Table of Contents
Say My Name Video (not needed here since it’s on Canvas, but I want it in my online portfolio)
“Concepts in 60” Videos (I said I’d do at least 5 – I did 6)
Inseparable Conjoined Twins: Rhetoric and Technology (Practice PhD Comp essay)
Our Digital Composition: The Legacy Drive, Cybershrines, and Autorhetoric (Final Project – essay – I originally said I’d do a book report but decided this essay was a better way to further my research)
Grade Contract
Here’s a link to the my original grade contract submitted on 13 Sep 2022 (note that I changed from a book report to a traditional seminar paper in an email on 11 Oct 2022): Original Grade Contract
Here’s the part of my grade contract where I state what I’ll do to earn an “A” grade:
.
For my reflection essay, I decided to do it in video form to explain how I earned my “A” grade:
Say My Name Video
“Concepts in 60” Videos
.
.
.
.
.
Inseparable Conjoined Twins: Rhetoric and Technology
In general, the relationship between rhetoric and technology is both symbiotic in that they need each other to survive and synergistic in that they amplify the effects of each other more than the simple sum of their effects. To prove this, I will first define the often-amorphous term rhetoric as well as technology, show the elements of the rhetorical process as I understand it, and then show how technology affects each element with examples from the Computers and the Teaching of Writing book.
In my humanities studies, I found the term aesthetic was poorly defined (if the author ever bothered defining it at all) in scholarly work and could mean anything from an artist’s specific style to a feeling that a cultural text evoked in audiences to simple beauty. Fortunately, the stakes are low for humanity when interpreting such a term as aesthetic in the context of interpreting a cultural text such as a film or a novel; however, the stakes are much higher when a term like rhetoric is used, because rhetoric as I understand it motivates humans to alter the world. I have read examples where something as trivial as the camouflage on a butterfly’s wing is rhetoric, but I don’t think this is the case (Rickert 417-8). In this camouflage case, who is the rhetor? What did the rhetor do? If the butterfly is the rhetor, then it did nothing because it was born with its camouflage which tricks predators into ignoring it. Or does Rickert see a totalizing nature as some sort of Grand Rhetor? I argue there is no viable rhetor in Rickert’s example, and there is therefore no rhetoric in butterfly wings. Much like the ambiguity of aesthetics, Rickert’s is an example of similar ambiguity when the term rhetoric is used. Rarely is rhetoric ever defined in scholarly articles dealing with rhetoric, and this leads to needless confusion in scholars reading these texts. Booth warned us that “defining any term [like rhetoric] so broadly risks making it seem useless” as Rickert has done, and this is especially the case when rhetoric is not defined at all (xii).
Given the academy will accept a wide variety of definitions for rhetoric, I will now present a specific definition of rhetoric useful for defining the relationship between rhetoric and technology informed by Lloyd Bitzer and Wayne Booth. Bitzer, the inventor of the Rhetorical Situation composed of exigence/audience/constraints, saw rhetoric as something that “functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world” (3). Booth defined rhetoric as the “entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another” (xi). Blending these two together, I see rhetoric as fundamentally a process that allows rhetors to produce responses in their audiences that alter the world in some way. To put it more clearly:
Rhetoric: A process whereby rhetors design, build, and deliver rhetorical texts to start, stop, continue, or prevent human action.
This definition of rhetoric makes sense to me as an engineer, and I see Bitzer’s “change in the world” as implicit in human action. Note my definition also includes preventing human action, such as voting, which is a necessary expansion of Bitzer’s definition to capture the typical desire of hegemonic forces to maintain the status quo. To me, the role of rhetoric in culture cannot be understated, and below is rhetoric in a bumper-sticker format:
“Rhetoric is the gravity of culture – it holds it all together!”
The Hawisher book can be seen as the struggle of a group of academics (rhetors) using rhetoric in their classrooms, conferences, administration offices, online, etc. to create and maintain a culture of writing built around the technology of computers.
With this functional definition of rhetoric, I now turn to the definition of technology to show how these two should be considered conjoined twins. Ken Funk states the etymology of the word technology comes from the Greek words techne, the “art, skill, craft, or the way, manner, or means by which a thing is gained,” and logos, utterances or expressions (in addition to the appeal to logic). This ancient definition means technology is a way for humans to make utterances to gain something, which can be interpreted as getting something done. Technology is then a broad category where the means are not defined; however, in rhetoric the objective is the same as technology – to get something done – but the means are defined as other humans. Rhetoric may then be considered a subset of technology. Graphically, human activity in nature may be shown as follows in Figure 1:
Considering the universe, humans exist in an infinitesimal piece of nature (the universe), and everything humans create may be considered art, which need not have a specific goal. Note that nature may appear artistic and evoke strong human emotions, but it is not human art. Unlike art which is every human creation no matter how trivial, technology must have a specific goal, and it may use natural or human resources to achieve that goal. This notion of technology as a subset of art is counter to the standard antagonistic humanities vs. science binary that needlessly bedevils the modern academy, but the art within technology is evident as countless filmmakers and artists have shown us (for example, the genre of films known as “city symphonies” exemplified by 1927’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City). Traditionally, we tend to think of technology as the mastery of natural resources to create means to achieve a goal (for example, modify the world in some way, such as air-conditioning Florida so that humans can exist in comfort), but we should include rhetoric as a technology associated with the mastery of human resources to achieve a goal, such as creating a new culture around computer-based writing. Moreover, rhetoric demands the mastery of other technologies, such as language, graphics, text, various other media, and now computers, to achieve its goal(s). Rhetoric may be seen not only as a technology but as a meta-technology. I use the metaphor of technology and rhetoric as “inseparable conjoined twins” because rhetoric would surely die if stripped of its technology and technology, like computers in the classroom, would surely die without rhetors advocating for its acceptance. Thus, the first and most fundamental relationship between technology and rhetoric is that rhetoric is a subset of technology which is a subset of art which is a product of human activity.
While considering rhetoric and technology as inseparable conjoined twins has its utility as a high-level view, to explore the lower-level relationships I will explicate rhetoric and technology relationships at each step along the process of rhetoric. After reviewing the five canons of rhetoric, Burke’s Pentad for Agent Motivation, and Bitzer’s Rhetorical Situation, I have created a rhetorical process useful for discussing lower-level rhetoric/technology relationships. To begin, I translated Burke’s motivation pentad into a more specific rhetorical pentad that incorporates the exigence, constraints, and audience of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation as show in Figure 2:
Admittedly, the incorporation of the rhetorical situation into Burke’s pentad wasn’t a perfect translation as seen by agency becoming a rhetorical text, but this new rhetorical pentad contains the essential elements of the rhetorical process. In chronological order, the rhetorical process is shown in Figure 3:.
There is nothing significantly profound or new about this depiction of the rhetorical process. It remixes the classic five canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) with Bitzer’s exigence, constraints, and audience but adds a focus on the end goal of audience action (or inaction) I stressed in my earlier definition of rhetoric. This process starts with an exigence, either real or fabricated to start the rhetorical process. An exigence is something that compels a rhetor to act; e.g., a hurricane on track to impact a populated area compels politicians to ask their constituents to evacuate – this is a real exigence. What we see all too often are fabricated exigences with no basis in reality; e.g., politicians who craft fabrications such as the August 4, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin “attack” for Vietnam and the Weapons of Mass Destruction for the invasion of Iraq, to garner support for unjustified wars. In the case of fabricated exigencies, the rhetor both creates the exigence and the rhetorical text, an insidious but powerful combination. The exigence inspires the rhetor to create what I call a Constrained Rhetorical Text (CRT) using Bitzer’s constraints from his rhetorical situation to emphasize that the rhetorical text must have cultural constraints that will make it more acceptable to the sensibilities of the audience thus increasing its probability of producing the rhetor’s desired audience action. Implicit in the rhetor’s creation of a CRT are the first 3 canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, and style which are culturally constrained. Note that the text of the CRT can be any medium: speech, tweet, social media post, article, book, banner, meme, video, film, etc. After the CRT is created, the rhetor must then determine the rhetorical performance and distribution. This can range from a classic speech delivered (the fifth canon) once by a rhetor who has committed it to memory (the fourth canon) to a meme distributed on social media where the internet serves the function of a perfect and perpetual memory that can perform the CRT whenever the audience wants. The next step in the rhetorical process is the audience and the impact of the CRT. It is up to the audience to accept or reject the action the rhetor requests in the performance of the CRT. Furthermore, there are other audiences the rhetor didn’t anticipate who may be exposed to the CRT and produce wildly different actions than the target audience. This last step in the rhetorical process potentially produces a multitude of actions from a variety of audiences. With the rhetorical process defined, I will now discuss the relationship between rhetoric and technology using examples from the Hawisher book to show how technology impacts each step in the rhetorical process.
