by police officers. The characters of the film react to Raheem’s death in a personal way (“They killed Radio Raheem!”), but it is clearly also a reaction to this serial killing of black men that contributes to the crowd’s reaction (someone is heard exclaiming, “They did it again!”). The rage at serial killing is evident also in Larry Kramer’s AIDS activism, as seen in his essay “1,112 and Counting,” and his exhortations to audience members at his plays that their inaction was responsible for the real life deaths of the characters portrayed.

A final question: Is Do the Right Thing a polemic? I find it interesting to consider the question in light of the definitions offered by this week’s featured authors. Rand traces the meaning of “polemic” to the Greek polemikos, meaning “warlike,” and when Lee’s film was released many reviewers and commentators were concerned that it amounted to a call for violence. I am not sure the film satisfies Rand’s four elements of rhetorical form, but I do believe it satisfies the rhetorical move that Olson calls shifting subjectivities:

“An advocate articulates a shift in the second persona of an address, wherein the auditors or readers occupy one kind of role initially and then, drawing on what is remembered or learned from that position, are repositioned subsequently into a different role that is harder for them to recognize or occupy, but that might possess some transforming power.” (p. 284)

As film critic Roger Ebert recounted in an essay about the film:

“Many audiences are shocked that the destruction of Sal's begins with a trash can thrown through the window by Mookie (Lee), the employee Sal refers to as ‘like a son to me.’ Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: ‘Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.’ But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.”

Some critics and audience members objected to what they interpreted as Lee’s call for violence, and at least an implicit approval of property destruction. We heard similar rhetoric in the last year, when protests in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner became characterized by media emphasis on incidents of property damage and looting. The state response to protests is always characterized by a tolerance so long as demonstrations are peaceful and “civil,” and when this line is broached it functions to demonize and dismiss the “protestors” at large. Is this not evocative of the white woman who purportedly said to Audre Lorde, “Tell me how you feel, but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you”? 

References

West, Isaac. "Reviving Rage." Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 97-102.

Olson, Lester C. "Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association." Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 283-308.

Rand, Erin J. "An inflammatory fag and a queer form: Larry Kramer, polemics, and rhetorical agency." Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 297-319.

Trump and the rhetoric of urban order

I rarely weigh in on national politics on this blog, and this post is not intended as an endorsement or a denunciation of any candidate. Although this post responds to recent remarks made by Donald Trump, I'm not interested in joining the pile-on critiquing his overall rhetorical style or campaign message, which seems overly easy and even superfluous at this point. Rather I want to focus on Trump's comments at the first one-on-one presidential debate last week regarding "law and order" and the "stop and frisk" program. These are topics I've thought and written about in regards to the use of "urban disorder" rhetoric in U.S. policy and policing practices. Trump's positioning himself as the "law and order candidate" and his appeals based on unruly "inner city" conditions recalls previous campaign rhetoric such as Nixon's 1968 campaign (see the above video). Furthermore, his support of "stop and frisk" policing directly ties his statements to a history of U.S. urban policies based on an order/disorder dichotomy.

Discourses based on a dichotomy of order and disorder have long been applied to urban spaces. In his classic historical survey of urban settlements, The City in History (1961), Lewis Mumford traced the development from early, “organically” developed Greek cities to more structured Hellenistic cities. Mumford describes this process as a transition “from supple ‘disorder’ to regimented elegance” (p. 190). A 2016 opera titled A Marvelous Order centers on the ideological struggle between urbanist Jane Jacobs and mayor Robert Moses in 1960s New York City. This battle of wills between Jacobs and Moses is seen by many to be emblematic of a historical opposition between urban planning schemes designed to order and regiment city spaces and populations, and the disorderly and unplanned activities and interactions that have long been characteristic of city life.

Cities and citizens have been “ordered” not only through planning schemes and infrastructure, but also through public policies and discourses. One aspect of my research focuses on how the term “disorder” has been employed across various discourses and analyses of U.S. cities, and how these discourses have influenced or supported policies of urban development. Through employing the language of disorder, these discourses have functioned pathologically to conceptualize certain citizens, spaces, and practices as either harmful or beneficial. 

Writers such as George Simmel, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth wrote about the turn-of-the-century American metropolis as a site of sensory overload and radical diversity. Disorder in these accounts was variously understood as criminal behavior, unregulated or unruly spaces, and perceived failures of integration and communication among different ethnic groups. Park in particular was concerned with broader problems posed by isolated ethnic enclaves and the weakening of social ties among city dwellers, as evinced in his analyses of immigrants and African Americans in U.S. cities. The sociology and criminology of the period was concerned with diagnosing and remedying the causes of disorder, and this diagnostic approach developed into the “social pathology” perspective. 

In his infamous report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965) applied the social pathology perspective to theorize race relations in U.S. urban communities. Family structure was prioritized in Moynihan’s analysis, claiming that at “the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family” (p. 6). Moynihan emphasized incidences of unmarried and divorced women, “illegitimate” births, and the number of women-headed households to support his claim that “the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable” (p. 7). Throughout the report, Moynihan refers to a “tangle of pathology” in which black women and children are ensnared, leading to the dissolution of families and thus the increase of violence and disorder in urban centers.

The Moynihan report has been cited as an important influence on the domestic programs enacted under President Lyndon Johnson, initiatives collectively known as The Great Society project. These programs focused on poverty and racial injustice, and also involved urban renewal and redevelopment efforts. Johnson outlined his vision of the Great Society in his 1964 commencement address at the University of Michigan. The Great Society, Johnson said, “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice,” and “is a challenge constantly renewed.” Johnson placed the state of urban America at the forefront of his Great Society vision, saying “our societies will never be great until our cities are great.”

In response to the urban race riots that occurred in several U.S. cities throughout the 1960s, President Johnson commissioned a working committee called the National Commission on Civil Disorders. The commission is also known as the Kerner commission, after Otto Kerner, chair of the commission and then governor of Illinois. Johnson directed the commission members to answer three questions in relation to the riots (Kerner, 1967, p. 1): What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? In their report, the authors referred to the riots that occurred in Detroit during the summer of 1967, stating that the riots “again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear, and bewilderment to the Nation” (p. 1). One of the report’s best-known statements is that the nation “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white,” and that the recent race riots had “quickened the movement and deepened the division” (p. 1). 

In the recommendations section of the Kerner report, the authors dedicate a section to the issue of housing. In addition to calling for provisions for affordable housing in cities, the authors recommend against the further building of high-density “slum” housing projects. The building of such housing projects represent further attempts to impose rational order onto what were seen as chaotic and disorderly spaces, as seen in the modernist urban planning schemes of the 20th century. This philosophy of architecture and urban design is exemplified by the work of modernist designer Le Corbusier. The architect of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project built in St. Louis in the 1950s was directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s architectural style and philosophy. 

While the modernist housing aspirations embodied in the Pruitt-Igoe project ended with collapsed walls and broken windows, students of urban life in America were soon preoccupied with broken windows of another sort. The broken windows theory of urban disorder was a significant influence on urban sociology and criminology for decades, and the implications of its approach to disorder can be seen today. In an article titled “The Urban Unease” (1968), J.Q. Wilson reacted to the U.S. urban riots of the 1960s with a view of cities rooted in the tensions between order and disorder.

Wilson eventually developed these ideas of neighborhood disorder into the broken windows theory, first outlined in an article written with collaborator George Kelling (1982). The authors encapsulate the broken windows perspective by stating “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken” (p. 2, emphasis in original). As with broken windows that go unrepaired, the authors argue, “’untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls” (p. 3). Wilson and Kelling are not exclusively interested physical manifestations of disorder such as litter, graffiti, and buildings in disrepair, but present a larger argument that visible disorder (whether stemming from the built environment or from individuals inhabiting it), if left unchecked, will spread throughout a neighborhood.

Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows article proved very influential, and is credited with inspiring the implementation of policing practices implemented in cities throughout the United States. These policing programs have been referred to as “broken windows policing,” “zero tolerance policing,” and also, using Wilson and Kelling’s preferred term, “order maintenance policing”. In the 1990s, order maintenance policies based on broken windows theory were implemented by the New York City Police Department under police commissioner William Bratton and mayor Rudolph Giuliani. These policies were adopted as part of the city’s broader “Quality of Life” initiatives. During this period crime rates in the city decreased, and New York gained a reputation as one of the safest large cities in the country. In a 1998 address titled “The Next Phase of Quality of Life: Creating a More Civil Society,” mayor Giuliani praised the benefits of broken windows theory and zero tolerance policing, saying “broken windows theory works”. Describing the theory as the view that “the little things matter,” Giuliani called broken windows theory “an integral part of our law enforcement strategy”.

Trump's deployment of disorder discourses, and his appeals to the virtues of stop and frisk policing, recalls this history in starkly similar ways. A recent Trump campaign mailer includes a close up of Hillary Clinton's face juxtaposed against images of urban disorder: a brick building with boarded-up windows, and a pile of detritus including splinters of wood and chunks of concrete. The reverse side bears the message: "Donald Trump will strengthen our communities and protect our families. The first step is rebuilding, revitalizing, and reigniting our cities - like yours." In light of the epidemic violence in the historically segregated areas of Chicago (which Mr. Trump is correct to emphasize), and the recent and ongoing protests against police violence in cities such as Ferguson and across the country, these appeals should be considered within the context of the history of disorder discourses in U.S. urban policy. Much of the strain between vulnerable urban populations and police officers evident today can be seen as the legacy of policing practices instituted under the support of these discourses. With the urban unrest of the 1960s being evoked in political rhetoric and recalled in televised images of protests, we should consider carefully what is being promoted with calls to "reignite" our cities. 

Thoughts on polemics, Audre Lorde, and Do the Right Thing

Radical black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde found productive potential in anger. According to Lester Olson, in his article "Anger among allies": “Lorde distinguished between anger and hatred, and she salvaged the former as potentially useful and generative” (p. 287). Lorde’s distinction between anger and hatred is developed in a quote from her remarks: “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change” (p. 298).

In a quote from her address titled “The Uses of Anger,” Lorde uses the metaphor of the virus to describe hatred:

“We are working in a context of oppression and threat, the cause of which is certainly not the angers which lie between us, but rather that virulent hatred leveled against all women, people of Color, lesbians and gay men, poor people - against all of us who are seeking to examine the particulars of our lives as we resist our oppressions, moving toward coalition and effective action.” (emphasis added)

This thematic link between hatred and disease is also present in Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing. While the film’s characters never state the distinction between anger and hatred as explicitly as Lorde does, the film makes many associations that establish a difference between the two. The action of the film takes place in a roughly 24 hour period, during the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, New York. The temperature is referenced throughout the film, and the link between the heat and character’s emotions is made early on. Anger is associated with heat: characters talk about “getting hot” as a euphemism for getting angry. By extension then, the hottest day of the summer could also be understood as the angriest.

Hatred, on the other hand, is continually linked with sickness and disease. Early in the film, when pizzeria owner Sal arrives with his two sons to start business for the day, his son Pino says of the pizza shop:

“I detest this place like a sickness.”

Sal admonishes his son, saying: “That sounds like hatred.”

This connection returns at the end of film, again in front of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, which at this point has been reduced to a smoldering shell. Mookie seeks Sal out to ask for the wages he is due from the previous week’s labor. Angrily, Sal throws $500 in $100 bills at Mookie, twice as much as he is owed. Mookie leaves $200 on the ground, telling Sal that he only wants what he has earned. There is a stalemate as the two men stare off, the $200 between them, and each of them waiting for the other to pick it up. Apparently not understanding why Mookie would leave the money lying on the ground Sal asks him:

“Are you sick?”

Mookie replies: “I’m hot as a motherfucker; I’m alright, though.”

Mookie’s response here should not be understood merely as a comment about the weather. Yes, he is hot because of the summer heat, but the associations presented by the film make clear the deeper meaning of this exchange. Mookie is angry, angry as a motherfucker; having endured the ordeal of the hottest day of the summer, culminating in his throwing a trashcan through a shop window, and now he finds himself the following day with his various responsibilities still in place, but now without a source of income. But he does not hate Sal. He is not infected by hatred. He is not sick.

If the film associates hatred with sickness and disease, how does it relate or portray love? The radio DJ character, Mister Senor Love Daddy, seems like an obvious connection. Another important component is the name of Senor Love Daddy’s radio station: We Love Radio 108 (“Last on your dial, first in your heart.”). The name of the radio station not only presages Clear Channel Communications’ eventual rebranding to I Heart Radio (kidding, of course), it also establishes a connection between love and another of the film’s characters: Radio Raheem.

Radio Raheem is arguably the character most closely associated with the concepts of love and hate. Raheem has custom brass knuckles on each hand: the word “LOVE” on his right hand, and the word “HATE” on his left. Through the presence of these words on his knuckles, and his performance of the accompanying story about the struggle between love and hate, “the story of life,” Radio Raheem recalls Reverend Harry Powell from the 1955 film Night of the Hunter. Reverend Powell has the words “love” and “hate” tattooed on his knuckles: love on the right hand, and hate on the left. He also tells “the story of life,” which, although using different language than Raheem, tells essentially the same account of a struggle between hate and love, where hate has the upper hand for a while but is eventually beat out by love.

In Night of the Hunter, Reverend Powell’s performance of pious geniality conceals a dark secret: he is a serial killer, traveling the country seducing widows whom he soon murders before absconding with what wealth he can steal. In Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem is not revealed to be a serial killer, but he is done in by a sort of serial killing: the recurring killing of men of color perpetrated by police officers. The characters of the film react to Raheem’s death in a personal way (“They killed Radio Raheem!”), but it is clearly also a reaction to this serial killing of black men that contributes to the crowd’s reaction (someone is heard exclaiming, “They did it again!”). 

A final question: Is Do the Right Thing a polemic? I find it interesting to consider the question in light of the definitions offered by various authors. In her article on Larry Kramer's polemical form, Erin Rand writes of polemics: 

“Hence, polemics refute dominant ideologies and modes of thinking by rejecting the primacy of reason an invoking explicitly moral claims. In polemics a moral position is not simply advanced through rhetoric, but morality actually does rhetorical work.” (p. 305)

Rand traces the meaning of “polemic” to the Greek polemikos, meaning “warlike",  and when Lee’s film was released many reviewers and commentators were concerned that it amounted to a call for violence. I am not sure the film satisfies Rand’s four elements of rhetorical form, but I do believe it satisfies the rhetorical move that Olson calls shifting subjectivities:

“An advocate articulates a shift in the second persona of an address, wherein the auditors or readers occupy one kind of role initially and then, drawing on what is remembered or learned from that position, are repositioned subsequently into a different role that is harder for them to recognize or occupy, but that might possess some transforming power.” (p. 284)

As film critic Roger Ebert recounted in an essay about the film:

“Many audiences are shocked that the destruction of Sal's begins with a trash can thrown through the window by Mookie (Lee), the employee Sal refers to as “like a son to me.” Mookie is a character we're meant to like. Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then he observes: “Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.” But the movie in any event is not just about how the cops kill a black man and a mob burns down a pizzeria. That would be too simple, and this is not a simplistic film. It covers a day in the life of a Brooklyn street, so that we get to know the neighbors, and see by what small steps the tragedy is approached.”

