Rhetoric Society of America 2016 – Jim Ridolfo and Bill Hart-Davidson

#RHETOPS: Weaponizing Rhetoric

Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson

Rhetoric Society of America

Sunday, May 29, 2016

Jim – Thank you all for coming. Bill and I had two goals for Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities – First, to make knowledge about digital work in rhetorical studies more known to other areas of what faculty in literature, history, philosophy defines as DH, and second to help internationalize North American rhetorical studies by communicating knowledge about what constitutes rhetoric at the intersection of the digital humanities to scholars in DH abroad. For most of our recent work, when digital projects are infused with PIs in rhetorical studies, conversations about audience, discourse, stakeholder communities are foregrounded. While Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities is about our effort to communicate and amplify our field identity to other humanities stakeholders, Bill and I have also been keeping an eye on how the digital role of rhetoric is being reimagined outside of academia.

To this end, for our next project tentatively titled #rhetops, we want to examine the digital intersections of rhetoric and war, rhetoric and asymmetrical conflict. Since 2007, Bill and I have been sharing with each other trends in how rhetoric, especially digital rhetoric, is adapted as a tool in asymmetrical conflict and often alongside or in support of violence. On the way, in rhetorical studies we’ve been influenced by scholarship such as Edwards and Hart’s 2010 Kairos special issue on rhetoric and the military, William Marcellino’s “2015 “Revisioning Strategic Communication through Rhetoric and Discourse Analysis” in Joint Forces Quarterly, and our interest in how the term rhetoric has increased in theses, dissertations, and articles in the Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL).

Since June 11, 2013 and with the much appreciated support of a dozen colleagues,* we have “slow sourced” examples of how digital rhetoric intersects with asymmetrical conflict (with examples on Twitter and Facebook under the hashtag #rhetops), and have documented approximately 200 examples of #rhetops, or what we loosely define as the overt or covert use of digital rhetoric’s affordances to support military operations by state or non-state actors, or how rhetorical knowledge is weaponized or used in conflict situations, such as:

Hashtag policing
Data-mining social media and discourse relations for military purposes
Digital propaganda initiatives, especially around shaping perception and group emotion
Distributed composing and distribution for military purposes
Field manuals on how to use social media, especially behavioral triggers, geolocation technology
Physical and electronic attacks on infrastructure
Government initiatives designed around the military use of digital media, especially social media
And more

Here’s what we are seeing. Just as digital rhetoric amplifies compositional and rhetorical trends that existed in print and manuscript culture (i.e., composing for recomposition), it also enables new and inexpensive ways to weaponize rhetoric in support of brick and mortar conflicts. As with composing with recomposition, the role of rhetoric in war is not new. Rhetoric has always had a well documented role in arguments for and against war, arguments for military resources, arguments to motivate and inspire troops, to strike fear into the heart of the enemy, to spread disinformation and propaganda. However, what we think is new are the evolving ways in which rhetoric can be digitally-deployed, and how rhetoric or messaging is discussed as a critical tool worthy of military investment.

WHY DIGITAL MILITARY RHETORIC

Ami Pedahzur, drawing on Theo Farrell, writes that the growth of special operations forces after World War Two are due in part to their relative affordability, ability to be constituted and disbanded quickly, and “alert, agile, and responsive to continual stimuli” and thus their human capital makes them an “ideal vehicle for for exploration and innovation” of new tactics and capabilities (16). Here, we see a parallel here between how Pedahzur discusses special operations forces and recent conversations on how messaging should be deployed in asymmetrical conflicts with non-state actors. First, most of these initiatives are experimental and rely primarily on human intelligence and ready-at-hand digital production and dissemination technologies. Second, based off the recent estimates at the failed human terrain system (HTS) experiments which was priced at $750 million for the life of the program, collectively these human initiatives are cheap when compared to the development and maintenance of most physical weapons platforms. We see calls for #rhetops initiatives that are short lived, highly specific to a certain mission, agile, and rapidly created and disbanded.

For example, in an analysis of IS media operations, the Soufan group notes in November 2014 “The Islamic State is crowd sourcing its propaganda… in a counterintuitive move, The Islamic State has maximized control of its message by giving up control of its delivery” (51). Six months later on July 6, 2015, President Obama discussed his strategy for fighting IS after a Pentagon briefing by top commanders, outlining not only airstrikes and supporting local forces on the ground but also placed a strong emphasis on rhetorical strategy online:

“As I’ve said before — and I know our military leaders agree — this broader challenge of countering violent extremism is not simply a military effort. Ideologies are not defeated with guns; they’re defeated by better ideas — a more attractive and more compelling vision. So the United States will continue to do our part, by working with partners to counter ISIL’s hateful propaganda, especially online. “ (10:47 – 11:36).

On July 9, 2015, US Central Command published an announcement that the US and UAE had launched an “online messaging, engagement center to counter ISIL” called The Sawab Center (Arabic for “that which is right”).