Technology Generates Exigences
Bitzer refers to exigences as anything that compels a rhetor to begin working to produce an audience action, or, as I prefer to put it, to begin the rhetorical process. Once a technology exists, it often, as described in the Hawisher book with respect to computers, is an object that humans project their hopes and dreams upon. Any glimmer of hope that technology could potentially lead to a utopian endstate, such as students learning more quickly to write better, creates an exigence for the acquisition of the new technology. This specific rhetorical process hopes to end with administrators providing the funds to acquire the technology, but having the technology leads to new, cascading exigencies. For instance, with computers there are new logistical exigencies which generate specific rhetorical processes for software training, maintenance costs, new classroom space, and time allocation for instructors. In these rhetorical processes, the rhetors are the instructors, who have the utopian vision of computer writing (since “Johnny Can’t Write”), and the audience is composed of deans and other administrators, who have the power to grant instructors’ requests. In addition to logistical exigencies, there is also a “peer exigence” generated with technology to ensure it spreads and becomes an integral part of the profession. The instructors reach this professional audience primarily via conferences and journal articles as shown repeatedly in the Hawisher book with its heavy emphasis on the evolution of journals and conferences over time.
Technology Modifies The Identity of Rhetors
In addition to generating multiple exigencies, technology also adds to the intersectionality of rhetors by integrating a new, technology-based element to their identities over time. One way to view the Hawisher book is see it as a cultural text memorializing the new identities of early adopters of computer-based writing. Readers learn from the testimony of myriad academics at the end of each chapter in the book how technology transformed English department academics into technical professionals often doing their own programming to achieve specific goals for their classrooms. It’s as if Hawisher and the other authors wanted to ensure that they were not remembered falsely as humanities folks simply “dabbling” in technology. They became full-fledged technologists well versed in all aspects of computer-writing technology – technology had altered their identities. This is typically the case with those who promote technologies. Whether intentionally or not, they create a new culture around the new technology and become the experts others rely on for guidance and inspiration. It should be noted there was no explicit discussion of identities or intersectionality in the book, but the profound impact of technology on the identities of rhetors (the adherents of technology) is unmistakable.
Technology Inspires and Limits Constrained Rhetorical Texts
While Bitzer speaks of constraints that place boundaries on the possibilities of a rhetorical text, I prefer to focus on what I call the constrained rhetorical text (CRT) resulting from Bitzer’s constraints. I focus on the final product that is the manifestation of the constraints rather than on the constraints themselves – a CRT fits better into the rhetorical process as I understand it. This CRT is also the manifestation of the first 3 canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, and style which are all limited and informed by constraints. For any CRT, technology can limit and/or inspire them. Technology limits CRTs when they are the product of the technology. The MOO example at the end of the book clearly showed the difficulty a community of rhetors can have when trying to carry on multiple conversations simultaneously using only lines of text as their CRTs. Another example is the CRTs students produce when using writing programs. Student CRTs are limited by those who wrote the algorithms that govern what is and what is not permissible in terms of grammar, spelling, and style. As a topic, technology can also inspire CRTs such as scholarly articles, conference presentations, grant proposals, and pleas for departmental support. Thus, technology is both a new topic for well-known CRTs and a creator of new form CRTs in the rhetoric process.
Technology Enhances and Perpetuates the Performance and Distribution of CRTs
Technology not only provides inspiration and form for CRTs, it also provides the means to enhance and perpetuate the performance and distribution of CRTs. The original CRTs in ancient Greece were ephemeral speeches that required much effort on the part of rhetors (i.e., memory, the fourth canon of rhetoric, and delivery, the fifth canon) as well as not insignificant effort on the part of the audience to also memorize the important parts of the speech. As the forms of CRTs evolved into other media as technology evolved (e.g., books, photographs, various audio formats, films, videos, memes, etc.), the requirement for memorization on the part of the rhetors and the audiences was drastically diminished. A rhetor could simply craft a CRT and deliver it to multiple audiences, and technology would allow for the “performance” of the CRT whenever the rhetor and/or the audience desired – the performance was no longer dependent on the rhetor’s breath. Technology effectively perpetuates the rhetor’s CRT and takes over the rhetor’s memory and delivery roles completely. For the case of computer writing, a rhetor would, for example, craft a software package and distribute it to audiences across America to enhance the creation of CRTs. The rhetor need not craft a new software package at each audience location, as if it were a speech, since technology creates endless perfect copies of CRTs that may be distributed via networks anywhere in the world within seconds. Technology replicates and disseminates rhetoric more efficiently than a single rhetor ever could.
Technology Expands Audiences While Replicating Kairos
Since technology can mass produce, distribute, and perform CRTs, it follows that audiences, both intentional and unintentional, will expand significantly. In ancient times, the static audience was limited by the local population available at the time a speech was performed; however, in modern times, the audience is dynamic in both time and space. In terms of space, the book mentions virtual international conferences that democratized attendance by allowing computer writing professionals to participate despite not having the funds to attend in person. The technology of the world-wide web allowed conference CRTs to reach an expanded audience in the same way that MOOs enjoyed an expanded audience. Because technology ensures CRTs are seemingly everywhere-all-the-time, there doesn’t necessarily have to be a single Kairos (opportune time) for a CRT performance. In fact, each audience may have its own Kairos where the audience responds in ways the rhetor wanted or not. Thus, technology not only replicates CRTs, but it also replicates multiple opportunities for Kairos as it delivers CRTs to new audiences around the world.
Technology Multiplies Action and Provides a Memory
The final step in the rhetorical process is action on the part of the audience. Rhetors have a specific, desired action, but the technology that replicates and distributes CRTs ensures unintended audiences also are exposed to the performance of CRTs. By facilitating the creation of new audiences, like MOOs, technology also allows these audience to be aware of the actions of other audience. Another way of thinking about an audience is to consider it a culture. What happens unfortunately is the action of one culture, Culture “A” in Figure 4, often becomes an exigence for Culture “B” leading to an action that becomes an exigence for Culture “A.”
It’s an endless loop of schismogenesis that can rightly be referred to as a Perpetual Rhetoric Machine (PRM), which is a riff off of the Perpetual Motion Machine fallacy from thermodynamics. The PRM is depicted as two rhetorical processes endlessly feeding off each other, but there could and will be many more than two cultures responding to the actions of each other. Including a third dimension to include other cultural action possibilities, the PRM is better considered a sphere where Figure 4 is simply a slice. Unlike speeches that have the possibility of fading away, technology perpetuates CRTs, so they never fade away. Almost any CRT is just a few keystrokes away, but technology is constantly bombarding us with unwanted CRTs to inspire us to action. CRTs are always with us, often polluting our digital world, ready to feed the PRM. In fact, we may be at the point where there is no “new rhetoric” only slight variations on the old to create the illusion of “newness.” Rhetorical invention may be an illusion.
Conclusion
In considering the relationship between rhetoric and technology, I claim they are closely related and intertwined so tightly they should be considered inseparable fraternal twins who need each other to survive. I show this first through my definition of rhetoric as a subset or special case of technology where the resources used in rhetoric to achieve a goal are human rather than from nature. To further explicate the relationship on a finer scale, I defined a rhetorical process informed by Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, classic rhetoric, and Booth’s thoughts on rhetoric. For each step in my rhetorical process, I showed how technology has impacted rhetoric using examples from the Hawisher book as well as rhetoric in the modern digital age of 2022. If nothing else, the use of clear definitions for rhetoric and its process greatly assists in the investigation of the relationship between rhetoric and technology and underscores the need to push aside such futile folly as “rhetorical” butterfly wings.
Works Cited
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City. Directed by Walter Ruttmann,1927.
Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 1, 1968, pp. 1-14.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. Blackwell Publishing, 2004
Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. University of California Press, 1945.
Funk, Ken. “Definitions of Technology” Oregon State, https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~funkk/Technology/technology.html
Hawisher, Gail, et. al. Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History, Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1996.
Rickert, Thomas. “Preliminary Steps Towards a General Rhetoric.” The Routledge Handbook of Comparative World Rhetorics, edited by Keith Lloyd, Routledge, 2021, pp. 414-421.
.
(Final as of 6 Dec 2022 but still needs work. It’s a bit long for a seminar paper, so this is more like the initial draft of two chapters of my dissertation. There are notes where I need to add data and/or text. Also, autorhetoric will ultimately be its own chapter.)
Our Digital Composition: The Legacy Drive, Cybershrines, and Autorhetoric
INTRODUCTION
The advent of the internet was supposed to spawn a glorious age of enlightened citizens consuming the purest truths and highest literature generating the most civilized debates resulting in an educated populace that could resolve its differences amicably. The inspiration for this utopian vision of a kinder, wiser public was the transfer of scientific data and knowledge via the ARPANET starting in 1969. If online activity could enhance scientists and their quests for truth, then surely online activity for civilians would have the same calmly logical effect. Obviously, like most utopian visions, it didn’t happen. In 2022, we’re more divided than ever and the hatred and vile of online discourse is the diametric opposite of what was expected. In fact, even with access to more human knowledge than has ever been possible, humans are typically seeking out so-called “conspiracy theories” and spreading at lightning speed them rather than even attempting to discover truth or facts or reality. What’s going on? How did we get here? The short answer is culture got in the way. The longer answer is the human desire for immortality, symbolic or otherwise, is a dominant psychic force driving human behavior. Think of it as a “legacy drive” that’s on par with other human drives such as those for food, sex, and pleasure (see Freud). Legacy drive is a term I’ve coined in addition to the terms autorhetoric and cybershrines to help explain the seemingly inevitable toxicity of digital discourse.
