Caddie Alford – författare

A landmark rhetorical theory of the formation and functioning of opinions in social media contextsEntitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality offers a rhetorical theory of opinions, especially as opinions operate within social media. Many urgent contemporary issues—from demagoguery to white ethno-nationalism—compel us to consider opinions seriously. Yet while clichÉs like “he tells it like it is” and newer imperatives such as #BlackLivesMatter seem straightforward, haptics, emoji, and “like” buttons belie unexamined collective assumptions about how opinions in the digital realm function. Caddie Alford illuminates this function by deploying the ancient Greek term for opinions: doxa. Doxa translates to “opinion,” but the term can also signal seemingness and expectations. Doxa’s capacious meanings reveal opinions to be more than static or monolithic: With doxa, opinions become emergent, dynamic, relational, and pluralistic. Masterfully combining rhetorical frameworks as well as scholarship on opinions and digital media entanglements, Alford puts opinions into conversation with such case studies as algorithms, infrastructure, digital illiteracy, virality, and activism. She shows how “doxa” reveals gradations of opinions, from more reputable to less reputable. She demonstrates that these gradations are multifaceted and susceptible to interventions. Entitled Opinions sheds much of the baggage associated with opinions while opening up more fertile pathways of inquiry. In a world that says, “don’t read the comments,” this book reads the comments, taking seriously content that could be easily dismissed otherwise and alchemizing judgments into implications.

A landmark rhetorical theory of the formation and functioning of opinions in social media contextsEntitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality offers a rhetorical theory of opinions, especially as opinions operate within social media. Many urgent contemporary issues—from demagoguery to white ethno-nationalism—compel us to consider opinions seriously. Yet while clichÉs like “he tells it like it is” and newer imperatives such as #BlackLivesMatter seem straightforward, haptics, emoji, and “like” buttons belie unexamined collective assumptions about how opinions in the digital realm function. Caddie Alford illuminates this function by deploying the ancient Greek term for opinions: doxa. Doxa translates to “opinion,” but the term can also signal seemingness and expectations. Doxa’s capacious meanings reveal opinions to be more than static or monolithic: With doxa, opinions become emergent, dynamic, relational, and pluralistic.Masterfully combining rhetorical frameworks as well as scholarship on opinions and digital media entanglements, Alford puts opinions into conversation with such case studies as algorithms, infrastructure, digital illiteracy, virality, and activism. She shows how “doxa” reveals gradations of opinions, from more reputable to less reputable. She demonstrates that these gradations are multifaceted and susceptible to interventions. Entitled Opinions sheds much of the baggage associated with opinions while opening up more fertile pathways of inquiry. In a world that says, “don’t read the comments,” this book reads the comments, taking seriously content that could be easily dismissed otherwise and alchemizing judgments into implications.

Rhetoric has long had a contentious relationship with the idea of truth, and the field of contemporary rhetorical studies has often been skeptical of easy understandings of truth. Meanwhile, hostility to truth is doing a lot of real-world damage, even if truth itself may never have been completely reliable. The idea of post-truth poses systemic problems for rhetoric’s traditional concerns. Active obfuscation, negation of truth, and even truth-indifference are certainly not new. But the past couple of decades have seen a proliferation and pervasiveness of falsities, rendering the term “post-truth” an identifiable marker of the contemporary moment. Public life regularly provides examples of both post-truth in action and efforts to combat it by invoking truth. In Rhetoric Before and Beyond Post-Truth, a range of English, communications, philosophy, and political science scholars draw on the resources of rhetoric to understand this moment, how truth has functioned in the past, and how it may continue to function when it is no longer accepted.