Some critics and audience members objected to what they interpreted as Lee’s call for violence, and at least an implicit approval of property destruction. We heard similar rhetoric last year, when protests in response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner became characterized by media emphasis on incidents of property damage and looting. The state response to protests is always characterized by a tolerance so long as demonstrations are peaceful and “civil,” and when this line is broached it functions to demonize and dismiss the “protestors” at large. Is this not evocative of the white woman who purportedly said to Audre Lorde, “Tell me how you feel, but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you”?

Immediacy, Hypermediacy, and Digital Rhetoric: Two views of Remediation

In Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999), Bolter and Grusin present a genealogy of media forms as it relates to current North American media phenomena built around three key terms: immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation. The authors use the term “remediation” to refer to “the representation of one medium in another” (p. 45). They are primarily interested in the representation of older media within digital media. Remediation, then, is the central concept, but the authors state that it “always operates under the current cultural assumptions about immediacy and hypermediacy.

            Bolter and Grusin conceptualize hypermediacy as a multiplication or intensification of mediation. The term itself may seem to represent the opposite of immediacy, and the authors make this connection clear: “At the end of the twentieth century we are in a position to understand hypermediacy as immediacy’s opposite number, an alter ego that has never been suppressed fully or for long periods of time” (p. 34). This binary or polar relationship between the two functions so that the absence of one is always implied in the presence of the opposite. “In every manifestation, hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire for immediacy” (p. 34).

            Immediacy, as the authors use the term, describes “a family of beliefs and practices,” and “the common feature of all these forms is the belief in some necessary contact point between the medium and what it represents” (p. 30). They refer to “the logic of transparent immediacy” to characterize how artists and designers have attempted to create immersive or immanent experiences that provide a sense of immediacy, or non-mediated experience. Computer interfaces become a key concept for the authors when considering immediacy in digital media. “What designers often say they want is an ‘interfaceless’ interface, in which there will be no recognizable electronic tools” (p. 23). This inclination toward invisible interfacing is associated with the essential logic of digital media. “The transparent interface is one more manifestation of the need to deny the mediated character of technology altogether. To believe that with digital technology we have passed beyond mediation is also to assert the uniqueness of our present technological moment” (p. 24).

            Ben McCorkle (Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse) refers not to computer graphics when addressing the transparent interface, but to printed books, writing of the “illusory interface of print as a transparent window into the mind of the author”(p. 149). McCorkle is concerned with communication media and technology as each relates to the practice of rhetoric, and especially the practice’s origins as spoken communication. The rhetorical canon of delivery is being redefined, McCorkle argues, and equated with a medium. McCorkle states that “redefining delivery works based on the logic of immediacy” (p. 153): “Delivery and medium become coequal terms not under the reign of print with its blank aesthetic but with the arrival of electronic and digital writing technologies that are perceived to be more flexible, alterable, and performative than print” (p. 154).

            McCorkle sees the historical transformations of rhetoric as contributing to the process of remediation. Changes in modes of communication brought about by new technological forms and paradigms result in associated changes in how rhetoric is conceptualized and practiced. Digital media, therefore, affect contemporary rhetorical practice. “In the era of digital writing, rhetoric has disembodied the canon of delivery, placing it atop nonverbal texts and, in effect, transforming those texts into surrogates of the performing body” (p. 160). As media forms and technology remediate spoken communication and rhetorical practice, rhetoric in turn remediates media forms and technology, recalling Bolter and Grusin’s seemingly tautological formulation of “remediation as the mediation of mediation” (p. 56).

Memes, Enthymemes, and the Reproduction of Ideology

In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the word “meme” to refer to a hypothetical unit of cultural transmission. The discussion of the meme concept was contained in a single chapter of a book that was otherwise dedicated to genetic transmission, but the idea spread. Over decades, other authors further developed the meme concept, establishing “memetics” as a field of study. Today, the word “meme” has entered the popular lexicon, as well as popular culture, and is primarily associated with specific internet artifacts, or “viral” online content. Although this popular usage of the term is not always in keeping with Dawkins’ original conception, these examples from internet culture do illustrate some key features of how memes have been theorized.

This essay is principally concerned with two strands of memetic theory: the relation of memetic transmission to the reproduction of ideology; and the role of memes in rhetorical analysis, especially in relation to the enthymeme as persuasive appeal. Drawing on these theories, I will advance two related arguments: ideology as manifested in discursive acts can be considered to spread memetically; and ideology functions enthymemetically. Lastly, I will present a case study analysis to demonstrate how the use of methods and terminology from rhetorical criticism, discourse analysis, and media studies, can be employed to analyze artifacts based on these arguments.

Examples of memes presented by Dawkins include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches” (p.192). The name “meme” was chosen due to its similarity to the word “gene”, as well as its relation to the Greek root “mimeme” meaning “that which is imitated” (p.192). Imitation is key to Dawkins’ notion of the meme because imitation is the means by which memes propagate themselves amongst members of a culture. Dawkins identifies three qualities associated with high survival in memes: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity (p.194).

Distin (2005) further developed the meme hypothesis in The Selfish Meme. Furthering the gene/meme analogy, Distin defines memes as “units of cultural information” characterized by the representational content they carry (p.20), and the representational content is considered “the cultural equivalent of DNA” (p.37). This conceptualization of memes and their content forms the basis of Distin’s theory of cultural heredity. Distin then seeks to identify the representational system used by memes to carry their content (p.142). The first representational system considered is language, what Distin calls “the memes-as-words hypothesis” (p.145). Distin concludes that language itself is “too narrow to play the role of cultural DNA” (p.147).

Balkin (1998) took up the meme concept to develop a theory of ideology as “cultural software”. Balkin describes memes as “tools of understanding,” and states that there are “as many different kinds of memes as there are things that can be transmitted culturally” (p.48). Stating that the “standard view of memes as beliefs is remarkably similar to the standard view of ideology as a collection of beliefs” (p.49), Balkin links the theories of memetic transmission to theories of ideology. Employing metaphors of virility similar to how other authors have written of memes as “mind viruses,” Balkin considers memetic transmission as the spread of “ideological viruses” through social networks of communication, stating that “this model of ideological effects is the model of memetic evolution through cultural communication” (p.109). Balkin also presents a more favorable view of language as a vehicle for memes than Distin presented, writing: “Language is the most effective carrier of memes and is itself one of the most widespread forms of cultural software. Hence it is not surprising that many ideological mechanisms either have their source in features of language or are propagated through language” (p.175).

Balkin approaches the subject from a background in law, and although not a rhetorician and skeptical of the discursive turn in theories of ideology, Balkin does employ rhetorical concepts in discussing the influence of memes and ideology: “Rhetoric has power because understanding through rhetorical figures already forms part of our cultural software” (p.19). Balkin also cites Aristotle, remarking that “the successful rhetorician builds upon what the rhetorician and the audience have in common,” and “what the two have in common are shared cultural meanings and symbols” (p.209). In another passage, Balkin expresses a similar notion of the role of shared understanding in communication: “Much human communication requires the parties to infer and supplement what is being conveyed rather than simply uncoding it” (p.51).

