Introduction Video

Readings, Discussions and Prompts

I apologize for this post’s length -- I wanted to walk through my thoughts/questions/other inquiries regarding the class discussions and readings up until my thoughts for the blog prompt.

For last Wednesday's class, I read about half of Gorgias, and when I did that, one of the things that stuck out to me was how Socrates tried to prove/persuade the rhetoricians that philosophy was the right way of seeing things. When I first read about that, I immediately remembered that in the rhetorical lens a person cannot “prove” anything since that word is a societal/Discursive construct that is (I think) also based off of objectification from scientific Discourses as well.

Then during our class discussions for that day, I thought of the possibility that rhetoric creates good speakers and how that line between good and bad is possibly blurred. It made me think about people like Adolf Hitler and how their speeches to persuade people to take their side could be blurred between good and bad (AKA depend on perspective). For example, to Hitler his speech was a good thing because he got people to listen to his ways and to obey his every word. However, for other people, his persuasion was a bad thing. In this circumstance, I also began to think of intent and in what lens people need to be looking through in order to say something is adequately qualified as good or bad.

For Friday’s class when I finished Gorgias, I began to really see that Socrates and the rhetoricians are (I think) in two separate Discourse Communities. To be totally honest, I was annoyed by Socrates' behavior. I thought he was arrogant when he insisted that his way right and other people’s perspectives were wrong. I think the reason why he failed to persuade them was because he failed to try to understand the reasons behind their passions for rhetoric. He failed to understand their values, their passion, their beliefs, their ways of thinking, their discursive language etc.,. And because refused to listen to them openly, he came off as arrogant and rude to me. I feel that in order to persuade either party, they needed to be more open minded instead of being blinded by their own values.

In class we discussed what point in the text (Gorgias) that we felt where either party was persuaded and I personally felt that neither of them succeeded in being persuaded to take either side. As iterated in my previous paragraph, I felt that if they tried to be open minded then maybe they could perhaps be open to the values of the other person. However, as I think about this now, I wonder if that could be possible. I wonder if maybe the strength of one’s beliefs/values could be strong enough to where they are not willing to be open minded to another person’s values. I wonder if one can truly shut off their mind and their heart to see the point of the view of the other person. I can only speak from my perspective, but whenever I read an academic document and/or in the mindset to acquire new knowledge, I don’t have any of my internal Discursive voices yelling back at the writer in the text. …. I wonder if maybe respecting the other person and looking at what they have to say as potential knowledge building opportunities can help open that gap between Discourses.

If I were to compare this to today’s society, I think I would compare the lens interaction within Gorgias to when two people who are set in their values/ways of thinking/ways of believing are in an argument and neither of them are willing to see eye-to-eye. And in relation to our class, I wonder if maybe this could point to people in an online platform using language that people who are not familiar with an online platform would not understand.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t persuaded by either lens in Gorgias because none of them spoke to my ways of thinking, valuing or believing. To be honest I think I’d be more likely to listen to Socrates if he tried to be more open minded or if he tried to use the discourse of academic journals that I’m used to reading.

Lastly, I wanted to take all of what I said to apply it to the prompt and Michelle’s statement by j. Kastely: “Rhetoric is committed to radical indeterminancy. Rhetoric thus becomes the art of rendering the radical indeterminate determinate. If you have an art that allows you to be reformed as the situation changes, you have a powerful art.”

Based off of Monday's reading by Michele Shauf, I began to think about how people can use the language of multimedia to communicate with other people. The article mentioned how the writer can invent an image and arrange it in a text. That bit of information made me wonder about how that image can possibly speak to specific Discourses/Discourse communities so that they can possibly be persuaded through ethos, pathos and logos through the different focuses of their values in which could influence what interpretations and meanings they get from the text. Not only that, but it also makes me think about how technology in multimedia is constantly changing. Because of that change, writers will (possibly) have to constantly adjust their content to better fit the values of their audience in order to continue knowledge construction and to further the conversations with those different audiences than when the texts were written.