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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
gTalk: iisblog@gmail.com
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MSN: iisblog@hotmail.com
Theorists 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 [...] -
Wednesday Link Dump – Screaming Chimps, Powerpoint Poisons Everything, Rhetorical Advertising, Etc
This is a preview of Wednesday Link Dump – Screaming Chimps, Powerpoint Poisons Everything, Rhetorical Advertising, Etc. Read the full post (285 words, 1 image, estimated 1:08 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 [...] -
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) -
Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops. Yes, Really.
The Internet is over. You can all go home now: Sigmund Freud’s head yields subtle contours and watermelon flavors when you suck on it. Of course it does. Post tagged ’s’ for stupid. References: * Watermelon Flavored Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops Previously: * [Edit] * Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other * Watermelon Flavored Sigmund Freud Head Lollipops Permanent link to this post [...] -
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 [...] -
Psychoanalytic Theory – Come For The Answers, But Stay For The Questions
We understand that there are disputes about the degree to which Lacanian theory provides the right answers to basic ontological, epistemological, and psychological questions. We happen to think that there’s something quite suggestive about a robust Continental theory that converges with so much of the American rhetorical and pragmatic tradition (Burke and Lacan’s emphasis on [...] -
Pentadic Ratios In The Rhetoric Of Addiction
The Burkean pentad has a bad reputation for lending itself to cookie-cutter “this is the agent, this is the scene, etc” pseudo-book reports. But there are at least a couple of interesting ways to do pentadic analysis, one which is to try to emulate Burke by analyzing rhetorical moves from within pentadic ratios. The manipulation [...] -
A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
Anti-cognitivst curmudgeon David Gelernter has a sustained critique of digital AI in Technology Review: I believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly [...] -
Cog Sci Blog Roundup
We’ve got a couple posts in the hopper – a Peirce vs. Deleuze post (of all things) and a post about how scientific triumphalism empowering anti-science right and the left – but little time to clean them up right now. Plus we’re still working our way through posts going back to May – quals was [...]