The mission of the center is to “create and share its content, including text, graphics, video clips and animations. Since its launch in 2015, The Sawab Center has consistently produced infographics, about a dozen short videos, tweeted over 4,000 times, and has a current audience of almost 69,000 followers. Initiatives such as these seem to be on the President’s mind. In his April 2016 interview with President Obama in The Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg writes that the President “thinks rhetoric should be weaponized sparingly, if at all, in today’s more ambiguous and complicated international arena” although we already see some selective examples such as the Sawab Center.

The Sawab Center is just one recent, visible, state-sponsored initiative focused almost exclusively on digital rhetoric and military conflict. We note however that just as the enthymeme functions as a hidden premise, or an under-judgment of delivery (Holmberg, 138), there are also a slew of digital #rhetops that are intentionally and unintentionally more difficult for audiences to evaluate and assign motive and authorship. We reference the growing trend of distributed composition that Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo noted in their 2007 Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty report “The War of Images and Ideas” on the media of the Sunni insurgency:

“Insurgents’ willingness to forego a centralized brick-and-mortar production infrastructure and their reliance on the Internet as the primary distribution channel for their media products have led to the emergence of a decentralized, building-block production model in which virtually any individual or group can design a media product to serve insurgent aims and goals…One or more individuals working anywhere in the world can create everything else. (pp. 34–35)

In the current conflicts in Syria and Iraq, it’s sometimes difficult for outsiders to discern the complexities of collaborative authorship and distribution. For example, see on rsa.rhetops.org a few case examples, such as the recent case of a Free Syrian Army video of ambiguous authorship or Syrian anti-emigration billboards. Who composed these texts? Who paid for their production? The answer is not immediately clear.

FOG OF DIGITAL RHETORIC

What this distributed composing and delivery amounts to, we argue, is a fog of digital rhetoric that itself becomes a rhetorical situation that state and non-state actors strategically compose into and attempt to navigate. By fog of rhetoric, we mean that the distributed composing, delivery, and circulation of #rhetops material by state and non-state actors creates conditions ripe for doubt regarding purpose and motivation, as well as speculation about sponsorship and authorship.**

— Jim Ridolfo

#RhetOps: Where Do We Stand?

Bill – I want to follow Jim’s discussion with two specific trends that add urgency to our call for colleagues in rhetoric studies to take up serious study of #rhetops and in doing so, connect this topic to the kinds of work you can find in the Rhetoric & Digital Humanities collection.

The first is the massive, disruptive potential that social media provides to engage in what Jim (Ridolfo, 2012) has described elsewhere as a strategic act of delivery: composing for appropriation. In their article on “rhetorical velocity,” Ridolfo & Devoss (2009) theorize the way networks provide not only the means to publish but also to push a message such that it spreads further and faster. Seeking this “push” – aiming for others to see and share a message in whole or with some modifications is an act of multimodal composition. There are a number of reasons for this, including the increasing appetite for sound and visual media in social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

But an ethical question arises from it: what responsibilities do those of us who teach digital rhetoric and multimodal composing have to anticipate and prepare students for the dark side of digital composing?

Jim and I first began using that phrase – the dark side of digital composing – in the aftermath of the tragic Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people before taking his own life. You may recall that Cho targeted people in two different buildings on the Virgina Tech campus: one a dorm and the other a classroom building. In between the two sets of attacks, he stopped to mail a package at the post office. It was a digital portfolio. sent to NBC news, the package contained photos of Cho posing with weapons, several video clips including one that became known as a “confession” video that now has nearly 3 million views on YouTube, and other materials. He’d spent quite some time planning not only the violent attack but also the way the words and images that characterize it and his own identity would be presented and circulated. The attacks themselves were “image events” meant to give the messages Cho intended to circulate a massive push. Today, we can see that this was an act of multimodal composition with a deadly strategy for achieving rhetorical velocity. It was and is horrific.

As teachers of digital rhetoric, the example struck Jim and I with a force similar to the example Steven Katz (1992) provides in his article on the ethic of expediency in technical communication. As scholars, we saw that theorizing and understanding the ethical dimensions of digital composing must involve careful examinations of the deliberate use of digital composing in situations that involve violence. Further, we should work toward articulating principles that guide our work as scholars and teachers of digital rhetoric as we see the ability for our disciplinary knowledge to become weaponized.

The second trend I want to call out is one that another of our colleagues on the panel, Ryan Omizo, will say more about in a moment: the rise of robots. I will keep my own comments brief, but I want to note that since the late 1970’s, rhetoric and writing studies has taken artificial intelligence and its influence on human rhetorical activity seriously, but only occasionally. Carolyn Miller (1978, 1992, 2003, 2007, 2010), and Lynette Hunter (1991, 2002) are two significant voices in this conversation, along with Kennedy (2009; Kennedy & Long, 2015). Miller, in particular, has kept a very important question before us: wherein lies human rhetorical agency when machines and humans write together (Miller, 2007).

