E35: Epicrisis for an epic crisis (w/ James J. Brown, Jr.)

With COVID-19 necessarily reducing our face-to-face interaction, we are increasingly reliant on digital tools -- from conferencing software like Zoom to social networks like Twitter -- to mediate our social, political, and cultural lives. Yet each digital tool brings along specific rhetorical affordances and constraints, a topic that few scholars have studied more closely in recent years than our guest, James J. Brown, Jr. (@jamesjbrownjr), Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University.

In a remote conversation, Calvin and James discuss the continuing relevance of notions of digital hospitality and ethos from James's 2015 book Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software, as well as new research James is conducting on the problem of harassment on communication platforms -- from early-20th-century phone network subscribers to today's Twitter trolls. As part of this work, James's new piece in Amodern, "Epicrisis for an Epic Crisis", analyzes rhetorical strategies used by women and people of color to comment on and catalogue instances of bad communicative behavior on platforms and networks. Along the way, we touch upon the value of records, fantasy baseball, and videogames at times like these, as well as why Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is the undisputed master of the quote-tweet. 

@tressiemcphd’s quote-tweet-thread in response to James’s article

Works and concepts cited in this episode

Brock Jr, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (Vol. 9). NYU Press.

Brown, J. J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.

Brown, J. J. (2020). Epicrisis for an epic crisis. Amodern, 9.

Campbell, K. K. (2005). Agency: Promiscuous and protean. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2(1), 1-19.

Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford University Press.

Hyde, M. J. (Ed.). (2004). The ethos of rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press.

Lanham, R. A. (1991). A handlist of rhetorical terms. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rollins, B. (2005). The ethics of epideictic rhetoric: Addressing the problem of presence through Derrida's funeral orations. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(1), 5-23.

Rosenfield, L. W. (1980). The practical celebration of epideictic. Rhetoric in transition: Studies in the nature and uses of rhetoric, 131-55.

Walker, J. (2000). Rhetoric and poetics in antiquity. Oxford University Press.