viz. - privacy

Rhetorical Collusion

james.wiedner — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:35:25 +0000

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester. Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

Of the two aforementioned fears, the latter is always more menacing than the former for me (to the extent that you can actually separate them). This being the case, I was thrilled to find out before the start of the Fall 2012 semester (my first semester as a PhD student and as a UT Associate Instructor) that the book I would be engaging with my introductory rhetoric students was Eli Pariser's "The Filter Bubble."

The reason that this was such good news for me was that I had already read the book earlier in the summer for "fun." And this was no superficial reading, either; my paranoia and indignation over the sort(s) of information gathering and content filtering taking place on the Internet had led me to copiously annotate the book throughout. For the first time in my life, there was the distinct possibility that being a cynical alarmist would work to my advantage!

What's more, I was certain my students would be every bit as enthusiastic about the subject matter as I was. Hell, I thought to myself, they'll be far more knoweledgable in these areas than I am! I had better bone up on both the technical and cultural state of online affairs, 'lest their suspicions that their rhetoric instructor was a total douchemobile become certainties.

However, I soon found that, despite (or perhaps because of) their total immersion in the technology that drives our day-to-day lives, I knew more than they did with respect to the "ins-and-outs" of our digital lives. This was a dubious discovery: it meant that I didn't have to worry as much about sounding like a clueless Luddite on par with their parents, but I would have to really work to get them involved in the course materials.

But we forged ahead. There were times when I'd see signs of life, usually at those points in lecturing wherein I'd inadvertently get so worked up talking about these issues about which I was so emphatic, that they took my paranoia for passion, and there eyes would follow my flailing arms with what looked like rapt attention.

By week 3, however, I realized that I wasn't the impassioned, young, mind-opening instructor that I had fancied myself. Rather, I was the neurotic, old (yes, when you're 18, 34 is old) instructor that really needed to get a life if he was this excited about online marketing tactics. It was high time that I employ the incredibly advanced equipment in the classroom I was given to teach in by the DWRL.

I showed them a TED Talk given by Eli Pariser on the very subject he engages in his book:

They took in more during the first 5 minutes of Pariser's talk than they did the first chapters of his book. I don't mean this as any sort of criticism of Pariser's writing. To the contrary, the speech served as the spark that got my students to reallyread his book; seeing an actual person has added a face to the pages. The book transfomed from textbook to extended blog. They were now reading, digesting, and synthesizing the course materials, as was evidenced by the next essays they submitted.

Still, I could tell that they were looking at this whole thing in a "this is interesting, but they're not actually tracking me" sort of way. For them, "The Filter Bubble" was eye-opening, but they still weren't grasping the full extent of what this book was telling us. They weren't thinking about what it meant for a company to go past the anonymous tracking, to a point where somebody out their knew your name, address, hobbies, names of relatives, etc.

Wanted terribly to get them to that next step, I put together a lesson plan that was going to be multimedia in nature. I began with another TED Talk. This one was by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, who was unveiling a new Firefox add-on called "Collusion,"

Collusion was created by Atul Varma, who says that it was reading "The Filter Bubble" that inspired him to crerate the program. Collusion examines some of the websites that silently track visitors long after they've left a site. More unsettling, Kovac's visual representation revealed the groups collecting information and following their every move around the Internet were sites that they'd never even visited.

I encouraged them to download the Collusion add-on and see what they found. We all took a screen shot of our "Collusion charts" at the end of a typical day of Internet usage (my chart is at the top of this post; to be fair, my chart represents heavier Internet usage than typical), and posted them on the course wiki. As I did not wanted to be yet another authority forcing them to divulge personal information, this assignment was 100% optional, and they had the option to submit anonymously, if they so desired.

The chart illustrating the extent of sites gathering my information without my knowledge (much less consent) wouldn't completely fit onto my screen. Hence, they aren't completely depicted on the screen capture above, which is unfortunate, because one of the most unsettling aspects of these charts is the visualization of the extent to which the web sites collecting my data were several steps removed from any site I ever visited...and they were sharing with sites even further removed from any online activity I personally engaged in.

With the Collusion charts, students saw all-too-clearly what they had previously understood only in the abstract. So long as it remained an abstract notion, it was never going to inspire a feeling of having a vested interest in these practices. Now that they'd seen what was going on, they were mad as hell, and were sufficiently knowledgeable that they could articulate the reasons behind their opinions effectively.

