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Epideictic Technologies and Democratic Designs William C. Kurlinkus

The University of Oklahoma

I. What does it mean for technological designs to be democratic and rhetorical? A common

answer to this question in recent science and technology discourses has been a spectrum of

audience interaction known as participatory design, a method of composing in which experts

decentralize their authorities to welcome the local expertise of users. Users (from medical

patients to tennis shoe purchasers) set problems, goals, and solutions and are given room to

customize texts. This presentation considers how a lens of nostalgia and epideictic rhetoric might

help see some of the value conflicts inherent in such an approach by juxtaposing three cases: the

mechanical tomato harvester, Google Fiber, and participatory medicine. In doing so, Ill argue

that nostalgia is useful for expanding technological expertise to a wider range of design traditions

and dealing with the problems of the simultaneity of right traditions such an expansion hails.

II. We begin with the mechanical tomato harvester, a machine commonly used in the philosophy

of technology to illustrate non-democratic design. In 1984, a group of tomato farmers filed a

lawsuit against the University of California over what counts as technological good. The farmers

claimed that their taxes had subsidized a device that put them out of business. The mechanical

tomato harvester had been in development since WWII, when a drop in the harvesting workforce

and a rise in the demand for the fruit caused a minor industry panic. Thus, led by the UC Davis

Department of Agricultural Engineering, a system of tomato harvesting was cultivated that

produced a greater yield, for less money, that could be harvested more efficiently, with fewer

hands. It wasnt until 1964, however, with the closure of the USs migrant labor bracero

program, that the harvester was popularized. In 1964, roughly 3.8% of Californias tomato crop

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was reaped by the harvester by 1970 this number had leapt to 99.9%. Conversely, in 1964

approximately 50,000 workers harvested tomatoes; by 1972 this number had dropped to

~18,000. But, the strongest exigence of the lawsuit was a concentration in the number of

growers. Because mechanical harvesters were expensive and required a significant amount of

land to justify the investment, only the largest farms could afford them and, thus, thrive.

Consequently, the number of growers dropped from 4,000 in 1964 to just 597 in 1973.

Following a deterministic logic that equates unfettered technological advance with

cultural progress, in the court the university argued, We have a university thats one of the

greatest research universities in the world....If we told researchers what to do, wed be second-

rate, and [California agriculture] has been a tremendous success in terms of productivity, and

in large part that is due to the work of the university. Though technological innovation isnt

often thought of in terms of nostalgia, through an epideictic lens the university wrote itself into a

tradition of progress, where agricultural success has been achieved through autonomous research

and an implicit trust in science rather than muddling science with other values like agricultural

tradition or labor politics. A lens of nostalgia destabilizes scientific authority by labeling it a

tradition-based value and a longing for a whole that never was. In comparison, the farms claimed

that the university prized efficiency over the human effects of their new tech and that if a small

number of corporations were benefiting from UCs research, those corporations (not tax payers)

should be footing the bill. But like the scientists, the farmers argued from an unquestioned

fundamentalist nostalgia. Rather than using nostalgia to champion a nebulous god memory of

progress, the farmers used nostalgia to critique the destruction of a nebulous traditional way

of life. Thus, both sides speak from what memory theorist Svetlana Boym dubs restorative

nostalgia, which does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.

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I begin with this example because it shows how design commonly occurs: designers with

one set of values create a product for a group of users with another set of values. Both sides

argue from nostalgic ideals, but neither side recognizes the politics of their own remembering.

