Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

Nice job, Aubrey, in helping me to think more clearly about how to address the issues that seemed insurmountable after reading Julian Dibble’s disturbing blog A RAPE IN CYBERSPACE: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society. Your argument is intriguing and made me think more deeply about what it actually means for a crime to be committed in cyberspace. Because of the “radically particular” and ever mutating nature of international law, it’s application to the issues and conditions of the virtual world may open up space for the adjudication of grievances. I wonder though how a forum for using international law could be established to respond to issues that arise online. It also addresses the very real issue of the fact that online there are no national borders. And as Dibble made clear, what happens in cyberspace, doesn’t actually stay in cyberspace. I appreciate your distinction between the two fields of thought on kairos and its applicability to the ways RL and VL intersect and interpenetrate each other. You helped me to bring information in one reading to bear upon my thinking about another. That is what collaborative learning is all about I think, so thanks for the insights.

The podcast itself was well produced, the music was well chosen and your argument was well laid out and easy to follow. Good job in editing together the various clips, I know how frustrating that can be. You seem to be getting the hang of this medium. I hope my next effort sounds as smooth as you made it seem.

Interesting train of thought here. You've mapped the polarity of personal agency versus situational exigence in kairotic understandings to the differences between domestic and international law. While there does seem to be some productive overlap, I'm not sure that these categorical distinctions are as straightforward as they seem, at least based on the various interpretations offered by Hawk. Indeed, you point to this near the end of your podcast when you mention that international law isn't created from scratch, but is derived from existing national statutes and precedents, which are then subject to additional arbitration and adjucation as needed. This co-adaptive structure, in which international law is created by specific contextual situations that borrow from elements of existing domestic policies, points to Hawk's overall complexity theory in that each type self-reflexively feeds into the other, akin to Taylor's "strange loops" (181). Here, situational contexts shape rhetorical usage by bounding potential possibilities in which rhetors might assemble linguistic elements in particular patterns, elements that have themselves been previously constructed and modified by other agents within other situational contexts. Just as domestic and international law borrow from each other, Miller's kairotic tension between agent and situation can be seen as a complex co-adaptive system. Biesecker suggests that a binary would be too easy, and that instead it is "their emergent relation[s]" that offer a more comprehensive site for kairotic production (181). I think this encapsulates Hawk's hope that complexity theory offers a way to get beyond the "two apparently incompatible conceptions of kairos," and similarly this might inform our discussion of the relationship between domestic and international law (185).

I was also led back to the HeinOnline excerpt from Dr. Lessig, where he discusses the applicability of online space to existing (domestic) laws. Lessig's discussion addressed the discrepancy between freedom of speech and the inherent limitations of interfaces constituted by speech, whether linguistic or digital. He points out that while we naturalize our physical interface with language, digital interfaces are consciously constructed via code in ways that specifically delimit boundaries for rhetorical agency. While his discussion largely focused on domestic law and corporate-controlled digital ecologies, I think your point about international law and gaming would definitely apply here as well, given the multinational facet of gatekeeper companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and the like. Perhaps the murky legal status of international waters offers a metaphoric ecology that might relate to our digital discussion, especially related to piracy!
Cheers,
- jmb3318