However, after a day or two of almost managing to convince myself that it was my vast knowledge and dynamic classroom persona that had made the course materials "real" for my students, I finally embraced the fact that the kudos would be more appropriately directed toward the videos and interactive add-ons that we had incorporated into our class time.

(As an aside, I felt compelled to temper their newfound disdain for the entities engaged in the practices exposed in "The Filter Bubble" with editorials defending those practices. I (hopefully) conveyed to my class that there are always multiple sides to any issue, and that the ability to argue one's opponent's case was the hallmark of a skilled rhetorician.)

Press(ing) Matter

Sarah Orem — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: BBC News

Only a scant 23 days elapsed after TMZ leaked nude photos of Prince Harry that French tabloid Closer printed images of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless on the balcony of a Provence guesthouse. In addition to the frenzied speculation about the photos themselves (Is the queen upset with her grandson? Was Middleton truly in private, since she was photographed on a terrace? Are there more images that will emerge?) it’s interesting to note that the press itself has been the subject of equal amounts of scrutiny.

The issue of where these revealing pictures would be published quickly became one of the most discussed aspects of this story. While UK’s The Sun printed Prince Harry’s photos on its front page, the same tabloid refused to publish indiscreet images of Kate. The royal family has brought a lawsuit against Closer for a breach of privacy. And, CNN speculates that since TMZ ran Prince Harry’s images before any British newspaper, it might mean that 1) the American press effectively “scooped” their English counterparts and, 2) that digital media is outpacing print journalism. Though Prince Harry and the Duchess of Cambridge are – literally – on display in this controversy, the press has become just as visible as the royal family.

Image Credit: Reuters

Visual texts, such as paparazzi photos and newsstand images, have become the site for a global conversation about the our right to privacy (or publicity). Many journalists claim that Kate’s photos represent “an invasion of privacy,” since she and her husband were on a “remote property” when captured on film. Conversely, columnists have seized Prince Harry’s photos as evidence of his “wild ways,” deeming the young man irresponsible for allowing the images to surface publicly. Here, visual objects allow journalists to rhetorically construct the ethos of those represented in the images.

By employing the language of the public/private split, news writers unwittingly wade into a long-standing scholarly debate on the same subject. It’s curious (or very, very appropriate) to see Kate Middleton’s images associated with privacy (which was “brutal[ly]” invaded), while the visual documentation of Prince Harry’s partying has been labeled “indisputably in the public domain.” Public sphere theorist Michael Warner points out in Publics and Counterpublics (2005) that women have long been associated with the private sphere (the home, the family) while “masculinity, at least in Western cultures, is felt partly in a way of occupying public space” (24). Though both members of the royal family could have reasonably expected privacy while undressing – Kate at a friend’s home, Harry in a hotel suite – journalists locate the Duchess’s nudity in the private sphere, and the Prince’s in public.

Not only are the distinctions between public and private increasingly articulated in visual terminology, as I argue above, but they are also defined on and through the medium of the body. Feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz unpacks the many significations we commonly heap onto the body in Volatile Bodies (1994): embodiment often becomes the physical locus for distinctions between

reason and passion, sense and sensibility, outside and inside, self and other, depth and surface, reality and appearance, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, form and matter, and so on. (3)

It seems that royal bodies bear an especially hefty portion of the conceptual weight we assign to the flesh as matter. Both the Duchess Catherine and Prince Harry’s bodies have become the site for a global discussion about the public vs. the private.

These sovereign bodies have also been used to flesh out (pun intended) our contemporary attitudes towards sex. The press has criticized Prince Harry’s licentiousness and lauded Her Highness’ sense of family duty, and I speculate that the disparity between these two reactions has something to do with the context in which their bodies appear. Middleton’s photos locate her in the frame of a heterosexual, monogamous, married, relationship. Swirling pregnancy rumors also link her sexuality with procreation. Reporters implicitly assign her to what Gayle Rubin calls the “Charmed Circle” of “good, normal, natural” sex. Rubin outlines the differences between taboo and accepted sexual practices in her 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” even providing a succinct chart to illustrate her argument.