In this essay, I’ll explicate my concept of autorhetoric (in this case, “auto” refers to self), a term I’ve coined to describe the unintentional effects that our seemingly immortal digital compositions have on us that tend to limit our ability to change. In traditional rhetoric, a rhetor creates constrained rhetorical texts (CRTs) designed to evoke some desired action from audiences. In autorhetoric, a rhetor’s archive of digital compositions (posts, reposts, likes, memes, papers, video, etc.) gain a newfound sense of democratized immortality where every participant in the digital world has their compositions stored forever: every digital utterance perfectly preserved for all eternity. Or so it seems. Every time we return to the digital world, we see that our previous digital compositions wait for us and that others have responded to them. Over time, the digitalia/CRTs defining our personal digital archive, which I call a cybershrine, tends to insidiously define an identity for the rhetor. Unconsciously, the rhetor seeks a cybernetic homeostasis with their cybershrine. It is at this point where the CRTs designed to evoke actions in an audience are also creating a feedback loop between the rhetor and their cybershrine. This relationship between a rhetor and their cybershrine defines autorhetoric where CRTs not only affect audiences but also the rhetor. In fact, a rhetor’s CRTs may have more impact on the rhetor than on the desired audiences. In the digital world, this autorhetoric effect is an unexpected but reasonable byproduct of traditional rhetoric that helps explain the conceptual immobility of rhetors online. The reason why autorhetoric “works” is because we humans have a psychological drive to grasp some sense of symbolic immortality – we demand a legacy that provides a symbolic immortality that will live on after we die. Our cybershrines with their illusion of immortality do just that for us, so we dare not move them. Moreover, there is a symbiotic relationship between autorhetoric and the legacy drive: the legacy drive is an overarching, enduring force that fuels an individual’s day-to-day (and even minute-to-minute) autorhetoric whether online or in the real world. In this essay, I’ll first address the legacy drive that motivates autorhetoric in Section 1, and then address the cybershrines. the unacknowledged digital rhetors we create in cyberspace essential to our autorhetoric, in Section 2.
.
SECTION ONE: THE LEGACY DRIVE
“In the obscurity that at present shrouds the theory of instinct, we shall certainly not do well to reject any idea that promises to throw light.”
– Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1922 (68)
.
“The theory of the instincts is, as it were, our mythology. The instincts are mythical beings, superb in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment overlook them, and yet we are never certain that we are seeing them clearly.”
– Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1933 (131)
.
Introduction to the Legacy Drive
Sigmund Freud understood the importance of human drives (he called them “instincts”), but after a lifetime of study he concluded, six years before his death, they were not well understood and still in the dubious realm of mythology from an epistemological perspective. To Freud, his earlier challenge stands that we should entertain any new ideas that can help us better understand our human drives: what they are and how they function. It is in this spirit of “throwing light” that I coin the term “legacy drive,” define it with respect to Terror Management Theory, and apply it to our new digital culture. I see a parallel to Freud’s early work with the unconscious and our present struggle to understand our new digital culture: in both cases, a new realm of human activity has been identified that reveals human drives and their complex manifestations. In the unconscious, Freud identified a multitude of drives (e.g., life, death, reality, ego) that explained the manifestation of both so-called “normal” and neurotic human behavior in the physical world. Similarly, I demonstrate how the legacy drive helps explain some of the neurotic behavior we witness online: the proliferation and zealous defense of “fake news” and endless, emotional arguments. Further, this legacy drive, due to its resulting sense of immortality, may play a role in declining participation in organized religion as well as the tragic increase in teenager suicides.
While we understand the commonsense notion of the word legacy, I am complicating it in the same way that Michel Foucault took a similar commonsense word, power, and built an oeuvre that transformed our approach to cultural studies. Much like an avant-garde filmmaker, Foucault defamiliarized power so that we could see it anew. I am doing something similar with legacy, but my goal is modest: present legacy and the legacy drive as viable options for cultural studies discourse of the digital domain. As evidence of its viability, I present the link between Foucault’s power and legacy. While Foucault explained how power works (its flow, accumulation, and exercise), he doesn’t seem to clearly explain why people and institutions seek power. Perhaps he considered it intuitively obvious (power for power’s sake), but we’ll never know with certainty why he omitted it from his oeuvre. To complement the work of Foucault, I propose legacy is a primary reason why power is such an essential commodity: it is through power that legacies are created and maintained. But why are legacies important? Legacies serve to relieve individuals of their unconscious existential terror of dying and its debilitating effects. Unfortunately, Foucault died a decade before we understood the importance of existential terror in the role of human behavior and culture via the psychology of Terror Management Theory. Even if he had this knowledge, I’m not sure he’d be interested: Foucault’s perspective was structural – one of institutions over individuals. In my work, I’m centered on individuals who assuage their existential terror through legacies within institutions. Thus, where Foucault saw how power functions for institutions, I explain one reason why power is so coveted – to create and maintain legacies for individuals and their cultures.
Terror Management Theory
All humans know the inevitability of their own deaths as they’re “inundated with literal and symbolic reminders of their mortality, whether through hearing about the death of someone close, receiving the diagnosis of a chronic illness, exposure to images of violence and death in the media, or through experiencing death-symbolic losses, such as the ending of a relationship or job” (Lewis 412). I’d argue that these reminders are more prevalent in our online lives where death and dying is fodder for 24-hour “if it bleeds, it leads” news and worthy of endless electronic alerts on our phones and computers. From a philosophical perspective, this inescapable mortality awareness can inspire positive feelings of “inspiration, innovation, and the drive to contribute to something greater than one’s self” but also incite negative feelings of anxiety and fear (Lewis 412). These consciously-decided positive feelings are commendable for not only the individual, who Lewis says can “live richer, fuller lives,” but also for society in general; however, they are not the focus of this essay as they pose no significant detriment (416). Conversely, these negative feelings operate not only on the conscious level similar to positive feelings, they also operate on the subconscious level, since the “fear of death is an unconscious, primal concern that stems from the individual’s desire for survival” (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 115). Greenberg et al. define the term mortality salience as shorthand for the awareness of one’s inevitable death (“Self Esteem” 78). In other words, even the most inspirational person who has first consciously dealt with mortality salience by turning it into a positive creative energy must still address their “unconscious core concern with mortality” (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 105). It is these inescapable anxious feelings of mortality salience, operating always on an unconscious level and often on a conscious level, that motivate Terror Management Theory (TMT) and the coping mechanisms that inform the functions of what I call cybershrines.
Recognizing that we all must deal with mortality salience on both conscious and unconscious levels, Greenberg et al. posit terror management as an “an unconscious and ongoing defense that functions to avert the potential for terror engendered by the knowledge of mortality”, and that mortality salience “functions as a motivating force whether people are currently focused on this particular issue or not” (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 100). In other words, existential terror is with us always as part of the human condition and the psychological defenses we use to assuage this terror are as autonomous as breathing. As the term terror has become somewhat loaded nowadays given our war-on-terror justification for global militarism, it is important to understand that for Greenberg et al. terror simply means the “emotional manifestation of the self-preservation instinct in an animal intelligent enough to know that it will someday die” (Greenberg et al., “Tolerance” 212). For a somewhat contrary view, Bradley pondered whether having existential feelings of terror is either an appropriate or even rational response when contemplating a “future nonexistence” (410). In the end, he concludes his analysis with the sweeping statement that “existential terror is irrational” (Bradley 409). However, as irrational as it may seem to him, Bradley also states that reflecting on “a past where you do not exist is not terrifying”, but that it’s “a future without you that causes terror” acknowledging the fundamental existence of existential terror (417). To effectively manage this pervasive existential terror in all humans, Greenberg et al. posit a Terror Management Theory with two basic components: 1) a cultural worldview, and 2) self-esteem, which form what they call a “cultural anxiety buffer” that separates us from our potentially paralyzing terror allowing for normal life activities (“Tolerance” 71).
The first element of the cultural anxiety buffer necessary to control existential terror is a belief in a collective cultural worldview which I’ll refer to as simply worldview. Just like our genes, we inherit the worldview of our parents and learn “over the course of childhood to control the potential for terror by remaining safely embedded in our [parents’] worldview” (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 122). As Greenberg et al. explain, the purpose of worldview is to “ameliorate anxiety by imbuing the universe with order and meaning, by providing standards of value that are derived from that meaningful conception of reality” and that achieving these “standards of value of the culture in turn confers literal and/or symbolic immortality” (“Self Esteem” 65). Literal immortality in a worldview is conferred by, for instance, the belief in an immortal soul and an afterlife whereas symbolic immortality is conferred by entities that will live on as a testament to one’s existence after death, such as a nation, corporation, children (who carry on the worldview you’ve imprinted on them), etc. (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 65). Simply put, the worldview encompasses religion and all forms of legacy, which directly provide a sense of immortality to effectively provide an anxiety buffer to minimize existential terror; i.e., worldview is quite an effective terror management tool, but it has some significant drawbacks.