Although Balkin never uses the term, these ideas are evocative of the rhetorical concept of the enthymeme. Aristotle himself discussed the enthymeme, though the concept was not elucidated with much specificity. Rhetorical scholars have since debated the nature of the enthymeme as employed in persuasion, and Bitzer (1959) surveyed various accounts to produce a more substantial definition. Bitzer’s analysis comes to focus on the enthymeme in relation to syllogisms, and the notion of the enthymeme as a syllogism with a missing (or unstated) proposition. Bitzer states: “To say that the enthymeme is an ‘incomplete syllogism’ – that is, a syllogism having one or more suppressed premises – means that the speaker does not lay down his premises but lets his audience supply them out of its stock of opinion and knowledge” (p.407).

Bitzer’s formulation of the enthymeme emphasizes that “enthymemes occur only when the speaker and audience jointly produce them” (p.408). That they are “jointly produced” is key to the role of the enthymeme is successful persuasive rhetoric: “Owing to the skill of the speaker, the audience itself helps construct the proofs by which it is persuaded” (p.408). That the enthymeme’s “premises are always drawn from the audience,” and the “successful construction is accomplished through the joint efforts of speaker and audience,” Bitzer defines as the “essential character” of the enthymeme. This joint construction, and supplying of the missing premise(s), resonates with Balkin’s view of the spread of cultural software, as well as various theories of subjects’ complicity in the functioning of ideology.

McGee (1980) supplied another link between rhetoric and ideology with the “ideograph”. McGee argued that “ideology is a political language composed of slogan-like terms signifying collective commitment” (p.15), and these terms he calls “ideographs”. Examples of ideographs, according to McGee, include “liberty,” “religion,” and “property” (p.16). Johnson (2007) applies the ideograph concept to memetics, to argue for the usefulness of the meme as a tool for materialist criticism. Johnson argues that although “the ideograph has been honed as a tool for political (“P”-politics) discourses, such as those that populate legislative arenas, the meme can better assess ‘superficial’ cultural discourses” (p.29). I also believe that the meme concept can be a productive tool for ideological critique. As an example, I will apply the concepts of ideology reproduction as memetic transmission, and ideological function as enthymematic, in an analysis of artifacts of online culture popularly referred to as “memes”.

As Internet culture evolved, users adapted and mutated the term “meme” to refer to specific online artifacts. Even though they may be considered a type of online artifact, Internet memes come in a variety of different forms. One of the oldest and most prominent series of image macro memes is the “LOLcats” series of memes. The template established by LOLcats of superimposing humorous text over static images became and remains the standard format for image macro memes. Two of the most prominent series of these types of memes are the “First World Problems” (FWP) and “Third World Success” image macros. Through analysis of these memes, it is possible to examine how the features of these artifacts and discursive practices demonstrate many of the traits of memes developed by theorists, and how theories of memetic ideological transmission and enthymematic ideological function can be applied to examine ideological characteristics of these artifacts.

References

Balkin, J.M. (1998). Cultural software: A theory of ideology. Dansbury, CT: Yale

University Press.

Bitzer, L. F. (1959). Aristotle’s enthymeme revisited. Quarterly Journal Of Speech,

45(4), 399-408.

Dawkins, R. (2006). The Selfish Gene. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (original

work published 1976)

Distin, K. (2005). The selfish meme: A critical reassessment. New York, NY: Cambridge

University Press.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly

Journal Of Speech, 66(1), 1-16.

Flooding the Zone vs Flaming: Online argumentation and deliberation

In “The Logos of the Blogosphere,” Pfister employs the metaphor of “flooding the zone” to examine the role of bloggers as “potent agents of public deliberation” (p. 141). Using the 2002 controversy over Lott’s remarks while honoring Strom Thurmond, Pfister traces a timeline showing how bloggers and online commentators persistently pushed the story until mainstream media picked it up. One of these bloggers, Glenn Reynolds of the blog Instapundit, exemplified this persistence in a post that read, in all capital letters “FLOOD THE ZONE!”. This message was followed by 10 posts throughout the rest of the day, all about Lott’s comments. Pfister develops “flooding the zone” as rhetorical and argumentative strategy by tracing the phrase’s etymology to its origins in sports strategy (p. 153).

For Pfister, the strategy of zone flooding “can be connected to rhetorical invention, the generative process through which novel arguments are articulated, and this linkage clarifies how bloggers are able to shape the news agenda through public argument” (p. 142). Pfister argues that “logos, the invention of public argument, is central to the blogosphere”, and that the invention of novel arguments is a “fundamental contribution that bloggers make to public deliberation” (p. 152). To elaborate on how blogs and networked media in general lend themselves to invention, Pfister highlights three themes demonstrated in these media: speed, copiousness, and agonism.

Regarding agonism, Pfister writes that agonism has been used to dismiss contributions from the blogosphere all together due to the fragmentation and discord that agonism in the blogosphere is perceived to produce. Pfister suggests, however, that agonism “can be partially recuperated by noting how it fuels inventional processes” (p. 154). Pfister foregrounds the role of hyperlinks in contributing to agonism in blogs and networked media: “The dialogic and disputatious nature of invention is particularly on display in the blogosphere because of how hyperlinks direct attention to others’ arguments” (p. 154). This consideration of positive aspects of agonism in online deliberation resonates with Weger and Aakhus’ use of “wit testing” in examining argumentation in online chat rooms.

In their discussion of chat room arguments, Weger and Aakhus note the phenomenon of “flaming”, the “practice of issuing personal attacks in online forums through acts such as name-calling, ridicule, and personal insults” (p. 31). Like agonism in in Pfister’s discussion of blogs, the phenomenon of flaming has been cited to dismiss online deliberation as fractious and unproductive. Weger and Aakhus suggest, however, that elements of these practices and related phenomenon may be similarly recuperated. One aspect of this has to do with exposure to different arguments. “Engaging in chat room dialogue exposes participants to a variety of opinions, attitudes, and sources of information that they may have never encountered otherwise” (p. 36). Also, “chat room participants arguing with each other over issues of public importance may create a sense of community and a sense of connection to the larger ‘public’ as a whole” (p. 36).

Weger and Aakhus approach online deliberation primarily from the perspective of argumentation theory, as opposed to Pfister’s foregrounding of rhetorical theory. Yet their conclusions and implications share several similarities. Both analyses acknowledge how agonistic argumentative practices can undermine productive deliberation, while also considering novel and positive aspects of agonistic discourse uniquely afforded by the online context. Both also connect newer forms of many-to-many communication to existing theories of argument and public deliberation, showing how these theories can help to understand these developments while allowing for new perspectives to emerge.

Secondary Orality and Electric Rhetoric: the ground of sound

In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong introduces the term secondary orality to characterize the recapitulation of oral communication characteristics in electronic media; thus, the introduction of secondary orality necessitates a definition of primary orality in order to function as a meaningful concept. Ong distinguishes between two categories of cultures: oral cultures existing prior to or isolated from print, and characterized by orally-based thought and speech; and typographic cultures whose thought, speech, and other practices are influenced by the effects of print communication. The use of the term “secondary orality” stems from Ong’s historical conception of a chronological progression of cultural epochs.

Ong relies on the nature of sound to outline and define the essential characteristics of primary and secondary orality. “Without writing, words as such have no visual presences, even when the objects they represent are visual. They are sounds. You might ‘call’ them back – ‘recall’ them. But there is nowhere to ‘look’ for them. They have no focus and no trace” (Ong p. 31). The nature of sound therefore determines the communicative practices of primary orality, and the rhetorical techniques and mnemonic formulae by which members of oral cultures structure thought and speech. “In an oral culture, to think through something in nonformulaic, non-patterned, non-mnenomic terms, even if it were possible, would be a waste of time, for such thought, once worked through, could never be recovered with any effectiveness, as it could be with the aid of writing” (p. 35).