Image Credit: University of Victoria

The press positions Prince Harry’s sexuality in Rubin’s “Outer Limits,” or, what dominant culture often deems “bad, abnormal, unnatural” sex. Since the images depict the young prince alongside several similarly unclothed women, media sources accuse him of participating in casual, promiscuous, and unmarried sex. His activities are seen as non-procreative and in a group, as opposed to within a relationship. Rubin’s writing might explain why journalistic rhetoric holds Prince Harry culpable for his own photos while exonerating the Duchess of Cambridge: his body is linked to non-normative sex, and hers isn’t.

Some tabloid websites, including The Hollywood Gossip, suggest that the leak of Harry’s photos “constitutes an epic failure on his handlers’ part.” The website argues that both Prince Harry and his “people” were “either clueless or careless” by not forcing the women with whom Harry was pictured to hand over their phones before the party began. This article implicitly raises the issue of control, blaming Harry for failing to reign in not only his own behavior, but the actions of those around him as well. This terminology of bodily control evokes the logic of Cartesian dualism, in which the activity of the mind gets contrasted with the inert body. The Cartesian theorization of the body typically reads corporeality in “naturalistic, organic, passive, inert terms, seeing it as an intrusion on or interference with the operation of the mind, a brute givenness which requires overcoming” (Grosz 3-4). Western philosophy typically construes the body as a blank slate onto which cultural norms get projected, or, as formless matter awaiting shape from the thinking mind.

Image Credit: PerezHilton.com

In being shocked by the prince’s lack of control, casting him as “careless,” the rhetoric of many journalists links up with the long-standing tradition of viewing the body as brute matter in need of discipline. Relying on and perpetuating the logics of Cartesian binarism, websites like The Hollywood Gossip condemn the prince because he refuses to “overcome” bodily excess. Because this rhetoric suggests the prince possesses an out-of-control corporeality, he is feminized. To return again to Grosz’s explication of Cartesianism, she points out that within the mind/body distinction, the “coupling of mind with maleness” leads to the association of “the body with femaleness” (4). Masculinity is graced with knowledge, thought, and enlightened rationalism, and femininity is bound to bodily excess. Unlike his sister-in-law, whose marital status the press seizes as an example of control and discipline (affording to her the privilege of masculinity’s “disavowal of the body”?), Prince Harry is constructed in feminine terminology by popular rhetoric (Grosz 4).

My final thoughts on this matter concern how the actions of the popular press affect even the most pedestrian, un-famous individuals (like you or me). The now ubiquitous claim that the press wronged Kate Middleton by invading her privacy has suggestive ramifications. By saying that photographers breached her privacy we imply that privacy is somehow sacred, or a space where an individual can exert control over their body. Does this association between privacy and autonomy correlate to the idea that publicity is not sacred? Put another way: if Middleton should have been protected under the guise of her privacy, would she not be protected in a public setting? I’ll admit, the question sounds a bit silly. But, I’d like to believe that even in public spaces we have the right to control our bodies, how they are represented, and what’s done to them. Personally, I would rather frame the issue in terms of consent: the widespread publication of these photos troubles me because neither Prince Harry nor the Duchess of Cambridge were given the opportunity to consent to the literally global display of their bodies.

Visual Rhetoric, Inhuman Gazes, and the TSA

Megan Eatman — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 16:56:57 +0000

Image via TripAdvisor

As the first big travel week of the holiday season approaches, there has been much discussion about the TSA’s new body scanners and “enhanced pat downs.” There is a lot to be said about both the scanners themselves and the images that comment on the controversy, so in this post I will highlight some points of interest to inspire discussion about conceptions of the gaze and uses of the image.

The TSA’s “advanced imaging technology” is now in 68 airports nationwide, including Washington Dulles, John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia, Los Angeles International, Chicago O’Hare and Boston Logan. The procedure has clearly been designed to counter privacy objections; a remote officer views the image, so he/she cannot match passenger to body scan. But for some, the very act of entering a scanner that produces this image is invasive. The gaze that assaults these travelers is disembodied and mechanical—not literally the same as, for example, an officer “touching your junk”—but it retains the invasive quality of a willful human gaze. It is, of course, a willful institutional gaze, which can feel equally if not more threatening; it makes the argument that individuals can be told to expose their bodies, even when those individuals are not under any particular suspicion.