One particularly troubling issue with worldview is the ramifications of its frail nature, since “cultural worldviews are essentially fragile symbols that are sustained primarily through social consensus” (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 80). It is ironic that a worldview, “which is so critical as a basis of [critical psychological] security, is actually a fragile symbolic social construction” capable of imploding (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 69). Take religion as an example of social consensus: every major religion has been subdivided into myriad sects over time that have split over and defined different “standards of value” required to ensure passage to the afterlife and thus immortality; however, any of these sects could quite simply dissolve if the social consensus of its members changed. Thus, there is an underlying sense of insecurity in one’s worldview, because, as Greenberg et al. explain, “the mere existence of alternative conceptions of reality will be psychologically unsettling, because granting their validity either implicitly or explicitly undermines absolute faith in one’s own worldview” (“Self Esteem” 70). Essentially, any other worldviews are seen as threats to be dealt with, and there are four main responses: 1) denigration – denigrating others who hold different worldviews as “ignorant savages who would share our perspectives if they were sufficiently intelligent or properly educated”, 2) assimilation — convincing the others to adopt your worldview, 3) accommodation – adopting portions of the others’ worldview to create a hybrid worldview that engenders a larger social consensus (this option demonstrates the frailty of worldviews and the formation of new sects), and 4) annihilation – killing the others up to and including genocide (Greenberg et al., “Self Esteem” 70). World history is replete with myriad examples of each of the responses to clashes of worldviews with genocide all too common; however, put in the context of terror management and its immortality imperative, diabolical genocidal acts show the extremes humans will go to defend their frail worldviews.
While worldview is the first element of the cultural anxiety buffer necessary in TMT to assuage existential terror, the second element is self-esteem and it effectively demands action to show loyalty to and defense of one’s worldview. Greenberg et al. state that “individuals manage their terror by maintaining faith in the cultural worldview and living up to the standards of value that are part of that worldview” (“Tolerance” 212). Lewis emphasizes the term self-esteem stating that when “people believe they are living up to cultural standards, they have high self-esteem, which temporarily relieves death anxiety” (413). Thus, in order to have an effective cultural anxiety buffer one must not only hold a worldview, but must internalize and embody that worldview through two types of actions that build and maintain self-esteem. The first set of actions is to explicitly follow the behavioral and other cultural standards defined by one’s worldview, but these are relatively simple requirements to fulfill especially since all the members of that culture have been living those standards since childhood. The second set of actions is implicit and tougher as they involve the defense of one’s worldview using the previously described responses of denigration, assimilation, accommodation, and/or annihilation to deal with clashes with other threatening worldviews – and ALL other worldviews are threatening by their mere existence.
While Terror Management Theory was defined with the physical world in mind, it translates remarkably well to cyberspace where the cybershrine (a cybershrine, explicated in the following section, is a simplifying assumption aggregating all activity in cyberspace for an individual with all their private digital media) provides an individual nearly infinite opportunities to demonstrate their devotion to and defense of a worldview thus virtually enhancing their cultural anxiety buffer necessary to alleviate existential terror. But there are significant differences in the translation to cyberspace. The greatest of these differences between the physical world and cyberspace is the exponential increase in the number of clashes between worldviews possible. In the physical world, there must be physical contact made in order for a confrontation of worldviews to occur; i.e., one party must physically travel to the other party’s “turf.” In cyberspace, no such “turf” exists and an individual’s digital presence can be on any public website at any time in defense of their worldview. Further, while an individual in physical space defending their worldview alone on the turf of a group harboring a different worldview could easily end in violence and possible annihilation, there is no threat of bodily harm in cyberspace during a virtual confrontation (and the possibility of follow-up confrontations in the physical world are exceedingly rare). Even though the number of confrontations are much higher than ever possible in the physical world, the requirement to defend one’s worldview is not diminished in cyberspace.
Another significant difference in the translation of TMT to cyberspace is the reduction in response options to a clashing of worldviews. When confronted in cyberspace by an alternate worldview, the responses available in the physical world – denigration, assimilation, accommodation, and annihilation – effectively winnow down to one: denigration. Because this is cyberspace, there is no physical killing possible, so the annihilation option is gone. Accommodation, merging two or more worldviews to form a new one, is highly impractical given the universe of worldviews clashing at any time – by the time the logistics of merging just two worldviews to satisfy a new, larger social consensus was completed, there would instantly be innumerable new clashes with the larger population defending their new worldview. Accommodation would simply lead to eternal exhaustion if it were the primary response, so from a practical standpoint it’s not a viable response to worldview clashes in cyberspace. Assimilation, convincing someone to reject their worldview and adopt yours, is a possibility, but the opportunities are limited to those not properly wedded to their own worldview in the first place. An example of this is those who become “radicalized” in cyberspace and adopt the worldview of another who typically is trying very hard to find a convert for life-ending, terrorist activities in the physical world. Much more typical is the vast amounts of energy folks in cyberspace waste trying desperately to convert others without realizing that the other folks see them as a threat to their worldview and are trying to convert them. Frankly, there’s no real incentive to reject the worldview you’ve been raised with to adopt another’s. While assimilation is technically possible in cyberspace and does happen, it’s primarily selected only by masochists willing to waste their time and energy in the fruitless pursuit of converts. This leaves only one viable option for the majority of folks to defend their worldviews in cyberspace: denigration of anyone with a different worldview. It should then come as no surprise, from a TMT perspective, that discourse in cyberspace, where worldviews clash everywhere, all the time devolves into never-ending and unresolvable flame wars: these interlocutors are not there to learn, they are there to defend their worldviews to enhance their cultural anxiety buffer thereby reducing their existential terror via denigration of other worldviews, the only practical tool available. In fact, it follows that the stronger the flame war, the greater the defense of their worldview, and the proportional lessening of their terror on an unconscious level. Of course, once the flame war ends, the digital evidence of the encounter becomes part of the individual’s cybershrine as proof of their commitment to their worldview thus increasing their self-esteem.
In addition to defending their worldviews in cyberspace, individuals must also demonstrate the standards of their worldview to fully realize the highest level of TMT self-esteem and thus lowest existential terror. This is quite simple using social media to post text, pictures, and videos of sanctioned activities, proper attire, appropriate relationships and behavior, acceptable language, flags, and other symbols reflecting one’s worldview. The cybershrine which includes all these posts stands as an enduring testament to prove that an individual has been “living up to the standards of value that are part of that worldview” and is worthy of the literal and symbolic immortality it offers (Greenberg et al., “Tolerance” 212). While it’s been shown that an individual can use their cybershrine to achieve a sense of immortality through the tenets of TMT, the cybershrine can also produce a sense of immortality sans any worldview via its ability to produce an independent sense of legacy.
Immortality
While TMT takes a scientific view to explain our impulse toward immortality via concepts of cultural worldview and self-esteem, Stephen Cave takes a broader, more historical view and posits that every one of mankind’s attempts at achieving immortality falls into just four immortality narratives (3). The first of these is called Staying Alive and encompasses attempts at physically keeping one’s body going for as long as possible to attain immortality, but this “narrative is really nothing more than the continuation of our attempts to stay young and healthy, to live that little bit longer – an extra year or ten” (Cave 4). We need look no further than our expansive health, fitness, and beauty markets to see the seemingly overwhelming impulse toward Staying Alive, and that much brainpower is spent cultivating this narrative such that “well-credentialed scientists and technologist believe that longevity liftoff is imminent” (Cave 4).
Thus far, all mankind’s efforts to develop physical immortality have failed, which leads to Cave’s second immortality narrative: Resurrection (4). Resurrection is based on the “belief that, although we must physically die, nonetheless we can physically rise again with the bodies we knew in life” and that “the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all also believe in literal, physical resurrection as a central tenet” (Cave 4-5). One of the most troubling issues with resurrection is its cruel reality that requires the extraction of one’s former atoms from nature to reassemble one’s body – this would naturally cause death and/or disfigurement in the living beings at the time of a mass resurrection as nature continually recycles decaying matter (like one’s dead body) to support ongoing life (e.g., worms) which works its way through the food chain to other humans (Cave 106). Then there’s Cave’s Duplication Problem: since “we replace roughly 98 percent of our atoms every year,” which atoms will be used (108)? Should the atoms just before death be used (to create an instantly dying body) or the much more preferable atoms of a healthier time (perhaps one’s teenage self)? In either case, the physical problems of resurrection and its essential bodily assemblage requirement show that, using TMT tenets, it’s much more of a fragile social consensus than a practical immortality option.
Since both immortality options that rely on a physical body, Staying Alive and Resurrection, have serious practical limitations that consequently don’t seem to offer viable options for physical immortality, Cave introduces a third option that relies on “surviving as some kind of spiritual entity—or Soul” (5). To explain the appeal of the Soul Narrative, Cave states that for “many, soul or mind has seemed separable from the flesh in which it resides – and therefore able to survive without it” (6). However, this absolute divide between flesh and mind, typically tied to soul, is becoming increasingly tenuous as our scientific knowledge increases. For instance, Kelly et al. state that “gut microbiota can communicate with the brain via neuroimmune, neuroendocrine, and neural pathways comprising the brain-gut-microbiota axis” (366). Fond et al. further state “the role of the human intestinal microbiota in the genesis and/or maintenance of psychiatric disorders is in its infancy but appears as one of the most promising avenues of research in psychiatry” (40). In other words, there’s a recently discovered link between the bacteria in our stomachs and our mood, which is self-evident to anyone who’s experienced being “hangry,” demonstrating the hardwired link between mind and body. More evidence is the cognitive decay that comes with age and the personality changes associated with brain trauma. Thus, the concept of an immortal soul should be different to the adherents of the Soul Narrative than the bodily-influenced mind, and, just like the Resurrection Narrative, requires a fragile TMT social consensus to function as an immortality option.
