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Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era: How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age

McKain, Aaron M.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339761282

Abstract Details

2012, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
This dissertation begins with a question that sits – obstinately – at the crossroads of 21st century American politics and 21st century scholarship in rhetoric and composition: How do we make judgments about rhetoric when new media (social-networking, web 2.0, ease of audio/visual production) have rendered our long-standing public norms of ethos untenable? This is the dilemma lurking behind the daily parade of new media acts that we, as citizens, are expected to judge: From co-workers caught mid-kegstand on Facebook to politicians trapped in the YouTube minefield of decontextualized and mashed-up gaffes. But ethos points to a larger concern as well: At the precise moment where technology has given us, as a citizens, unparalleled power to act as rhetorical critics -- when anyone with a laptop and dial-up connection can effortlessly remediate, remix, and repurpose rhetorical acts from one context to another – we are uncertain about what the new rules of rhetoric are? How do we rethink ethos – in terms of character -- for a heavily surveilled, socially-networked age, where the distinctions between public and private are nebulous and all of our previous public performances are always only a Google search away? Concerned that our current, mass media age, standards for judging ethos as character (e.g., as authenticity, as the search for the “real” person) are both deadlocking our politics and providing no vocabulary of resistance to the new media era’s twin industries of information-gathering and surveillance, this dissertation proceeds in three stages in order to present a solution. First, using U.S. presidential campaigns in the new media era as a canonical political and pop cultural text, it zeroes in on two particular crises of ethos: the impossibility of maintaining a coherent public persona (e.g. Gov. Mitt Romney versus the internet archive) and the erosion of the line between what is public and what is private (e.g., Sen. John McCain). Second, it turns to an underexplored area of American politics – aesthetics – to consider how the continued embrace of now forty year old, postmodern political aesthetics (e.g., metafiction, the New Journalism) prevents us from updating and re-conceptualizing our notions of political ethos. Finally, drawing on these observations, Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era proposes a heuristic to rethink our judgments of ethos: A critical updating of the “Chicago School” narrative model of communication. Arguing for this narrative model academically (via debates within the digital humanities on the issue of posthumanism), politically (using Stephen Colbert as a test case of ethos and new media era American politics ), and pedagogically (as a method of teaching ethos in rhetoric and composition classrooms), this project lobbies for a rethinking of our judgments of ethos that (1) better navigates the complexities of our new rhetorical landscapes; (2) is more in sync with the post-postmodern aesthetics of the digital media age; and (3) triangulates, as a pedagogy of resistance for citizens and students, the legal, political, and ethical values of ethos that new media – through our judgments of even its most mundane acts – invite us to acquiesce to.
James Phelan, PhD (Committee Co-Chair)
Cynthia Selfe, PhD (Committee Co-Chair)
Wendy Hesford, PhD (Committee Member)
190 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • McKain, A. M. (2012). Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era: How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339761282

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • McKain, Aaron. Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era: How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age. 2012. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339761282.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • McKain, Aaron. "Fear and Loathing in the New Media Era: How to Realign Our Rhetorical Judgments for the Post-Postmodern, Digital Media Age." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339761282

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1339761282
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© 2012, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.