Secondary orality thus refers to a renewed emphasis of certain characteristics of orality that were deemphasized in typographic cultures. Ong locates the nexus of this transformation in the advent of electronic communication media, what he also calls “post-typography” (p. 133). One aspect of the relation of electronic media to secondary orality cited by Ong is the transmission of spoken words to a mass audience, forming groups of listeners similar in essence, though not in scale, to oral cultures. “Radio and television have brought major political figures as public speakers to a larger public than was ever possible before modern electronic developments. Thus in a sense orality has come into its own more than ever before” (p. 134). In Electric Rhetoric, Kathleen Welch focuses primarily on television as a locus for changes in oralism brought about by electronic media, a condition Welch calls “televisual aurality” (Welch p. 132).

The use of “aurality” rather than “orality” in Welch’s phrase indicates the central role sound plays in the televisual paradigm. “Television is more acoustic than visual, and so is attached strongly to oralism/auralism.” (p. 102). The presence of television in public spaces is primarily aural, as a person can turn away from the images on the television screen, while the accompanying sounds are still heard. Television’s pervasiveness is exemplified in background noise. In this sense Welch, like Ong, identifies a connection between electronic discursive forms and the characteristics of pre-literate communication. Welch also cites the formulas (here koinoi topoi) used in pre-alphabetic cultures as an element of orality that is recalled to prominence in the electronic age. “Koinoi topoi are memorable and amenable to speaking and hearing in particular […] Next Rhetoric requires them as part of its theorized electrification” (p. 117).

Welch uses the term Electric Rhetoric (or Next Rhetoric) in referring to these transformations in literacy and communication. Though there are clear parallels with Ong’s notion of secondary orality, Welch’s formulation doesn’t evoke that term and is distinguished by a critical concern with hegemonic narratives and the unmasking of power relations. While professing skepticism about modernist histories, Welch presents electric rhetoric as an emergent phenomenon in a linear progression, as Ong characterized secondary orality. “Electric rhetoric, Next Rhetoric, is the third Sophistic. It is what will come after postmodernism” (p. 136).

Urban Communication: City Branding; Social Networks; Mapping and more

• David Crouch reports in the Guardian that Denmark wants to rebrand part of Sweden as "Greater Copenhagen":

A metropolis needs 4 – 5 million people to be “somebody” on the world stage, Tryding admits, and Copenhagen is the only city in the region whose name has international recognition. Many southern Swedes already treat Copenhagen as their cultural capital, he says, with all the attractions of a big city that is much more accessible than Stockholm. “At least we have the ‘greater’ part of Greater Copenhagen,” he consoles himself. “Without us they are only Copenhagen.”

Sweden’s main business newspaper, Dagens Industri, recently came out in support of the rebranding, noting southern Sweden’s economic weakness and declaring that Copenhagen could become “Skåne’s bridge to the world”. But it also struck a note of caution about the potential loss of regional identity.

• Stateside, Alex Schieferdecker at Urbanophile considers whether Minneapolis-St. Paul can rebrand itself as "the capital of the north":

It’s not clear that the Twin Cities and our hinterland are struggling because of our attachment to the boring Midwest and our reputation as the American manifestation of Hoth. [...] Of course, the problem here is that we’re dealing with a counterfactual. If Minneapolis-Saint Paul had a stronger identity, would we see the results in a better economy?

[...]

But in another sense, it would be a missed opportunity to think of North as simply a marketing campaign. North could (should) be as much about placemaking as place branding. This may be a chance to set the course of the region in a deliberate way. The recent media coverage illustrates these dual objectives, because both Brinkley and Martucci capture important parts of what North is about. The aim is to reinvent the image of our cities and our region—and reinvent the cities and the region themselves.

• Minneapolis resident Jay Walljasper writes at the Project for Public Spaces about how to keep cold weather cities cool:

That’s a problem in an increasingly globalized economy and mobile society when investment, jobs, and young people have more opportunities than ever to roam the world. It’s tough for towns to thrive if people everywhere else think they’re frozen, lonesome tundras where everyone hibernates 3-5 months a year.

And this problem is becoming more acute as the Millennial Generation begins to take over from the Baby Boomers, who are retiring in droves. The Millennials are the first generation that reports they will choose a good place over a good job.

[...]

The Danish architect Jan Gehl, a worldwide authority on how to enliven cities by building great public spaces, notes, “Cultures and climates differ all over the world, but people are the same. They will gather in public if you give them a good place to do it.”

• Mike Isaac in the New York Times recently reported on tech startup Nextdoor, a social network designed to foster community among neighbors:

Nextdoor has slowly built a network of more than 53,000 microcommunities across the United States, all based on local neighborhood boundaries. Nextdoor restricts communication to only those people who live close to one another; users are required to verify their identity and home address upon signing up.

Consider Nextdoor a modern, more attractive version of a community email list service or Yahoo Groups, the popular message board. Users can post neighborhood news, offer items for sale, ask for help finding lost pets or organize a block party.

Nextdoor also works with about 650 local government agencies that can send out citywide alerts on things like utility shutdowns in specific areas, crime alerts or emergency-preparedness tips.

• Dale Mackey and the Daily Yonder writes about a Vermont-based social media platform that helps residents communicate with neighbors:

Front Porch Forum, a hyper-local social-media platform, is operating in 200 towns in Vermont, says founder Michael Wood-Lewis of Burlington. About a third of the residents in each of these communities are using the system, he said.

The forum serves as a place for people to share information, plan neighborhood gatherings, promote local businesses and connect with their neighbors.  But Wood-Lewis says there’s another benefit.

“There’s a somewhat hidden effect that turns out to be the most powerful: over time, people start to feel different about their community.  They start to feel more connected to their neighborhoods and in the loop about what’s going on.”

• The Art & Cartography blog details the Primark Berlin Projection Mapping project:

Dalziel + Pow have moved the play of light onto a physical map where they experiment with different narratives using the terrain of Berlin to abstract and segment their sense of movement. I like the idea that with this being an indoor permanent installation the growth and development of the narratives can evolve and change from the projection mapping unlike many projection mapping spectacles that are single events. It is exciting from a data visualisation point of view to see how they could experiment with this, ‘expect to see dynamic data and live online feeds added in the near future.’ (Dalziel and Pow, 2015).

Dynamic data could be live narratives from geotextual tweets, visual iconography of weather, real time data of subway, air or live visuals with imagery of scenery, architecture that are geotagged within the framed boundaries of the physical map then abstracting into their segments in a realtime collaborative cartophoto-montage.

• At Thinking City, Charles Critchell presents personal experiences with the London tube map:

To think that such a great city as London can be reduced to lines, points and colours is disconcerting, though look a little harder and you soon realise that for many Londoners this is London. Harry Beck, the Tube map’s architect, immortalised an icon below ground to rival those above, whilst the tube would go on to shape the suburbs that define the city as the vast, sprawling entity standing today.

I soon realised that Beck’s map was not only a tool which would enable me to navigate my way around the city, but a gateway to what could turn out to be some interesting experiences, a bit of fun, and who knew what else? Here are a few of those journeys.

• Brittni Brown at The City Fix writes about the power of maps for safer urban mobility:

Constantly evolving technologies like geographic information systems (GIS) are enabling both city planners and law enforcement agencies to better protect citizens. GIS is a powerful data collection and mapping program that allows users to visually represent and analyze detailed information. It has a wide range of applications, and has often been used to map crime in efforts to help law enforcement effectively utilize limited resources.