Definitionally, design differs from other modes of production because of its focus on how a text

is deployed by specific users. Thus, where the tomato harvester design fails is that the scientists

imagine themselves as their ideal usersthey hold nostalgic imaginations of their own use rather

than engaging with actual users. Their design fails to be sufficiently rhetorical by failing, in

Aristotles terms, to [form enthymemes] from things [that seem true] to people already

accustomed to deliberate among themselves. At the heart of this rhetorical failure, I think, is a

neo-liberal epideictic failure to consider multiple sets of technological memories. As Chantal

Mouffe argues, in the isolation of private values (conflicting religions, labor values, sexuality,

etc.) and public scientifically-rational morality, neo-liberalism isolates itself as a fundamentalism

and, thereby, sequesters anyone that reasons from personal memory. This propensity of each side

to label the others view as values rather than logics is why I use a lens of nostalgia

emotionally charged rememberingto read technology rather than memory writ large. I argue

that if each side looked at the others technological nostalgias, designs would be better. For

instance, had the UC scientists asked: What traditions does each side see themselves upholding?

What are the technological god memories each side invokes? And is there common ground in

those memories? They might have seen that their own nostalgic definition of scientific progress

(more tomatoes are better, cheaper products are better, less labor is better) conflicted with the

tomato harvesters nostalgic ideals of farming: smaller is better, self-sufficient is better, lower

costs to the farmer is better. Thus, innovation without tradition leads to alienation. This

recognition of the rhetorical nature of nostalgia is what Boym calls reflective nostalgia.

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III. Our second example differs from the first in that the designers attempt to be participatory

and democraticbut their attempts fail because they, again, fail to engage user memory. With

hopes of creating a high-speed Internet infrastructure across the US, Google launched its Google

Fiber initiative in 2012. For a low, often communally-paid, start-up fee, neighborhoods would be

equipped with the lines needed to connect to the network. Early on, only certain Fiberhoods

that voted for the service would be connected. If enough people in a neighborhood asked for it,

Google would make the investment. This course of distribution held the potential to wire

previously unconnected neighborhoods, for The lowest tier of service offered by Google Fiber

guarantees a free broadband connection for at least seven years, though customers must still

come up with a $300 startup fee (Wohlsen). Schools would even get free access if surrounding

neighborhoods signed up. As it turned out, however, Google Fiber preserved the digital divide.

In Kansas City, for instance, those neighborhoods that pre-registered and those that didnt split

directly down Troost Avenue, a street that historically divides Kansas City socio-economically

and racially. In order to pre-register, neighborhood residents needed to pay ten dollars and have

Google wallet and Gmail accountslow hurdles to access, according to Google. But residents

also needed the infrastructure of technological literacies, traditions, and cultural ideals that

valued such technology and that saw Google Fiber as a community-bettering good.

Though Googles marketing team attempts to spin Google Fiber as a way to spread a high-

speed Internet to areas that havent been connected, then, it assumes the same access points,

technological literacies, social values, and public goalsthe same epideictic technological

discoursesacross all markets. Google needs technical communication students trained in

epideictic design to help them out of this jam. For instance, if Googles objective was really to

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spread high-speed Internet to areas that previously hadnt had access, they needed to go into

individual communities and examine and speak to the pre-existing techno-logical structures they

found there: Who has access to the Internet already and why? Who spreads the word about new

technologies? Who are the most influential technology literacy sponsors? What are this

communitys god terms? What are peoples technological goals and how can they be targeted?

These nostalgia-based questions radically expand what counts as technological literacy and hold

the potential, I think, for creating more rich, useful, and democratic designs. Thus, nostalgia and

collective memory aid in transforming technological markets from ever-willing tabula rasas into

complex subjects who can contribute their own technological traditions to make designs better,

more personal and, ultimately, more profitable: a concept I call memorial interactivity.

IV. My final example is from my current research on nostalgia and participatory design and

illustrates some of the stickiness of memorial interactivity in actionit comes from an interview

with an ER doctor, Mason, on how collaboration changes doctor-patient rapport. Through

interviews with Mason and other physicians I began to uncover how the simultaneity of right

traditions welcomed by participatory design has changed the way doctors encounter other

medical traditions. Increasingly, for example, experts face ethos contact zones as user-audiences

bring other systems of credibility to the design process. Thus, one of the primary techno-

negotiation questions of the contemporary designer is: How might designers generate their own

ethos while working with, learning from, or refusing other networks of credibility?