The use of images to comment on the new security procedures is particularly interesting. FlyWithDignity.org uses provocative images in its ads to cover a variety of objections. While only one addresses body scans, it is especially creative:

Image: FlyWithDignity.org

Their other images illustrate objections to the enhanced pat downs. Both show women who appear traumatized by the invasive reach of gloved hands.

The use of only women in these images makes a potentially problematic argument, but one that could persuade a wide audience through an obvious allusion to sexual assault and trauma.

One last visual argument uses Xtranormal, which Ashley discussed in a recent blog post, to construct an argument against the TSA's new procedures. While I find videos made with Xtranormal basically unwatchable (in spite of my love for robot voices), this one provides an interesting contrast to the images above. The robot voices and limited gestural capabilities of the animated figures contrast with the very real emotions and bodies involved. This format can draw attention to issues of privacy and trauma without sensationalizing, which could be useful in a debate that can easily devolve into accusations of oversensitivity. Additionally, while I find the computer voices maddening, that irritation could be, in part, a positive rhetorical effect, since the video portrays a frustratingly hopeless conversation.

We Feel Fine

EmilyBloom — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:44:26 +0000

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

H/T: Stephanie Rosen

I spent an inordinate amount of time today on Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s thought-provoking website, We Feel Fine. This website scans, or in their words “harvests,” weblogs for statements with the phrase “I feel.” Each of these statements is then represented as a colorful “particle” and organized into a variety of visual and statistical data. The website generates fascinating examples of how people communicate about feelings and gives a powerful impression of both the diversity and similarity among affective statements online. It also raises important questions about privacy. The statements and images on We Feel Fine are from blogs, MySpace and Flickr. Harvested statements whose writers’ also posted images are represented as a “Montage” with the text embedded in the image. Site users can then save and send these postcard-like pieces. For both its creative design and surveillance techniques, We Feel Fine provokes interesting questions regarding affect, privacy and online writing.

Image Credit: We Feel Fine

One of the amazing, and time-sucking, capacities of this site is the endless combinations of categories that users can search. With the options to search among 3,428 feelings, numerous locations (countries, states and cities), genders, ages, weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy) and dates, there are countless possible research queries. How do women feel in the UK when it’s cloudy? How do people in New York describe their apathy? What were people feeling in the US in the months leading up to the 2008 elections?

I thought it would be interesting, in the context of this website, to see who feels “rhetorical” and how they describe this feeling. Although there were only 38 people who felt rhetorical since data collection began in 2005, the responses show interesting uses of the word. While many wrote about feelings towards rhetoric assignments, one of my favorite particles reads, “I feel like throwing some rhetorical grenades.” The implications of data such as this is not always readily apparent and is clouded by the somewhat eerie concept of "harvesting" feelings, but as a means for exploring a specific phrase like "rhetorical," it is a fascinating resource.

“When people talk, General Hayden listens”

John Jones — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:52:19 +0000

Mark Fiore has posted a satirical cartoon on the role of telecoms in the warrant-less wiretapping controversy. The cartoon stars Snuggly the Security Bear and CIA Director, General Michael Hayden.

via Boing Boing

You are your grades

LaurenMitchell — Mon, 05 May 2008 03:43:15 +0000

This New York Times article discusses the implications of new online systems that allow parents to monitor their children’s grades and attendance.

Titled “I know what you did last Math class,” the article explains that sometimes parents know the results of their children’s tests before they do. Many parents check the system on a daily basis, although some opt not to use the system at all. There are clearly some fantastic advantages to be had from such a system—for working or divorced parents, for students that need a lot of motivation, as well as for detecting warning signs of other problems that the child might be experiencing.

As a surveillance issue this is especially worrisome because these children are essentially becoming their grades. There is no contextual information for the grades. One mother commented that, “’There’s nothing telling you that your kid loves the class but isn’t a good test taker.’” And in a time when the preparation for and pressure surrounding college admissions is beyond ludicrous, it seems to me that creating this sort of relationship with learning and grades will only worsen the situation.

The article comes down with the conclusion that the systems can be very useful if used correctly, but it can be very damaging to the parent-child relationship as well as the learning atmosphere. I think this is a bit excessive for most students. But if you have a child that is deceiving you constantly, this clearly would be a helpful tool. I’m left wondering should we just get used to the advantages and disadvantages of having this much information about each other?