By combining different datasets into layers of map data, it is possible to overlay various kinds of information and reach surprising conclusions. For instance, by adding incident data from police records, it is possible to determine where and when certain types of crimes are occurring most frequently, and to respond accordingly. Doing so helps to make public transport both more efficient and safe.

• I recently discovered the excellent Maps Mania blog, a rich resource for cartogrophiles and anyone interested in innovative mapping for data or creative expression. To offer just one example: last week they covered the 71 Square Miles map that represents Brooklyn through found trash:

Artist Jennifer Maravillas has been wandering around Brooklyn collecting trash from every neighborhood block. The result of all this litter-picking is a map of the borough made from all of the collected rubbish, called 71 Square Miles.

The finished 10 x 10 foot trash map of Brooklyn is on display at BRIC Arts until September 6th. However, if you can't make it to BRIC Arts, you can still explore the artwork on this Mapbox map. You can even search the map by address, so if you live in Brooklyn you can zoom in on the trash that was found nearest your home.

• You can view the 71 Square Miles map here.

Urban Communication: media infrastructure, neighborhood narratives, rhetoric & rebranding, and more

• In Urban Media Ecology news, several recent studies reported correlations between characteristics of the built environment and human health. A study from the University of Kansas (in my birthplace of Lawrence) found that "neighborhoods that motivate walking can stave off cognitive decline in older adults":

The researcher judged walkability using geographic information systems — essentially maps that measure and analyze spatial data.

“GIS data can tell us about roads, sidewalks, elevation, terrain, distances between locations and a variety of other pieces of information,” Watts said. “We then use a process called Space Syntax to measure these features, including the number of intersections, distances between places or connections between a person’s home and other possible destinations they might walk to. We’re also interested in how complicated a route is to get from one place to another. For example, is it a straight line from point A to point B, or does it require a lot of turns to get there?”

Watts said easy-to-walk communities resulted in better outcomes both for physical health—such as lower body mass and blood pressure—and cognition (such as better memory) in the 25 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease and 39 older adults without cognitive impairment she tracked. She believes that older adults, health care professionals, caregivers, architects and urban planners could benefit from the findings.

• Another research paper from researchers at multiple institutions "suggests that street design may have a larger impact on public health than previously thought":

By studying 24 California cities with an array of street design characteristics and their associated health data, the authors find that living in cities with high intersection density—a measure of compactness—significantly reduces the risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. A full-grid street pattern also is a factor in lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease, as compared with full treelike patterns.

• At CityLab, Richard Florida posted a roundup of recent research studies on the health benefits afforded by walkable communities:

If walkability has long been an “ideal,” a recent slew of studies provide increasingly compelling evidence of the positive effects of walkable neighborhoods on everything from housing values to crime and health, to creativity and more democratic cities.

[...]

Walkability is no longer just an ideal. The evidence from a growing body of research shows that walkable neighborhoods not only raise housing prices but reduce crime, improve health, spur creativity, and encourage more civic engagement in our communities.

• Another CityLab article by Emily Von Hoffman looked at what architecture is doing to your brain:

I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.

• As part of a directed study this semester, I've been studying the role of communication infrastructure in urban design, and particularly the parallel developments of mass media and the modern metropolis. Urban explorer Bradley Garrett recently wrote a piece for The Guardian about the massive infrastructure of underground London, including not just tube stations but communication infrastructure including Britain's deepest telephone exchange: 

The urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers – it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the crème de la crème, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011.

Kingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable – the £120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state - part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester.

• These photos of subterranean communication infrastructure contrast with images of above ground cables covering the urban landscape, as featured in this io9 post, "photos from the days when thousands of cables crowded the skies":

Before most cables ran underground, all electrical, telephone and telegraph wires were suspended from high poles, creating strange and crowded streetscapes. Here are some typical views of late-19th century Boston, New York, Stockholm, and other wire-filled cities.

Wires over New York, 1887, via Retronaut, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/kb9dns2>

• Joseph Stromberg at Vox recently wrote about the "forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of 'jaywalking'":

Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.

This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word "jay" meant something like "rube" or "hick" — a person from the sticks, who didn't know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word "jay walker" as someone who didn't know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.

• William Eric Rinehart at Sweet Talk asks: Did a change in rhetoric give rise to cities?

Between the mega-village and the cities that came later lies the formation of the state. Ultimately, this is the world of stratification buttressed through religion. With it came the creation of differing social groups and distinctions based upon rank or property. Yet, the acceptance of social specialization required a new view of the world, a new rhetoric in the McCloskeyian sense. And once that jump was made, benefits followed. Clustered people allowed for more trade and specialization of work, leading to more wealth, prestige and better equipped armies. While still a brutal world, cities had the potential for stability, but it came at the expense of radical equality.

• Matt Stroud at The Verge recently wrote about the dream and the myth of the paperless city in Chicago:

But you can’t just flip a switch to reverse paper systems in place for hundreds of years, can you? Adobe first released its Portable Document Format nearly 20 years ago, yet many private companies, nonprofit organizations, libraries, law firms, courts — and yes, major city governments such as Chicago’s — have yet to embrace a world reliant on PDFs and devoid of paper records. Mayor Emanuel has agreed to change that. Or at least to try. In 2011, he announced plans to spend $20 million on efficiency improvements including changes to make the city less reliant on paper.

Will Mayor Rahm Emanuel change the way governments deal with paper? Or is the road toward a “completely paperless” government a long way off?

• At URBACT, Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller consider urban planning and the multi-dimensional communication era:

"Because urban planning has always been based on the gathering and exchange of information and – as a democratic process – on communication between different stakeholders, a change in the method of communication has a significant impact on decision-making throughout the process"

[...]

The quote at the beginning of this post was taken out of a paper by Stefan Höffken and Chris Haller, who set out to research how new medias were used for urban planning matters. They are refering to geographer Manuel Castells’ and Clay Shirky‘s work to describe the change from uni-dimentional communication towards a many-to-many exchange sphere that, so Shirky, is on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Höffken and Haller provide interesting insights in how different tools can serve certain goals and complement each-other by surveying urban projects and institutions or civil society mobilizations on urban matters as different as Tulsa municipality and the Mediaspree campaign in Berlin.

• Emily Badger at the Washington Post reports that Uber is offering cities an olive branch in the form of their customers' trip data:

The company plans to partner first with Boston, sharing quarterly anonymized trip-level data with the city in a model that Uber says will become its national data-sharing policy. The data will include date, time, distance traveled and origin and destination locations for individual trips, identified only by zip code tabulation area to preserve privacy. Once held by cities, this information will be open to records requests, meaning that the public (and researchers) will have access to it, too.

Such data could help cities keep tabs on Uber and, for example, which neighborhoods the company is serving. Uber says, though, that it's primarily offering the data so that cities can better understand themselves.

A redesigned Los Angeles parking sign, retrieved from <http://tinyurl.com/nu5tr2z>

• Rosie Cima at priceonomics recently wrote about a designer's war on misleading parking signs:

Sylianteng first tried to redesign parking signs when she was living in LA and applying to grad school, in a project she called “To Park or Not to Park.” She reduced the usual jumble of signs and regulations to a single, holistic panel, which looked a lot like a Google Calendar – it was a grid of days of the week, broken into hours. The blocks of time when a parking spot was valid she shaded green, the blocks of time it was invalid she shaded red. She also simplified the rules she illustrated, working off the principle that people would much rather adhere to an overly restrictive regulation than get a parking ticket.

[...]

Her prototypes provoked a lot of commentary, discussion, and praise. She used this feedback to improve her designs. She printed out new prototypes, and taped those up. The feedback validated some of her central assumptions, among them: (1) a lot of current parking signs were very confusing, and (2) people didn’t care why they could or couldn’t park somewhere, they just didn’t want to be ticketed.

