I chose to pursue a career in the American academy because it allowed me to pursue my two chief passions: teaching and learning. I tried my hand in the sales world, but found my work unfulfilling. After a brief stint in the music industry and working some odd jobs, I chose to pursue my BA in Rhetoric and Composition at Georgia Gwinnett College.
When I began studying rhetoric in my English BA program, I was resuming a program of study I had begun in middle school. I attended a joint middle/high school program that emphasized a classical Greek education—logic, literature, and the spoken word were my world for those six years. When I began to study theorists including Michel Foucault, Kenneth Burke, Roland Barthes, and Marshall Mcluhan, I began to develop a more analytical, reasoned approach to my understanding of complex systems and the ways in which they influence our daily lives.
After graduating from Georgia Gwinnett College, I was accepted into the Communication department at Georgia State University to pursue my MA in Human Communication and Social Influence. In that program, I focused on media effects and rhetorical criticism. After completing my MA, I continued my education at Georgia State, joining the PhD program in Rhetoric and Politics in the Communication Department. I am currently in my second year of the program, studying rhetorical theory, media, and philosophy.
I am an active member of the Communication community, and I have attended the National Communication Association and its regional conference (SSCA). I have attended smaller, boutique conferences as well, usually presenting on the intersection between rhetoric and technology. I also serve as a reviewer for the NCA’s Rhetorical and Communication Theory division. I am also involved in the GSU chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America, and I have served as an officer in the Communication department’s graduate student organization (CGSA).
Rhetoric and Technology
Rhetoric is a social practice, finding the possible means of persuasion in any given communication context. As a socially-bound practice, rhetoric has a reciprocal relationship with technology. As new technologies arrive on the social scene, they allow for new means of communication or alter the doxa of a society. Scholars like Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Elizabeth Eisenstein have traced the connections between technological innovations like the printing press and the rhetorical possibilities of a given epoch. For my part, I explore the ways digital communication technologies allow new forms of being-together to emerge from discourse. I see the connection between rhetoric and technology existing at the ontological level—both structure our experience and influence our epistime.
Conspiracy Culture
Conspiracy culture has a long history in the United States. Though some would trace the emergence of conspiracy culture to the JFK assassination, I see conspiracy culture being a part of American culture from the outset—the declaration of independence is in many ways a response to a conspiracy to tax without representation. American law, from the outset, has been interested in transparency and quashing conspiracies. Today, the term “conspiracy” conjures images of wild-eyed lunatics screaming about black helicopters. I see conspiracy culture differently. For many Americans, conspiracy culture offers a form of myth-making that attempts to grapple with questions of agency, privacy, and power in a hopelessly confusing world. As such, conspiracy culture often acts as a weathervane in American politics, showing deep-seated discontents before they hit the mainstream of American culture.
Post/Transhumanism
“I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more. —John Cavil, Cylon Model Number One, “No Exit”
My politics are derived chiefly from the injunction of Donna Haraway that we are all cyborgs now. In response to this ontological condition, we must move beyond essentialized and essentializing models of humanity to embrace a future beyond the limits imposed by natural selection. I do not believe in a teleology or destiny for the human race; except that we must always exceed ourselves if we wish to prosper.
In addition to my scholarly work, I also engage in special projects from time to time that are designed to promote brain change. Following the work of Dr. Timothy Leary and the American philosopher R.A. Wilson, I actively work to disrupt and distort the “reality tunnels” that I inhabit. Consciousness is a complex function of inputs and outputs, and changing the input changes the output with remarkable efficiency. Using social media as a vehicle, I like to broadcast these exercises in an attempt to show that perceptual and ideological structures can be altered or abolished if they do not serve our interests. Some examples of these projects include:
Geomantic Survey Corps
Together with the Third Floor Society, a Georgia-based art collective, the Geomantic Survey Corps runs a pop-up event called FLAGS! In this piece, we bring a large number of blank yellow flags to an outdoor event like a music festival or a town-square event. We distribute the flags with customization materials and encourage people to carry the flags with them, trade flags with others, and customize their own flags.
The point of the project is to cause productive alienation with the flags. Flags are so present in our lives and they are powerful semantic tools used for purposes both communal and imperialistic. By breaking the chain of signification with a blank flag, we present the individual with a choice. Any meaning in the flag must be created and reinforced by the holder of the flag, producing meaning in an intentional, rather than automatic, way. By causing the moment of alienation from the object, we show flag-holders the arbitrary nature of national symbols, hopefully clearing the way for a more thoughtful engagement with our national flag.