Literature Review - Dani Ploeger, Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences: Everyday Technologies in Extreme Circumstances

Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences is acaptivating critique on consumer culture and the role technology plays, and canplay, in our understanding of the world around us and ourselves. Dani Ploeger’scollection of essays offer a guided tour of items and memories, like a livingmemory box. These writings probe our relationships with devices and what they representin our culture; from mobile phones to projectors, from smart fences to strap-ondildos. Ploeger’s provocation unravels from the journey of a device; to theintertwining of the human and non-human technology, shifting gears to the symbolismand mythology of military and state devices of control, closing with thecultural interaction with architectural decisions made in urban landscapes.Although seemingly grand, and without a doubt ambitious, in subject matter,Ploeger evokes the tone of memoir, incorporating reflections of his travels andpersonal happenings, with philosophical and political deliberation; bringing inkey thinkers to ratify and expand his unique perspectives.

Visual Rhetoric and the Power of Imagery: A Brief Lesson in the Rhetorical Power of Images and the Need for phronesis and krisis in the Teaching of Visual Rhetoric

Since the ancient rhetoricians, humans have awarded imagery, the visual, and the vivid an extraordinary effect on emotions and memory. Such assumptions have led to iconophobia, iconoclasm, and myths about the special power of images. The issue of the power of pictures, however, is more complicated. As all other kinds of rhetorical utterances, the visual can be both powerful and powerless depending on the circumstances. For many pictures, the rhetorical power lies not mainly in their political deliberation, but instead in their nature as demonstrative or epideictic rhetoric: a rhetoric that does not primarily advocate immediate change, but tries to increase adherence to existing view-points, attitudes and values. Even though visual rhetoric may perform a powerful address to those who are already convinced, it does not necessarily hold much power over adversaries and sceptics. This article argues that when teaching visuality and the power of imagery, educators ought to help young pupils – and the citizenry in general – not only to decode visual communication, but also to interpret and evaluate it. The first requires knowledge about rules of visual literacy, the second requires not only critical thinking, but also situational and cultural knowledge, as well as sound judgment.

TAKING INTERDEPENDENCIES SERIOUSLY: THE CASE OF MOZILLA’S ENTANGLEMENTS WITH JOURNALISM

Despite the complex interdependencies in today’s digital news ecology, it is still common to study digital journalism primarily by looking at how ‘non-journalists’ are influencing journalists from ‘outside’ the field of professional journalism. When it comes to how digital journalism is shaping non-journalists, we mostly find audience research or research on the effects of journalistic reporting. We argue that understanding journalism’s role in society today requires us to more broadly ask how imaginaries about journalism influence all kinds of actors that make up our digital public. In this paper, we therefore discuss how imaginaries about journalism shape the practices and identity of Mozilla, an organization best known for the development of the Firefox web browser. Mozilla currently explores collaborations with, or support of journalism, and we argue that this exploration is shaped by imaginaries about journalism. Using a Mozilla project as an example that seeks to support alternatives to advertising as the dominant way to finance journalistic content online, we show how Mozilla is trying to support its own mission by supporting organizations whose practices and values are considered compatible with this mission. We argue that Mozilla is not aiming to support ‘journalism’ as such, but a particular and rather traditional idea of fact-oriented journalism that facilitates political deliberation. Our findings suggest that studying how particular imaginaries about digital journalism influence non-journalists can help illuminate journalism’s role in today's digital news ecology beyond its ‘democratic function’ and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the digital transformation as a whole.

Trust and Distributive Justice in John Locke's Politics of Money

Modern commentators tend to view John Locke's theory of money either in terms of a process of naturalization placing currency completely beyond the realm of politics or as an effort to provide a moral foundation for a convention subject to epistemic instability. This study builds on the latter interpretation but offers an alternative to the standard view that Locke sought to remove monetary policy from the scope of ongoing political deliberation. While Locke emphasized the concept of trust necessary for the networks of credit and economic exchange, his account of money also prioritized prudential judgments and distinct discursive contexts, especially relating to distributive justice. Locke's economic tracts give reason to reconsider his putative role as founder of the “sound money” doctrine and shed light on aspects of his statecraft only partly visible in his more familiar political works.

Not Monsters After All: How Political Deliberation Can Build Moral Communities Amidst Deep Difference

Political deliberation typically aims to improve the legitimacy of collective decisions. This article proposes a different function for deliberation, which is both more modest but nevertheless critical in public life: the legitimation not of decisions, but of fellow citizens. This outcome is especially important in polarized societies, where what divides citizens is not only differences in conceptions of the good, but also the perception that the other side is not motivated by any good at all. Drawing on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Taylor as well as on an empirical study of political dialogue between university students after the 2016 election in the United States, I show how a particular form of political dialogue can help interlocuters recognize the conceptions of the good that motivate others’ views. Such learning can help create what Taylor suggests is necessary for diverse democracies: a shared understanding that does not obscure and in fact brings to the fore principled and significant divisions. Such recognition has the potential to diminish support for violence and the disenfranchisement of political opponents.

Truth and Uncertainty in Political Justification

Political deliberation and decision-making typically take place in circumstances of substantial uncertainty about what should be done. Some of this uncertainty concerns decision-relevant empirical facts and some of it concerns decision-relevant normative facts. It is widely accepted that uncertainty about empirical facts should make us cautious and that political justification must take such uncertainty into account. Some have argued, however, that uncertainty about empirical and normative facts is not symmetrical, and that normative uncertainty does not demand the same caution. This chapter argues that the argument against symmetry does not work in the political context and that political justification must take normative uncertainty into account.

“The people want it”

This article reflects on the reasonableness of populist arguments supporting a prescriptive standpoint in the context of deliberation (which I call ‘deliberative’ populist arguments). A literature survey shows a divide between authors who claim that populist arguments are always fallacious and those who think that in some situations they can be reasonable, including the context of political deliberation. It is then argued that deliberative populist arguments are based on a linking premise that appeals to majority opinion as a principle of democracy. This linking premise differs from the one underlying the traditional interpretation of a fallacious populist argument (argumentum ad populum) and appears at first sight to make the argument reasonable. However, I conclude that a deliberative populist argument is also unreasonable, because it acts merely as a trump card, creating a false impression about democracy and avoiding engagement in real debate and substantive reasons.

Epilogue

The epilogue brings the book’s theorization of the connections between embodied environmental risks and olfactory aesthetics to bear on everyday contexts of olfactory politics. Discussing examples drawn from Indra Sinha and the Yes Men, the author suggests that stink bombs and malodorous performances that relocate noxious odors from vulnerable spaces into the conventionally deodorized spaces of economic and political deliberation offer a provocative counterweight to the movement for “fragrance-free” spaces and lifestyles. Like the aesthetic examples analyzed throughout the book, these noxious irruptions exemplify the power of olfaction as an embodied mode of thought, feeling, and protest.