To sidestep the practical limitations and philosophical debates for Cave’s first three immortality narratives (Staying Alive, Resurrection, and Soul) to function, he introduces his fourth, Legacy, which is the most widespread of all (6). Legacy “requires neither the survival of the physical body nor an immaterial soul, but is concerned instead with more indirect ways of extending ourselves in the future” (6). Cave divides the legacy immortality narrative into two forms: the cultural and the biological (205). Biological legacy is the creation of children to inherit and pass on our genes as an “attempt to fling ourselves into an endless future” (Cave 230). Cultural legacy is associated with achieving a level of fame that will endure and/or the creation of physical artifacts, such as books, films, works of art, buildings, statues, etc. that are valued and will likewise endure once the creator or namesake has passed. It’s important to differentiate how TMT and Cave use the term “culture.” For TMT, culture is defined by a rigid set of rules that individuals must follow and defend in order to gain a sense of immortality. For Cave, individuals in his culture gain a sense of immortality by seeking fame, which doesn’t necessarily require adherence to the rules, and creating timeless works; i.e., individuals in Cave’s culture earn immortality by standing out, but those in TMT’s culture earn it by blending in. However, in both cultures, it’s a fragile social consensus that defines worldview in TMT and similarly defines individual fame for Cave. Implicit in Cave’s concept of legacy is the notion that only those things worth remembering in the physical world, as determined by social consensus, are collectively protected from the ravages of entropy and its concomitant rapid decay; however, the digital domain and cybershrines change that bringing legacy and its promise of immortality to folks without the typically futile pursuit of social consensus required in the physical world.
Traditional Legacy
In the physical world, we are surrounded by evidence of innumerable legacy narratives, and the magnitude of one’s legacy is dramatically different depending on whether one is an “ordinary person” or has fame, status, and/or riches thereby granting a type of highly visible and privileged legacy. Of course, there’s biological legacy which is an option for most humans, but my focus is on Cave’s cultural legacy which I consider here our traditional legacy mode and will refer to as simply legacy. Note I will not address the digital equivalent of biological legacy which is an uploadable “digitized self idea” untethered by physical form that could obviously be duplicated at will (Solomon et al. 98). This digitized self idea implies a disembodied presence in cyberspace capable of autonomous action, but the cybershrine concept presented in the following section is the accumulation of one’s digital data and evidence of online presence, which, without considering cybernetic feedback with its owner, are passive and incapable of autonomous action – just like traditional legacy. Another obvious similarity between traditional legacy and cybershrines, which necessarily reflect one’s TMT worldview, is the potential to invoke responses in the living.
The reminders of legacy are inescapable: the names of the privileged deceased are attached to streets, buildings, foundations, businesses, schools, public facilities, etc. and their likenesses are prominently displayed in both two-dimensional (paintings) and three dimensional (statues) physical forms. The cultural texts they’ve created (e.g., books, films, music, plays, etc.) have been selected by social consensus for preservation, and their enduring presence among the living creates a symbolic immortality. Of course, there are limitations like natural disasters, curation blunders, or the insidiousness of unstoppable entropy-driven decay that will degrade and eventually eliminate all attempts at legacy in the physical domain; however, the intent is clear that symbolic immortality of the privileged is the goal, and significant efforts will be made to maintain it. This is not the case for the masses where society has little interest in their symbolic immortality and will make little or no efforts to either create or preserve their legacy – the masses must make their own legacy. Typically, the average person (or their family) pays for an advertised, truncated summary of their life (an obituary) and a tombstone, which is forgotten in a decade or two in the best case. Any of the deceased’s material possessions are distributed among family and friends and/or sold with the proceeds distributed as well. A few special items, called heirlooms, will pass on to descendants promising some hope of immortality, but even these items soon lose their connection to the deceased and are broken, lost, or sold. Thus, for the masses, traditional legacy is an illusion, but there are much better prospects for symbolic immortality via cybershrines and their persistence both offline and in cyberspace.
Legacy Drive Characteristics
In general, there are at least three levels of legacy: 1) personal legacy, 2) group legacy, and 3) human legacy. Personal legacy in cyberspace is defined by the cybershrines in Section 2. Group legacy in cyberspace is defined by digital affective communities and is only included here for completeness. I see human legacy as a utopian goal where all legacies are aligned toward the perpetuation of the human species. Human legacy and the related activist concept of “cultural montage” will be discussed in future work as will the application of the legacy drive to trauma theory and to the close reading of cultural texts.
Many characteristics of legacy in the physical domain are equally relevant in cyberspace. To begin with, legacy knows no bounds – it is an insatiable drive. We need only look to the wealthy and their need to inundate culture with their prominently displayed names. Only death ends the legacy drive for individuals and groups alike. The legacy drive has also been with us for tens of thousands of years. While some may view the cave drawings of our distant ancestors as evidence of a creative impulse, I wonder whether this may be the first evidence of humankind realizing its inevitable death and attempting to create a visual legacy that would live on after its death. If this is true, then there is a legacy link between the first cave drawings and the creation and distribution of digital memes today. Finally, we must not forget that legacy is inherently amoral: neither the individual nor the culture need be moral to gain a mortality salience benefit (recall the horror of the “annihilation” option for clashing cultures). Further, there is no requirement that a legacy be inherently rational, either – a legacy based on ignorance can be just as valuable to the individual and group as a legacy based on reason.
Legacy Drive and Freud’s Death Drive
Sigmund Freud, following his examination of WWI soldiers suffering from shell-shock, updated his theories to include the life drive and the death drive since he found his Pleasure Principle insufficient to explain their behavior [NEED CITATION]. While Freud used sadism as an example where the two drives function simultaneously, my interpretation of Terror Management Theory is that the two work sequentially: first, a human must behave in ways consistent with the norms of their culture (life drive), and, second, defend their culture often at great risk to themselves typically in combat (death drive). In other words, Freud’s death drive should not be considered simply a desire to return to some inanimate state, but the sacrifice of one’s self to make the ultimate contribution in the defense of their culture: the “death bet” is that the culture will live on indefinitely. The legacy drive is useful in analyzing the digital domain where the threat of physical harm is absent but the opportunities for cultural clashes are nearly infinite. Since the legacy drive is amoral (a sense of immortality is independent of morality) and often irrational (a sense of immortality is independent of reason), we see never-ending online fights where “fake news” is defended and denigration dominates. Although I have stated that the legacy drive functions sequentially in the physical domain where actual death is involved (life drive first, then death drive), in the digital domain we see a return to Freud’s sadism where the two drives function simultaneously: the online insults provide both a love and defense of one’s culture while also attacking the culture of The Other. In order to devise and implement action leading to social justice, it’s important to understand why the cultural clashes we witness online are so acrimonious: it’s a competition of legacies rather than merit-based ideas.
.
SECTION TWO: CYBERSHRINES AND AUTORHETORIC
Introduction to Cybershrines
Over the past two decades, our access to cyberspace and increasingly cheap digital media have revolutionized our ability to interact with one another and simultaneously store ever-larger amounts of personal digital data. Each time we interact in cyberspace, we leave digital traces that have been given a variety of names, such as a “digital footstep, fingerprint, shadow, profile, mosaic, persona, virtual self or doppelganger,” that Parkinson found weren’t used in a consistent manner in scholarly literature (553). The most all-encompassing term for the accumulation of evidence of cyberspace activity attributed to an individual was the “digitally extended self” which provides the “fullest possible digital representation of an individual” (Parkinson 556). This naturally includes all activity on social media as well as on forums, blogs, etc. whether as the creator of digital media or simply a consumer regardless of cyberspace entry point (cellphone, tablet, computer, etc.). However, there are two primary concerns with the “digitally extended self” term: 1) it doesn’t include private digital data stored either locally or in the cloud, and 2) it assumes a passive set of data. To address these concerns, I propose the term cybershrine to define the aggregation of all public activity in cyberspace and private digital media to thus create an all-inclusive digital shrine devoted to an individual, while also allowing for an active feedback loop between the cybershrine, as a cybernetic feedback apparatus, and the individual. Using the Statue of Liberty to conceptualize the concept of a cybershrine, there are two parts: the main artistic piece, which represents the public digital activity of an individual, and the base, which represents the private digital archive of an individual. Together, these two elements compose the cybershrine of an individual as seen in Figure 1:
Note that a cybershrine is different from the concept of an electronic monument in that the creator of the cybershrine, as defined here, is alive to reap its benefits; however, once the cybershrine’s creator has passed, elements of her cybershrine could certainly become part of an electronic monument (Ulmer xxi). Further, the electronic monument as Gregory Ulmer defined it may memorialize anything from a deceased person to a significant cultural event, whether joyful (fall of the Berlin Wall) or tragic (9/11), but the cybershrine is exclusively the domain of the living individual. It’s also worth mentioning there are memorials in cyberspace that are sometimes referred to a cybershrines, when, in fact, they are by definition electronic monuments, and that some simply post images of physical shrines and call them cybershrines when they are not intended in any way to fill the role of the shrines they document – it’s the equivalent of taking pictures of books and absurdly calling them cyberbooks.
