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About
Omri Ceren is a PhD candidate studying Rhetoric at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. He lives in downtown Los Angeles.
Email: omri@iconindexsymbol.com
Skype: omricerenAIM: iisblog
ICQ: 426677773
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MSN: iisblog@hotmail.com
Rhetoric and Philosophy Archive
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Marketing Outpacing Comm/PR Departments For Control Over Corporate Social Media. Also, Foucault And Institutional Argument.
The dogma in Comm/PR programs is that since corporate engagement now is a conversation – with social media being merely a contingent albeit stark materialization of that dynamic – corporate Communication departments will soon be recognized as indespensible. There are a bunch of implicit sociological and epistemological arguments behind the argument, but the basic strain [...] -
Lifeworld Colonization Meets Mass Communication, Global Warming Edition
Democratic theory 101: there is a technical sphere and a public sphere, and the two are by design separate and unequal. Where they do come into contact, scientists are charged with providing grist for the deliberative mill via epistemic descriptions of risk pegged to measures of sociological consensus. Legislative bodies and argumentative forums take the [...] -
Scientist Who Doesn’t Understand Judgment Tries To Persuade People To Drink Own Waste, Produces Rhetorical And Psychoanalytic Train Wreck, Comedy Gold
Orange County has just launched a Toilet To Tap water program to reclaim flushed waste, distill it, and return it into the drinking supply after a few years. The scientific side of the debate is a crush: even ignoring the Southern California water crises, the tap water is cleaned until it’s near-bottle quality and certainly [...] -
![The History Of Hip Hop, Viral YouTube Edition [Videos]](http://www.iconindexsymbol.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2007-12-01-IIS-HipHop-110x110.jpg "The History Of Hip Hop, Viral YouTube Edition [Videos]")
The History Of Hip Hop, Viral YouTube Edition [Videos]
It turns out that, contra Tricia Rose, hip hop actually originated in an obscure Mongolian farming village in the 1960s. MC Farmer on the mic: The genre then mutated (metastasized?) into nerdcore, giving rise to MC Frontalot’s utterly brilliant “It Is Pitch Dark”: “The voices in your head said the dwarf shot first… but doctors with needles [...] -
“People Are Really Smart” Not The Most Compelling Explanation For Why Rank Propaganda Fails
PsyBlog calls out Fahrenheit 9/11 for being bad argumentation and open propaganda, and then goes on to ask why Bush still lost: This is a preview of “People Are Really Smart” Not The Most Compelling Explanation For Why Rank Propaganda Fails. Read the full post (483 words, 1 image, estimated 1:56 mins reading time) -
Two-Thirds Of Americans Are Fairly Stupid
You have got to be fucking kidding us: Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found. And that’s not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States. The poll found that more than one out of [...] -
Severity Bias In Doctor-Patient Relationships Unhelpful To Glib, Non-Rhetorical Medical Ethics
We really don’t have much to say about this beyond the obligatory “this is why it’s important for doctors to have rhetorical and argumentative training.” But it’s about a fallacy that affects judgment in the context of a medical science controversy, ergo: This is a preview of Severity Bias In Doctor-Patient Relationships Unhelpful To Glib, Non-Rhetorical [...] -
The Lacanian Unconscious Vs. Pop Second-Wave Feminist Psychology That Ruins Peoples Lives
There’s a post up at Philosophy of Memory – one of our favorite blogs and one of our many creepy academic crushes – about efforts to help victims with false memories implanted during recovered memory therapy. One of the more charming excesses of second wave feminism, recovered memory hypnosis seems thankfully to have slipped into [...] -
Gender And The Sacred In Ancient Greece (Plus: The Dangerous Anachronism Of Identification-Driven Classical Scholarship)
Joan Connelly has a new book out about the role of priestesses in ancient Greece. James Davidson’s is not a fan: This is a preview of Gender And The Sacred In Ancient Greece (Plus: The Dangerous Anachronism Of Identification-Driven Classical Scholarship). Read the full post (504 words, 1 image, estimated 2:01 mins reading time) -
Greek Version of Scientific Instrumentalism Was Particularly Instrumentalist
There are at least two ways that science is circumstantially practiced. One is as a heavily mathematical search to understand the basic structure of the universe and what’s in it – what David Deutsche refers to as “revealing and explaining the fabric of reality.” (3) The other is as fairly straightforward instrumentalism – the theory [...] -
It Would Be Really Nice If Science Was What Chris Mooney Says It Is (Plus: Climate Scientists Learn The Hard Way That Making Scientific Method Into Collective Identity Is A Bad Idea)
We used to call this the naive, self-congratulatory bench-scientist version of science. But we’re becoming inclined to think of it as the Chris Mooney version science: It has fallen to those of us who oppose the direction the country has been heading to simultaneously champion a way of thinking that would have averted so many blunders [...] -
Believe! Lacanian Theory Wiki
We were going to wrap this link into a longer post about online research and organization in the 21st century: the growth of specialized online communities (listservs, blogs etc), the merging of communication artifacts with sites of knowledge production (a science blog is both a place where science happens and an artifact for rhetoric of [...] -
Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
Lacanian theory can be justified simply as an approach that reveals interesting problematics and generates tensions with conventional wisdom. But that’s almost certainly unnecessarily modest. Lacan’s ontological assumptions are philosophically rigorous, especially when refracted through Zizek’s Hegelian rereading of the real as the Night of the World, etc. Far downstream, Lacanian social theory converges with [...] -
Anthimeria – Linguists Uncover “Garden-Variety Typo” In Rhetorical Landscape
The only thing that annoys us more than non-rhetoricians rampaging through the rhetorical china shop is when they’re obviously right. Language Hat recently tried to hunt down the etymology of anthimeria, which seems malformed. Silva Rhetoricae defines the figure as “substitution of one part of speech for another (such as a noun used as a [...] -
Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents – New Books We Can’t Afford
Now they’re just being cruel: You’d think their marketing algorithms would also cross-check for “likelihood of max’d credit cards given previous shopping patterns”. Or do you think that doesn’t really matter to them? If you’ve got a job though, you really ought hook yourself up because this sounds awesome. References: * Missiou, Anna. The Subversive Oratory of Andokides: [...]
