In this edition of reading notes I would like to take to task the article of Lester Faigley, "Rhetorics Fast and Slow." While I am not opposed to some of his viewpoints, I see the article as a view of a man who has a problem with change overall.
First, I would like to analyze his list (Faigley 6, CP 51) of how his life is "too fast." First I would like to state that his list is entirely subjective. Having a cell phone, being occupied by email, and impatience are all a lifestyle choices that can be altered. Who says you have to make your cell phone more than an emergency device? Who says you have to check your email as much as you do? All of these things can be changed to however he would like to do them. Check your email once or twice a day, near the end, and send what you need to. Don't answer leisurely cell calls.
My point is this: life is only as fast as you make it. But his analog of life being too fast, rhetoric, and the problems of every day life is a bit of a red herring. As I see it, fast rhetoric is today's electronic media: cells, emails, and other sorts of instant media, whereas slow rhetoric is books, letters, and ideas that take time. Faigley himself states that fast rhetoric is quite possibly the downfall of society as we now know it: "fast rhetorics are manifestation of a culture that suffers from A.D.D., a culture where things are quickly used and discarded, a culture where abuse of the environment and gaping inadequacies are ignored." He cites that global warming, of all things, is a problem caused by fast rhetorics. Honestly, I don't see the connection.
Global Warming as we know it today is caused by carbon dioxide emissions from multiple man made sources, such as vehicles, factories, and other fossil fuel burning. How does Faigley make the connection to fast rhetoric? Is it because we as humans shoved it to the back of our minds with other issues that were spread through fast rhetoric? Is it that the facts were watered down through fast rhetoric? Was there a "spin" put on it by lawmakers, in the conventional rhetoric sense? While I'll agree with him on the lawmaking side of the issue, I see that fast rhetoric would only make the problem more prevalent through information spreading quicker. Just this Friday, the IPCC, the leading science community with the task of studying global warming processes, released its latest report on Friday. It is widely available on the internet for all to read. If we were still back in the day of telegraphs and the Pony Express, information to create this report would take much longer to assemble. Policy makers would have no basis for stopping a problem that began during the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, not the INFORMATION AGE.
Faigley comes off in his article as nothing more than a senile old man yelling at children from his porch to get off of his lawn. He needs to adjust to today's world. MAKE time for your personal pleasures. Make the world your own oyster, and you can create with it more than what was possible just 10 years ago. The information age helps solve our problems, not enhancing them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
"Having a cell phone, being occupied by email, and impatience are all a lifestyle choices that can be altered. Who says you have to make your cell phone more than an emergency device? Who says you have to check your email as much as you do? All of these things can be changed to however he would like to do them."
You have a great point here. When talking about fast rhetoric/new media, etc., we have to guard against technological determinism, which suggests that technology on its own is shaping (for better or worse) our world and our selves. As you rightly suggest, technology works only (or mostly) in relation to a user. Still, there's an argument to be made that technologies use us at the same time we use them.
Interestingly, Faigley's argument about climate change may in fact stear him away from the sort of tech determinism we see earlier in the essay. Since we are causing climate change, he argues, we have the capacity to do something about it.
Post a Comment