The term cybershrine is rescued here, given a concrete definition, and is used here simply so that its meaning and functions won’t be confused with the variety of other digital identity terms and their often inconsistent meanings, as stated previously. Indeed, it is their proposed functions in service to an individual that is the central point, and cybershrines will be shown to have four: 1) to demonstrate the individual’s worldview to others in cyberspace, 2) to increase the individual’s self-esteem, 3) to provide a digital legacy, and 4) from a cybernetic point of view, to collect and filter information to minimize entropy. The first three assuage the existential terror of dying common to all humans, and the fourth provides a way for an individual to maintain steadiness in a world of increasingly chaotic information that conflicts with their worldview. In this way, cybershrines have quickly become an essential new psychological tool for humans to deal with the real world, whether they realize it or not.
Digital Legacy Offline: Personal Digital Archive
As a simplifying assumption for one’s digital life, a cybershrine is composed of not only an individual’s digital interactions with others in cyberspace but also an individual’s private collection of digital media, whether online or off. Moreover, a private digital media collection can grow very easily over the years, and I have extensive experience unconsciously building mine. As I look around my desk and the boxes I have in my garage, I see numerous forms of digital media I’ve amassed throughout my life: 3.5” floppy discs, 5¼” floppy discs, a reel of digital photographic data from my early graduate work that will only work on ancient machines that no longer exist, Zip discs, compact discs, portable hard drives, fixed hard drives removed from old computers, numerous USB drives and media cards of various capacities. Why is it so hard for me and others to get rid of our digital media? The answer is that this collection represents a private digital legacy that also functions as any traditional legacy would by providing a sense of symbolic immortality to lessen existential terror. Further, this digital off-line legacy is available to nearly every human regardless of fame, status, and/or riches – the digital effectively democratizes legacy providing symbolic immortality without the social consensus mandate previously discussed.
It is instructive to think of the private digital media component of a cybershrine as an individual’s personal archive. Foucault stated that the “archive is first the law of what can be said” and that “the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous mass” (29). Foucault died in 1984 at the dawn of the digital storage revolution, but his thoughts are still germane with respect to the personal, digital archives we daily curate. Indeed, the media we amass reflects what we’ve determined has value and thus naturally reflects “what can be said” of us. While Foucault saw that an archive put order into what would be otherwise “an amorphous mass,” that’s exactly what most personal digital archives begin to resemble over time. Baron thinks that physical archives, despite their appearance of order, hide “a vast amalgamation of unrelated and unruly rather than neatly ordered objects” (3). In other words, the disorder of one’s digital media collection shouldn’t necessarily be a hindrance in applying the term “archive” and all of its scholarly connotations. While an often “amorphous mass” of digital media seems impossibly archive-like, Sweeten et al. says that “the amassing of large, unstructured digital archives seems unproblematic, perhaps because of the relative low cost of digital storage and the efficiency of modern search engines” (55). It is the search engine which effectively relieves the digital archive of the structure essential to and characteristic of the physical archive. Thus, one’s collection of digital media may be considered an “archive” regardless of file structure, and, translating Foucault to the personal digital domain, well reflects its curator.
Given that we are all, either consciously or unconsciously, amassing and curating a personal digital archive, the question arises as to its psychological importance for the owner. After a review of research data, Sweeten et al. conclude “that people perceive their ‘self’ as extending to their digital possessions and become increasingly ‘attached’ to them” (54), and that these “virtual possessions have become an important part of the user’s extended self” (59). Given this inseparable link between our digital archive and self, it’s not surprising that Schull finds deleting personal digital data “risks self-dissolution” due to our “subjective identification with [our digital archive]” (44). The digital archive is evidently more than a mere collection of random data files: it’s psychologically part of us, and losing our digital data means losing part of ourselves. Consequently, in addition to the aggregation of cyberspace activity artifacts Parkinson et al. define as the “digitally extended self” (556), we must also add the personal digital archive thereby completing the totality of our perceived digital selves and giving credence to the definition of the cybershrine. Moreover, in describing personal digital data, Shull also speaks of “its promise of binary permanence”, making a clear allusion to the promise of immortality (47). In seeing immortality in one’s digital archive and projecting one’s self onto the archive, it thus follows that the existence of a personal digital archive provides a sense of symbolic immortality that alone, without the need for any TMT worldview or social consensus, provides psychological relief from existential terror. Recall that earning immorality via TMT requires not only embracing and demonstrating the tenets of a worldview in cyberspace to earn self-esteem but also defending it from constant clashes with other worldviews using primarily the denigration option as the assimilation, accommodation, and annihilation options are quite limited online. In comparison, the personal digital archive requires practically no work and grants immortality by just being there.
Since a personal digital archive can provide psychological benefits (i.e., an anxiety buffer necessary to control existential terror) and efficient search engines render file structure and archive size irrelevant, the question arises as to whether digital hoarding, the creation of a massive archive, is as detrimental as physical hoarding and if it might negate the archive’s positive effects. Physical hoarding can have positive motivation: Fried states that hoarding is “born of the threat of scarcity” alluding to a primordial survival instinct, but this only seems relevant if the hoarding is for food, water, or some other life-sustaining product (357-358). However, the hoarding of textual material (newspapers, magazines, books, etc.) “is driven by a desire to rescue information that would otherwise pass on into unworldly forgetfulness” because it could be useful at a later date or it has important documentary value for society or the hoarder’s life (Fried 344). For the physical hoarder, the accumulation of physical items grows to the point where physical movement in the home is dramatically curtailed rendering the home impossible to live in and threatening the safety of the hoarder. Fried finds that physical hoarding resulting in such a predicament is psychological reflecting “a cognitive deficit (the inability to categorise in ways that make the personal space livable) and an extreme affective personality (unwillingness to treat objects as disposable because they either are assigned quasi-human dispositions, or because they become the locus for psychic storage of emotional memory)” (357). So, while physical hoarding can obviously lead to physical problems because of one’s inability, for whatever reason, to assign rational values to items and purge accordingly to ensure a livable space, there are mental defects at play.
For digital hoarding, the motivation can be similar to physical hoarding, but the impacts are far less detrimental. Digital hoarding is defined as “the excessive saving, archiving, and storing of digital artefacts, along with a reluctance to delete, even when the content in question is redundant, irrelevant, or no longer valuable to the owner” (Sweeten el al. 44). Similar to physical hoarding, “the hoarding of digital items appears to display the same characteristics of excessive acquisition, failure to discard, and emotional distress” (59). Sweeten et al. reports that there are five reasons for failing to delete digital items: “1) keeping data for the future/just in case; 2) keeping data as evidence; 3) lazy/time consuming; 4) emotional attachment to data; 5) not my server-not my problem” (Sweeten et al. 56). In other words, there are good reasons for keeping digital data and the requirement to sort/purge one’s archive comes down to personal preference given the ubiquity of ever-growing storage options and efficient search engines; however, there are unique psychological issues with a digital archive of any size. Sweeten et al. found that there’s an “anxious sense of entropy that can arise for keepers of an ever-expanding virtual archive” followed by a “disorienting sense of vertigo that accompanies the task of collecting and containing the bits of one’s life” and finally an “annihilating sense of loss” if the data become lost or corrupt (44). This devastating sense of loss also extends to the “fear of losing one’s identity when [intentionally] discarding items” (Sweeten et al. 59). Ultimately, there’s just no way to avoid the anxiety of a digital archive whether culling it, adding to it, or leaving it be – its psychological importance and concomitant anxiety is consistent with its crucial role as a buffer against existential terror. Since digital archives provide a sense of immortality via the legacy narrative and there’s really no imperative to efficiently sort/purge them, it seems that digital hoarding will be mankind’s normal inclination for the foreseeable future thus creating ever-expanding cybershrines.
Digital Legacy Online: Digital Footprints
While it has been shown that simply possessing a digital archive provides a sense of immortality via Cave’s legacy narrative and that increasing one’s self-esteem by presenting and defending a worldview also provides a sense of immortality via TMT, there’s a question of whether simply having a presence in cyberspace (without the necessary TMT denigration fights over worldview) provides another element to our digital legacy that will assuage existential terror. To begin with, the “digital persona is an essential part of the individual identity” and “involves personal, social, institutional, legal, scientific and technological aspects” (de Kerckhove and de Almeida 278). In other words, it’s everything we do that leaves a trace in cyberspace, and everything we do does leave a trace. Crafting this “digital persona” is essential and the “moment when one participates in digital space, the identity is constructed, and the individual begins communicating” (Deh and Glodovic 105). In her discussion of cybernetics, Hayles states that we “do not see a world “out there” that exists apart from us” (11) which I think is an appropriate way to think of ourselves in cyberspace: we exist in cyberspace just like we do when we enter any other medium, like the ocean, with our physical bodies, except in cyberspace it’s a mental construct. And we experience cyberspace through the cybershrines we’ve created which are a perfectly preserved record of all our digital interactions (in addition to our digital archive) that is just as we left it when we logged off. Deh and Glodovic state that “identity is an experience of the essential consistency and continuity of the self in time and space” (102), and that’s exactly what a cybershrine provides. In discussing one’s digital life after physical death, Maciel and Pereira ponder what will become of one’s “digital legacy” in cyberspace (2), and its “immortality” that lives on in social media accounts (3). Whether intentionally or not, Maciel and Pereira are using the same terms TMT and Cave used to address existential terror. Thus, it is easy to conclude that one’s mere presence in cyberspace, an online digital legacy, provides a sense of immortality and consequently some relief from existential terror.