• At Tropics of Meta, South El Monte Arts Posse posted about mapping community narratives in El Monte and South El Monte:

The writing of social history needs to keep in mind the motivations and individual agency of the people participating in events as they happen. In interview after interview, people were aware of the larger structural forces, and yet made choices and actions in contradiction to expectations. Again and again we spoke with people who beat the odds, who pushed back against racism, and took it upon themselves to change circumstances and in many cases succeeded.

• Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian reports on neighborhood rebranding in London:

Similar semantic shifts are being attempted, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of London. Intrepid developers have discovered “Tyburnia”, an undervalued stretch of real estate between Paddington Station and Hyde Park. Meanwhile, the “Knowledge Quarter” is an attempt to rid King’s Cross of its association with prostitution by emphasising the new preponderance of cerebral institutions there. You could call it “brain-washing”. The Knowledge Quarter, incidentally, is one of 21 “Quarters” in London; there are also a dozen or so new “Villages”. Neighbourhood rebranding is often the linguistic leg of gentrification and, as such, follows a predictable pattern: “Villages” assert their legitimacy by emphasising community, while “Quarters” lend a gravitas to whatever noun they follow. Both have a cleansing effect on the associations that came before them.

• At NextCity, Nathan C. Martin considers why art, not Google, could revolutionize WiFi:

Remember a few years ago when television went digital and everyone had to get adapters or new TV sets? When that happened, what once were television channels became simply channels, a bulk of empty bandwidth that could host any variety of transmission. The Federal Communications Commission named it Super WiFi. The policies to regulate it are yet to be written, and a chorus is imploring the FCC to leave a large part of the spectrum open, or “unlicensed,” instead of auctioning it off. Those advocates tend to refer to the spectrum in spatial terms — a group of Stanford University economists likened the spectrum to a public park, a resource everyone should have access to. Mary Ellen Carroll speaks of it similarly. “It’s like public land,” she says. “It’s like Yosemite.”

• Finally, Emanuel Maiberg at Motherboard looks at homelessness in SimCity, and whether it is a bug or feature:

SimCity's homeless people are represented as yellow, two-dimensional, ungendered figures with bags in tow. Their presence makes SimCity residents unhappy, and reduces land value. Like many other players, Bittanti discovered the online discussions when he was searching for a way to deal with them.

At first, players wondered if they were having so much problems with the homeless in their cities because of a bug in the game. Like many of 2014's big-budget games that launched in broken or barely-functional states, SimCity originally would only work if players connected to EA's servers, which repeatedly crashed under the load of players. It seemed possible that the homeless problem in SimCity was simply a mistake.

"Has anyone figured out a easy way to handle the homeless ruining those beautiful parks you spend so much money on?" asks one player on EA' site. "Create jobs, either through zoning or upgrading road density near industry, that helped me a lot," another player suggests.

Gentrification and 'the fucking hipster show'; hostile architercure and defensive urban design

• In a post at the Jacobin blog, Anthony Galluzzo considers how the mainstream media's "fucking hipster" show mocks hipsters in the service of capital:

[Marxist geographer Neil] Smith offers a dry, but emphatically structural account of this process, which he first theorized in the late eighties with Soho and the Lower East Side in mind. Gentrification has since become central to neoliberal urbanization generally, and New York City in particular, under the developer-driven Bloomberg administration.

But why bother with “dry” and “structural” when you can tune-in to the “fucking hipster” show?

Unlike Smith’s rigorous Marxian analysis, most popular accounts from the spurious creative class mystifications of Richard Florida to standard issue conservative populist diatribes forget the larger forces and primary movers in this process, which is instead reduced, metonymically, to the catchall figure of the hipster.

[...]

On topics ranging from the capitalist dynamics of gentrification to the casualization of employment among ostensibly middle class Millennials, the “fucking hipster” show beats staid structural analysis every time — even for many members of the self-identified Left.

[...]

We should retire “hipster” as a term without referent or political salience. Its zombie-like persistence in anti-hipster discourse must be recognized for what it is: an urbane, and socially acceptable, form of ideologically inflected shaming on the part of American elites who must delegitimize those segments of a largely white, college educated population who didn’t do the “acceptable thing.”

The anti-hipster censure here includes a healthy dose of typically American anti-intellectualism, decked out in liberal bunting, subtle homophobia, and recognizably manipulative appeals to white, middle class resentment, now aimed at the lazy hipster, who either lives on his trust fund or, more perniciously, abuses public assistance, proving how racist templates are multi-use tools.

Our power elites’ rhetorical police action becomes increasingly necessary as large swaths of the people lumped under the hipster taxon slip into the ranks of the long-term un- and underemployed. Once innocuous alternative lifestyles could potentially metamorphosize into something else altogether. Better to frame “alternative lifestyle” in terms of avant-garde trend setting without remainder, providing suitably rarefied consumption options for Bloomberg’s new bourgeoisie, as they buy locally sourced creativity on Bedford Ave.

• Anti-homeless features in urban design became a trending media topic earlier this month after pictures of anti-homeless studs in London were shared on social media. The Mirror reports on the background and the eventual removal of the spikes:

Metal spikes designed to stop homeless people sleeping in the doorway of a London apartment block have been removed, after almost 130,000 people signed a petition calling for them to be taken out.

Pictures of the metal studs outside flats in Southwark Bridge Road were widely shared online last weekend, sparking outrage on social media.

Many criticised the spikes as inhumane, and compared them to those used to stop pigeons landing on buildings.

• An Atlantic article by Robert Rosenberger looks at how cities use design to drive homeless people away:

It has been encouraging to see the outrage over the London spikes. But the spikes that caused the uproar are by no means the only form of homeless-deterrent technology; they are simply the most conspicuous. Will public concern over the spikes extend to other less obvious instances of anti-homeless design? Perhaps the first step lies in recognizing the political character of the devices all around us.     

An example of an everyday technology that’s used to forbid certain activities is “skateboard deterrents,” that is, those little studs added to handrails and ledges.  These devices, sometimes also called “skatestoppers” or “pig ears,” prevent skateboarders from performing sliding—or “grinding”—tricks across horizontal edges. A small skateboard deterrence industry has developed, with vendors with names like “stopagrind.com” and “grindtoahault.com.”

[...]

An example of a pervasive homeless deterrence technology is benches designed to discourage sleeping. These include benches with vertical slats between each seat, individual bucket seats, large armrests between seats, and wall railings which enable leaning but not sitting or lying, among many other designs. There are even benches made to be slightly uncomfortable in order to dissuade people from sitting too long. Sadly, such designs are particularly common in subway, bus stops, and parks that present the homeless with the prospect of a safely public place to sleep.

[..]

The London spikes provide an opportunity to put a finger on our own intuitions about issues of homelessness and the design of open space. Ask yourself if you were appalled by the idea of the anti-homeless spikes. If so, then by implication you should have the same problems with other less obvious homeless deterrence designs like the sleep-prevention benches and the anti-loitering policies that target homeless people.

• In the Guardian, Ben Quinn writes that anti-homeless spikes are part of a wider phenomenon of "hostile architecture":

In addition to anti-skateboard devices, with names such as "pig's ears" and "skate stoppers", ground-level window ledges are increasingly studded to prevent sitting, slanting seats at bus stops deter loitering and public benches are divided up with armrests to prevent lying down.

To that list, add jagged, uncomfortable paving areas, CCTV cameras with speakers and "anti-teenager" sound deterrents, such as the playing of classical music at stations and so-called Mosquito devices, which emit irritatingly high-pitched sounds that only teenagers can hear.