The landscape of machine rhetorics encompasses not a future but, to borrow an oft-cited phrase from cyberpunk fiction writer William Gibson, the unevenly distributed present day circumstances of “assistive writing technologies” – commonly known as ‘bots – that are increasingly incorporated into the writing process. Advanced ‘bots are already in use by news wire services to draft sports and financial reports (Van Dalen, 2012). We may soon live in a world where most day-to-day writing tasks do not begin with a human creating a first draft, but with a machine assembling one from a personal – that is, built from one’s lifetime activity as a writer – archive of words (Walker, et. al., 2010).

In conflict situations, ‘bots can impersonate human actors, they can be employed to institute what appear to be popular campaigns on social media (often called astroturfing or sockpuppeting), among other possibilities. Machine learning and network modeling can also be employed to find military targets by locating “influencers,” those human actors who hold significant persuasive power over others in a particular community.

The tactics may not be new, but the tools to train these machine learners do not exist apart from the expertise and knowledge represented in this room and at this conference. Our formulations, our rubrics, our text corpuses, our data sets are needed to proceed with a rhetorical education for killer robots. Our work to monitor #rhetops as a category of activity reported via social media tells us that we may already be part of this activity, whether most of us know it or not. And so it is time, we believe, to be directly involved in how our disciplinary knowledge is used.

How should digital writers, teachers of digital writing and rhetoric, and scholars of rhetoric think about the world populated with networked, cyborg writers? How should we talk about writing with machines as the ability of machines to deploy rhetorical strategies – often at humans’ explicit request – grows more sophisticated?

What should we teach these machines to do? How should we teach them? We have long recognized the perils of a rhetorical education for humans that is devoid of ethical reasoning, but we now must take seriously a new set of responsibilities to teach machines what to do and what not do with powerful rhetorical strategies.

— Bill Hart-Davidson

*such as Tim Amidon, Jen Michaels, Janice Fernheimer, Les Hutchinson, Douglas Walls, James Schirmer, John Gagnon, Brian McNely, Ryan Omizo, Christa Teston, Steven Alvarez, Matt Penniman, and more)

**Enoch, Gold, Cushman, to name a few.

*** For discussions about origin and circulation, see Ridolfo and Rife 2011 and Gries 2015

Works cited

Gries, Laurie E. “Iconographic tracking: A digital research method for visual rhetoric and circulation studies.” Computers and Composition 30.4 (2013): 332-348.

Holmberg, Carl B. “Some available conceptions of rhetorical experience.”Rhetoric Society Quarterly 10.3 (1980): 135-142.

Hunter, L. (1991). Rhetoric and artificial intelligence. Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, 9(4), 317-340.

Hunter, L. (2002). Critiques of Knowing: Situated textualities in science, computing and the arts. Routledge.

Katz, S. B. (1992). The ethic of expediency: Classical rhetoric, technology, and the Holocaust. College English, 54(3), 255-275.

Kennedy, K. A. (2009). Textual curators and writing machines: Authorial agency in encyclopedias, print to digital (Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota).

Kennedy, K., & Long, S. (2015). The Trees within the Forest: Extracting, Coding, and Visualizing Subjective Data in Authorship Studies. Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, 140. Ridolfo, J., & Hart-Davidson, W. (Eds). Rhetoric and the digital humanities. University of Chicago Press.

Kimmage, Daniel, and Kathleen Ridolfo. Iraqi insurgent media: The war of images and ideas: How Sunni insurgents in Iraq and their supporters worldwide are using the media. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2007.

Miller, C. R. (1978). Technology as a form of consciousness: A study of contemporary ethos. Communication Studies, 29(4), 228-236.

Miller, C. R. (1994). Opportunity, opportunism, and progress: Kairos in the rhetoric of technology. Argumentation, 8(1), 81-96.

Miller, C. R. (2003). Writing in a Culture of Simulation. Towards a rhetoric of everyday life: New directions in research on writing, text, and discourse, 58.

Miller, C. R. (2007). What can automation tell us about agency?. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37(2), 137-157.

Miller, C. R. (2010). Should we name the tools? Concealing and revealing the art of rhetoric. The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, 19-38.

Perelman, L. (2012). Construct validity, length, score, and time in holistically graded writing assessments: The case against automated essay scoring (AES). International advances in writing research: Cultures, places, measures, 121-131.

Ridolfo, J. (2012). Rhetorical delivery as strategy: Rebuilding the fifth canon from practitioner stories. Rhetoric Review, 31(2), 117-129.

Ridolfo, Jim, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 13.2 (2009): n2.

Ridolfo, Jim, and Martine Courant Rife. “12 RHETORICAL VELOCITY AND COPYRIGHT: A CASE STUDY ON STRATEGIES OF RHETORICAL DELIVERY.” Copy () Copy (write): 223.
Sheridan, David Michael, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel. The available means of persuasion: Mapping a theory and pedagogy of multimodal public rhetoric. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2012.

Van Dalen, A. (2012). The algorithms behind the headlines: How machine-written news redefines the core skills of human journalists. Journalism Practice, 6(5-6), 648-658.