An online presence also provides a new opportunity in the legacy narrative that can translate to the physical world: fame. There are presently innumerable online YouTube stars who, through their videos, have gained a level of fame equivalent to stars in the sports or music industries; however, they needed no corporation to specially select and sponsor them – they simply posted clever videos and built an audience. Exploiting this fame, they have become so-called and well-paid “influencers” with their audience and steer their followers to buy commercial products. This fame in cyberspace is as significant in the digital world as it is the physical world for providing a sense of immortality.
Cybershrines and Religion [additional support data will be added]
I’ve made the argument that cybershrines – the accumulation of digital artifacts both online and off – provide an anxiety buffer that lessens the potentially paralyzing fear of dying by creating a sense of immortality. Returning to Cave’s analysis, there were two immortality narratives that were tied closely to religion: resurrection and soul. With the advent of cybershrines, we have a contender to challenge religion’s dominance in the anxiety buffer arena, and we’d expect a reduction in religious practices if cybershrines are providing an alternative form of immortality. Mansager et al. “correlated a decline in Americans’ religious affiliation with an increase in Internet use” (214). Downey found that even accounting for education and internet use, there was an unknown factor where “people born later are more likely to disaffiliate” from religion (10). Downey goes into even more detail stating that “this third factor would have to be new and rising in prevalence, like the Internet, during the 1990s and 2000s (…). It is hard to imagine what that factor might be” (9). To me, this factor isn’t so hard to imagine: it is most likely cybershrines. Their rise perfectly matches the rise in internet use by definition – it is impossible to communicate in cyberspace without creating a cybershrine. Thus, the phenomenon of decreasing religious affiliation we are witnessing is probably a new generation, brought up with digital archives and internet use, who are finding a daily sense of immortality in their personal cybershrines rather than in religious affiliations. In a way, cybershrines could be replacing physical religious temples for many, but this conclusion needs more study.
Cybershrine Cybernetics
Because cybershrines are a collection of static data, whether in cyberspace or on private digital storage devices, they are incapable of autonomous action; however, cybernetics shows how a cybershrine can be considered an active apparatus that informs its owner and, unfortunately, limits change. Hayles shows the evolution of cybernetics from homeostasis in the 1940s, to reflexivity in the 1960s, and finally to virtuality in the 1980s (7). For this analysis, I’ll look at cybershrines using the original form of cybernetics and focus on homeostasis. As defined by the architect of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener states that the “process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis” (95). Hayles describes it in a manner more applicable to cybershrines: “homeostasis had been understood as the ability of living organisms to maintain steady states when they are buffeted by fickle environments” (8). Obviously, a cybershrine is not a living organism, but, as a symbol of one’s TMT worldview, it will definitely clash with the worldviews of others in the “fickle environment” of cyberspace. For every clash (typically a post challenging one’s worldview), the response will be a strong TMT defense (typically denigration) to build self-esteem that reinforces one’s worldview thereby closing the attack-response loop – this is the stability-seeking homeostasis process that builds cybershrines. Wiener also describes a “special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world” which, translating into cyberspace, well defines another function of the cybershrine: the data posted on social media exist primarily to collect information – responses – from others (26). While some responses to the “collected data” will be negative in defense of one’s worldview, another response is self-presentation where “individuals selectively provide information about themselves and carefully cater this information in response to others’ feedback” (Rui and Stafanone 110). The goal of self-presentation is for individuals to “adjust their public images to audience expectations” (Rui and Stafanone 111). Here we see again homeostasis at work: the individual limits what is posted in cyberspace to appease an audience and achieve stability. Indeed, as Wiener stated, homeostasis “is the touchstone of our personal identity” and this notion persists in the digital world (96). This cybernetic concept of homeostasis is a guiding principle in the construction of one’s cybershrine, and the need for stability, especially when understanding the role cybershrines play in minimizing existential terror, is paramount. Thus, the cybershrine may be considered a type of rigid cybernetic apparatus that provides a feedback loop to its owner and consequently limits responses in cyberspace to ensure stability of worldview and self. [TO BE ADDED: CYBERSHRINE CYBERNETICS (HOMEOSTASIS) AS A POSSIBLE CONTRIBUTOR TO THE RECENT INCREASE IN TEENAGE SUICIDES]
Cybershrine Curation
We’re living in an unusual time where the majority of cybershrines belong to the living rather than those who have passed; however, the time is fast approaching when we must deal with the increasingly significant issues of curating and potentially deleting the cybershrines of the dead. It may seem morbid, but we are now at the point in the growth of cybershrines where “individuals, even though dead, can keep interacting with others by means of the data of their digital asset” (Maciel and Pereira 28). Note this observation from a software engineering perspective reinforces this essay’s immortality narrative of cybershrines. While an individual may perceive cloud storage of their cybershrine as infinite and immortal, this just isn’t the case. Schull puts it succinctly “that digital storage, as weightless as it may be, nonetheless consumes massive amounts of energy and other worldly resources” (44). This raises an obvious question: how much energy and resources should be spent on maintaining the ever-increasing number of cybershrines of the dead rather than enhancing the lives of the living? However, we shouldn’t simply delete cybershrines after an arbitrary number of years since there are “social networks with scientific purposes, [and] information [that] must be kept, as it happens to printed books” (Maciel and Pereira 21). For the benefit of mankind, we don’t want to lose those data, but wrestling with the final resolution and social impacts of the cybershrines of the dead is just beginning.
The biggest irony of the digital world is that it is fundamentally grounded in the physical world of server farms requiring extraordinary amounts of energy for storage equipment operation and cooling. This physical footprint means the digital world is subject to entropy in the forms of natural and manmade disasters and to human curation blunders (especially when regular software updates have been known to delete data or render it unreadable). Much like Ozymandias, who built a substantial physical legacy that eventually decayed into sand, the immortality builders of cybershrines seek is an illusion when considering time in terms of millennia rather than decades. To me, it seems inevitable that nearly every cybershrine will be either substantially reduced or deleted altogether so those resources may be used for the living. But the inevitable demise of cybershrines isn’t the point: cybershrines are built for the promise of immortality and the anxiety buffer they produce to lessen the paralyzing fear of existential terror is real while the cybershrine owner is alive. In the same way that those who believe in the resurrection narrative don’t want to think through the bloody mess that reassembling their original atoms from living beings will entail, those who benefit from cybershrines don’t want to think through the reality of their ultimate deletion – in both cases, it is their faith in immortality that is important to their lives.
Moving Cybershrines
Just like a shrine in the physical world, cybershrines are very difficult to move or modify once built, but it is not impossible. They do quickly become cybernetic systems, and owners subconsciously process all new information to ensure coherence with their respective cybershrines resulting in the homeostasis of limited thinking and endless worldview clashes. But there is hope for a better future. Greenberg et al. found that “that those who subscribe to a worldview that embraces tolerance may actually respond to mortality salience with more acceptance of those who are different” (“Tolerance” 219). For Americans, there must be an effort to embrace a more inclusive, overarching worldview – a human legacy! – that emphasizes tolerance and our immigrant roots in order to minimize clashes and prioritize civility. This may seem impossible today, but as the older generation (who were raised with a segregation-based worldview) die off, they are being replaced with a more tolerant generation raised with a diversity-based worldview. Even if elders refuse to alter their worldviews, the arc of history is bending toward worldviews that are more tolerant, which is good news for all of us. Further, the clashes we have in cyberspace are conducted via one-dimensional text or two-dimensional imagery, so it’s not surprising that cyberspace discussions lack depth and can quickly devolve into a cycle of aggressive, reptilian-brain responses reflecting the limitations of the media used. Hopefully, as we begin to enter cyberspace in a more natural three-dimensional form (e.g., virtual reality), our discourse will become more human and humane and the tolerance of others’ worldviews will come naturally. But just knowing the profound psychological impact of cybershrines due to immortality, it’s easy to conceive of something along the lines of “cybershrine therapy” where, guided by mental health professionals, individuals delete negative aspects of their cybershrine and rebuild it to reflect a more positive worldview and thus a more positive version of themselves. Because of the cybernetic nature of cybershrines, this should eventually alter their real-world behavior. The point here is that cybershrines may seem to lead to a dystopian future of endless worldview clashing, but they can be manipulated for a better future once we fully realize the extent of their roles in our lives and manipulate their power for good.
Autorhetoric
With the Legacy Drive motivating the homeostasis of an individual’s cybershrine now explained, it’s time to integrate cybershrines into the traditional model of rhetoric. To begin, the specific definition of rhetoric I use is informed by Lloyd Bitzer and Wayne Booth. Bitzer, the inventor of the Rhetorical Situation composed of exigence/audience/constraints, saw rhetoric as something that “functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world” (3). Booth defined rhetoric as the “entire range of resources that human beings share for producing effects on one another” (xi). Blending these two together, I see rhetoric as fundamentally a process that allows rhetors to produce responses in their audiences that alter the world in some way. To put it more clearly:
Rhetoric: A process whereby rhetors design, build, and deliver rhetorical texts to start, stop, continue, or prevent human action.