[...]

The architectural historian Iain Borden says the emergence of hostile architecture has its roots in 1990s urban design and public-space management. The emergence, he said, "suggested we are only republic citizens to the degree that we are either working or consuming goods directly.

"So it's OK, for example, to sit around as long as you are in a cafe or in a designated place where certain restful activities such as drinking a frappucino should take place but not activities like busking, protesting or skateboarding. It's what some call the 'mallification' of public space, where everything becomes like a shopping mall."

Manifesto for a Ludic Century, ludonarrative dissonance in GTA, games and mindf*cks, and more

• Kotaku recently posted a "manifesto" by game designer Eric Zimmerman declaring that the 21st century will be defined by games:

Systems, play, design: these are not just aspects of the Ludic Century, they are also elements of gaming literacy. Literacy is about creating and understanding meaning, which allows people to write (create) and read (understand).

New literacies, such as visual and technological literacy, have also been identified in recent decades. However, to be truly literate in the Ludic Century also requires gaming literacy. The rise of games in our culture is both cause and effect of gaming literacy in the Ludic Century.

• In a follow-up to Zimmerman's treatise, Kotaku asked various game theorists, designers, and writers: will the 21st century be defined by games? Respondents include media theorist Ian Bogost:

So, perhaps there is one fundamental challenge for the Manifesto for a Ludic Century: would a truly ludic century be a century of manifestos? Of declaring simple principles rather than embracing systems? Or, is the Ludic Manifesto meant to be the last manifesto, the manifesto to end manifestos, replacing simple answers with the complexity of "information at play?"

• While on the topic of Bogost, I recently read his game studies paper from 2009 wherein he relates contemporary game studies to McLuhan's discussion of games in 1964's Understanding Media:

Might we conclude: videogames are the first creative medium to fully emerge after Marshall McLuhan. By the time they became popular, media ecology as a method was well-known. McLuhan was a popular icon. By the time the first generation of videogame players was becoming adults, McLuhan had become a trope. When the then-new publication Wired Magazine named him their "patron saint" in 1993, the editors didn't even bother to explain what that meant. They didn't need to.

By the time videogame studies became a going concern, McLuhan was gospel. So much so that we don't even talk about him. To use McLuhan's own language of the tetrad, game studies have enhanced or accelerated media ecology itself, to the point that the idea of studying the medium itself over its content has become a natural order.

• This piece by Bogost for The Atlantic looks at "flipped classrooms" and massive open online courses:

Generally speaking, educators have warmed to the idea of the flipped classroom far more than that of the MOOC. That move might be injudicious, as the two are intimately connected. It's no accident that private, for-profit MOOC startups like Coursera have advocated for flipped classrooms, since those organizations have much to gain from their endorsement by universities. MOOCs rely on the short, video lecture as the backbone of a new educational beast, after all. Whether in the context of an all-online or a "hybrid" course, a flipped classroom takes the video lecture as a new standard for knowledge delivery and transfers that experience from the lecture hall to the laptop.

• Also, with increased awareness of Animal Crossing following from the latest game's release for the Nintendo 3DS, Bogost recently posted an excerpt from his 2007 book Persuasive Games discussing consumption and naturalism in Animal Crossing:

Animal Crossing deploys a procedural rhetoric about the repetition of mundane work as a consequence of contemporary material property ideals. When my (then) five-year-old began playing the game seriously, he quickly recognized the dilemma he faced. On the one hand, he wanted to spend the money he had earned from collecting fruit and bugs on new furniture, carpets, and shirts. On the other hand, he wanted to pay off his house so he could get a bigger one like mine.

• In a post discussing the trio of protagonists of GTA V, in anticipation of the game's impending release, Craig at unigamesity sees the use of multiple playable characters as addressing "ludonarrative dissonance":

Ludonarrative dissonance is when the story the game is telling you and your gameplay experience somehow don’t match up. As an example, this was a particular issue in Rockstar’s most recent game, Max Payne 3. Max constantly makes remarks about how terrible he is at his job, even though he does more than is humanly possible to try to protect his employers – including making perfect one-handed head shots in mid-air while drunk and high on painkillers. The disparity and the dissonance between the narrative of the story and the gameplay leave things feeling off kilter and poorly inter-connnected. It doesn’t make sense or fit with your experience so it feels wrong and damages the cohesiveness of the game world and story. It’s like when you go on a old-lady only murdering spree as Niko, who is supposed to be a reluctant killer with a traumatic past, not a gerontophobic misogynist.

• Ludonarrative dissonance also cropped up in this post by Alex Pieschel on medium discussing irony and praise in videogames (found via Critical Distance):

What I find strange, in light of our supposed anti-irony cultural moment, is a kind of old-fashioned ironic conceit behind a number of recent critical darlings in the commercial videogame space. 2007's Bioshock and this year’s Bioshock: Infinite are both about the irony of expecting ‘meaningful choice’ to live in an artificial dome of technological and commercial constraints. Last year’s Spec Ops: The Line offers a grim alchemy of self-deprecation and preemptive disdain for its audience. The Grand Theft Auto series has always maintained a cool, dismissive cynicism beneath its gleefully absurd mayhem. These games frame choice as illusory and experience as artificial. They are expensive, explosive parodies of free will.

• Which led me to this 2007 post from click nothing on ludonarrative dissonance in BioShock:

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game’s narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player’s ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.

• Sarah Wanenchak at Cyborgology considers mindfucks in videogames (partially in response to this post from Problem Machine):

The post itself makes a very important point: games, for the most part, can’t pull the Mindfuck like movies can because of the nature of the kind of storytelling to which most games are confined, which is predicated on a particular kind of interaction. Watching a movie may not be an entirely passive experience, but it’s clearly more passive than a game. You may identify with the characters on the screen, but you’re not meant to implicitly think of yourself as them. You’re not engaging in the kind of subtle roleplaying that most (mainstream) games encourage. You are not adopting an avatar. In a game, you are your profile, you are the character you create, and you are also to a certain degree the character that the game sets in front of you. I may be watching everything Lara Croft does from behind her, but I also control her; to the extent that she has choices, I make them. I get her from point A to B, and if she fails it’s my fault. When I talk about something that happened in the game, I don’t say that Lara did it. I say that I did.

• These excerpted research results published on kmjn.org reports that videogame players are acceptive of at least some cases of incoherence in anachronic gameplay:

Anachrony is a common storytelling technique in which events are narrated out of chronological order. A familiar example is a flashback, where story time jumps to the past for a bit, before returning to the present. The term "nonlinear narrative" is also sometimes used for this kind of out-of-order storytelling (somewhat less precisely).

While it's a common technique in literature and film, anachrony is widely seen as more problematic to use in games, perhaps even to the point of being unusable. If the player's actions during a flashback scene imply a future that differs considerably from the one already presented in a present-day scene (say, the player kills someone who they had been talking to in a present-day scene, or commits suicide in a flashback), this produces an inconsistent narrative. The root of the problem is that players generally have degree of freedom of action, so flashbacks are less like the case in literature and film—where already decided events are simply narrated out of order—and more like time travel, where the player travels back in time and can mess up the timeline.

• Polygon reports on a venture by Press Select to publish longform games criticism:

The first of the books are set to be published in early 2014. Some of the writers that will be published by Press Select in its first round have written for publications like Edge magazine, Kotaku, Kill Screen and personal blogs, including writers like Chris Dahlen, Michael Abbott, Jenn Frank, Jason Killingsworth, Maddy Myers, Tim Rogers, Patricia Hernandez and Robert Yang.