Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

I was fascinated by your application of David Edgerton’s ideas from The Shock of the Old to Kenyan popular music. You explain how “the best use of technology mixes the old and the new to suit the particular situation”—this is clearly predicated upon the cultural context, immediate history, and so on. I like how you insist that what should guide technological use is the now, the moment, and not some vision of a possible future. I feel that the kind of futurity Edgerton attacks, and that we similarly have reservations about, are grounded in Platonic forms that we throw into the future as some sort of goal. Conversely, many reactionaries cast these same Platonic forms into our past as something to revive, salvage, or re-inscribe for our own age. Although there is nothing essentially wrong with futurism or revivalism, when it gets crossed with Platonic ideals, cast into a temporally foreign terrain as to evade criticism or beyond the scope of discourse and analysis, anxiety sets in. Your focus on Kenya is particularly insightful because for the developed world to invent futurist technologies that worked in the United States for Kenya presupposes the United States rhetorical situation as something for which the Kenyans should strive, when in actuality, there future will be something that grows out of the rhetorical situation that they experience daily.