This definition of rhetoric makes sense to me from a practical perspective, and I see Bitzer’s “change in the world” as implicit in human action. Note my definition also includes preventing human action, such as voting, which is a necessary expansion of Bitzer’s definition to capture the typical desire of hegemonic forces to maintain the status quo. To me, the role of rhetoric in culture cannot be understated, and below is me definition of rhetoric in bumper-sticker format:
“Rhetoric is the gravity of culture – it holds it all together!”
A simple flowchart of the traditional rhetoric model based on the exigence/constraints/audience elements in Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, is presented in Figure 2:
To complete the model, I’ve introduced the notion of a “constrained rhetorical text” (CRT) which may take any form (speech, film, meme, article, book, etc.), and the “constrained” adjective highlights the constraints from Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. The last element added to the model is “action” which is always implied in rhetoric, but it’s included to explicitly state the endstate of traditional rhetoric model. Note that there are many different interpretations of rhetoric and the process/model of rhetoric, and I’ve created one for the physical domain in Fig. 2 that allows for easy translation to the digital domain and the inclusion of my cybershrine concept.
Recall that cybershrines in cyberspace function primarily at the unconscious level just like mortality salience from TMT that is motivated by the legacy drive. What the cybershrine adds to rhetoric in the digital domain is the homeostasis feedback loop – not once, but twice: once for the rhetor and once for the audience. For the audience, there are feedback loops for each individual in the audience. Granted similar cognitive processes are probably occurring for each audience member, but no two cybershrines are identical. What’s happening in each individual audience member and the rhetor is what I call autorhetoric. a process of unconscious homeostasis that occurs while individuals operate in cyberspace where the goal is to minimize CRT elements and audience action inconsistent with their individual cybershrines because the rhetors’ CRTs and audience actions immediately become part of their respective cybershrines. Autorhetoric is digital homeostasis where consistency is paramount. The updated flowchart for activity in cyberspace that includes cybershrines is presented in Figure 3:
Jean Neinkamp coined the term “internal rhetoric” to describe a “lens through which to study mental activity rather than a reference to a particular kind of mental activity” (ix). In her work, she defines a “rhetorical self” which is composed of a “colloquy of internalized social languages” (127). While just talking to yourself is what would naturally be assumed with a term like internal rhetoric, Nienkamp refers to this conscious self speech as “cultivated internal rhetoric” (125). For Neinkamp, there are both conscious and subconscious versions of internal rhetoric. Her primary internal rhetoric is a “process that goes on virtually all the time in our subconscious minds” (125). This subconscious primary internal rhetoric is where I propose the cybershrines I’ve defined operate in accordance with the terror management theory I’ve presented. Since her book was written in 2001 before the explosion and ubiquity of social media, Nienkamp’s theories are based in the physical world as is the traditional rhetoric model in Fig. 2. My contribution to rhetoric theory is including new stabilizing mechanisms and applying a new social psychology (TMT) that operate at the subconscious level while humans navigate the digital world. This is the new concept of autorhetoric where I’m building on Nienkamp’s work and extrapolating it into cyberspace. In fact, Nienkamp argues that the “rhetorical self is composed of internalized cultural imperatives” in the physical world, and I’ve defined how these “internalized cultural imperatives” manifest themselves via cybershrines and TMT in the digital world (135). The autorhetoric I propose is merely one aspect of digital rhetoric, but it’s one of the most crucial as it demonstrates how the powerful legacy drive leads to the polarization of humans online and why it’s almost impossible for humans to change online: they are driven to feel immortal.
Conclusion
The advent of and advances in cyberspace communication and digital data storage have allowed us to perfectly document our public interactions and create digital archives of our own work and the work of others. The accumulation of all possible digital data online and off related to a single individual is called here a cybershrine. From a Terror Management Theory perspective, cybershrines allow us to embrace and defend our worldview which in turn builds up our self-esteem creating an anxiety buffer that minimizes the existential terror of dying, which could potentially paralyze us if not addressed. The key is to create a sense of immortality. Cybershrines also create this sense of immortality via the incidental building of personal digital archives, whether in cyberspace or stored on private media. Finally, one’s mere presence in cyberspace creates a sense of immortality. This new sense of immortality inherent in the ascendance of cybershrines in the past 20 years may be related to the simultaneous reduction of religious affiliation, which similarly provides a sense of immortality. The downside of a cybershrine is that it becomes a cybernetic apparatus that prioritizes homeostasis via autorhetoric, thus preventing human growth and development that would necessarily deviate from a stable point. This can have tragic consequences for those who feel stuck by their cybershrine and autorhetoric; e.g., the unfortunate rise in teenage suicides. However, there should be ways to alter worldviews to free ourselves. Thus, cybershrines are not simply the benign collection of digital data but are in fact powerful psychological tools for humans to deal with their fear of dying – an unexpected result. And while cybershrines promise immortality and do provide relief from existential terror while their owners are alive, the “immortal” digital world depends on the physical world for its existence; thus, digital immortality is but an illusion since entropy always wins.
Works Cited
Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect : Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. London ; New York : Routledge, 2014
Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 1, 1968, pp. 1-14.
Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric. Blackwell Publishing, 2004
Bradley, Ben. “Existential Terror.” Journal of Ethics, vol. 19, no. 3/4, Dec. 2015, pp. 409–418.
Cave, Stephen. Immortality. Crown, 2012.
de Kerckhove, Derrick, and Cristina Miranda de Almeida. “What Is a Digital Persona?” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, vol. 11, no. 3, Dec. 2013, pp. 277–287.
Deh, Dragana1 and Danica Glođović. “The Construction of Identity in Digital Space.” Art + Media Journal of Art & Media Studies, no. 16, Sept. 2018, pp. 101–111.
Downey, A. B. “Religious affiliation, education and Internet use.” 21 Mar 2014, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.5534.pdf
Freud, Sigmund, and C. J. M. Hubback. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. International psycho-analytical press, 1922.
Freud, Sigmund. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Carlton House, 1933.
Fond, G., et al. “Review: The ‘Psychomicrobiotic’: Targeting Microbiota in Major Psychiatric Disorders: A Systematic Review.” Pathologie Biologie, vol. 63, Feb. 2015, pp. 35–42.
Foucault, Michael. “The Historical a Priori and the Archive.” The Archive, edited by Merewether, Charles. MIT Press, 2006. pp. 26-30.
Fried, Daniel. “Compulsive Hoarding: Psychopathologies of Print, Phenomenologies of Text.” Culture, Theory, and Critique, vol. 55, no. 3, Nov. 2014, pp. 342–364.
Greenberg, Jeff, et al. “Terror Management and Tolerance: Does Mortality Salience Always Intensify Negative Reactions to Others Who Threaten One’s Worldview?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 63, no. 2, Aug. 1992, pp. 212–220.
Greenberg, J., et al. “Terror Management Theory of Self-Esteem and Cultural Worldviews: Empirical Assessments and Conceptual Refinements.” ADVANCES IN EXPERIMENTAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 1997, pp. 61-139.
Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Kelly, John R., et al. “The Microbiome and Epidemiology: Brain-Gut-Microbiota Axis: Challenges for Translation in Psychiatry.” Annals of Epidemiology, vol. 26, May 2016, pp. 366–372.
Lewis, Adam M. “Terror Management Theory Applied Clinically: Implications for Existential-Integrative Psychotherapy.” Death Studies, vol. 38, no. 6, July 2014, pp. 412–417.
Maciel, Cristiano, and Vinicius Pereira. “The Fate of Digital Legacy in Software Engineers’ View: Technical and Cultural Aspects.” Digital Legacy and Interaction: Post-Mortem Issues, edited by Cristiano Maciel, Springer, 2013, pp. 1-30.
Mansager, Erik, et al. “Internet and Faith.” Journal of Individual Psychology, vol. 71, no. 2, Summer 2015, pp. 214–220.
Nienkamp, Jean. Internal Rhetorics: Toward a History and Theory of Self-Persuasion. Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.
Parkinson, Brian1,2, BLP1M11@soton.ac. u., et al. “The Digitally Extended Self: A Lexicological Analysis of Personal Data.” Journal of Information Science, vol. 44, no. 4, Aug. 2018, pp. 552–565.
Rui, Jian, and Michael A. Stefanone. “Strategic Self-Presentation Online: A Cross-Cultural Study.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 29, Jan. 2013, pp. 110–118.
Schüll, Natasha Dow. “Digital Containment and Its Discontents.” History and Anthropology, no. 1, 2018, pp. 42-48.
Solomon, Sheldon, et al. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Random House, 2015.
Sweeten, George, et al. “Digital Hoarding Behaviours: Underlying Motivations and Potential Negative Consequences.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 85, Aug. 2018, pp. 54–60.
Ulmer, Gregory L. Electronic Monuments. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Da Capo Press, 1954.
This page last updated on December 7, 2022