Founded in 1996, for instance, WebMD is a free online repository in which users can enter

their symptoms and retrieve a list of possible illnesses. In the ER Mason says WebMD is a

double-edged sword. From a positive angle, because WebMD often scares patients into

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thinking their symptoms are a result of a terrible illness (an effect called cyberchondria),

patients go to the doctor sooner. Mason also said having data about their health gets patients

more involved: It does kind of empower patients more of their medical care, which is what we

want as physicians; we want people participating actively in their care, asking questions.... But,

more undesirably, some patients might refuse collaboration by trusting the data they read online

more than they trust their doctors memories and experience, insisting that they have a certain

illness and that they receive a certain treatment: Every once in a while you do have that patient

that says, No, I have this, youre wrong. And I say, You have no kind of basis or knowledge

background to make any kind of bad decision and. Yeah, so, you definitely get patients that say,

I looked this up; this is what I have, and theyre totally wrong, and they will refuse.

Another source of outside information that Mason describes in a more negative light is

celebrity crusades on health issues. For instance, Mason told of his anger with the current

popular correlation between vaccinations and autism spread by celebrities like Jenny McCarthy,

whose pop ethos gives her access to a larger audience than scientists who research autism. This

is one of the true cruxes of participatory design. Given the audience deference and embrace of

simultaneous right traditions Ive argued are vital participatory design, how does the rhetorical

physician learn to draw upon and work with the expertise of a community that believes

something that the practioner considers wrong or self-destructive? One way rhetoric instructors

can approach such a contact zone, I argue, is by teaching students to unravel the technological

values and enthymematic links behind community nostalgias, transforming the question why do

you believe that? into the question why do you remember that? In doing so, the rhetorical-

designer learns from the contextual expertise of the user-audience. After close analysis, as

suggested by psychiatrist Peter Bearman, for instance, vaccine scientists might discover, that the

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anti-vaccination movement is so hard to quell because doctors have so often failed to listen to the

parents of autistic children at a time when these parents felt out of control and needed to gain

some sense of participation in their childs life. Scapegoating vaccines provides a causal logic

and a semblance of controltransforming negative experience into nostalgic resolution. Thus,

even if after examining parental memories scientists discover that their science was sound,

vaccine scientists will still learn a valuable lesson about prizing user values that might change

doctor/patient interactions.

A final source of alternative credibility that Mason has to negotiate in his practice is

alternative medicines: Especially practicing in northern California we see a lot of times that

people will come with alternative therapies. And, my theory on the situation, and I think a lot of

physicians is as long as you can identify that the patient isnt actively hurting themselves by

their alternative therapy, um, its probably ok. Its like, again, I said, its their choice. Though

Mason believes that alternative therapies, from raiki to prayer, probably wont cure an end-stage

terminal disease, he described to me how patients who have support from communities often

have a better quality of life: People saying, Oh, Im praying about this stuff. Absolutely! Pray

about it! Whatever makes you feel better is good for you. Um, Ive seen a million times where

people with, you know, really negative attitudes that are getting the standard of care that should

treat them, they dont do as well as the people that are super highly positive. Ultimately, then,

and this is where memory can really inform communication design, Mason tries to make his

treatment work with the cradles of medicinal knowledge his patients trust. He has learned that

there are benefits to partaking in medicinal traditions he doesnt personally believe in because his

goal, as a designer, is patients using medical designs to heal in the context of their communities.

Again, design focuses on meaningful use in context; understanding audience nostalgias helps

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access those contexts. Thus, tethering tradition, community, and memory to medicine (making

medicine memorially interactive) helps patients. Mason, unlike the designers in my first two

examples, does not take a fundamentalist approach to medical persuasion but, rather, attempts to

understand patients and connect his resulting treatments to their distinct medical nostalgias.

V. So, in concluding, what a lens of epideictic technology, nostalgia, and memorial interactivity

offers designers attempting a participatory approach is highlighting the sometimes conflicting

value systems between designer and user-audience; illustrating that all sides are equally vested in

tradition; and showing that because all sides are vested in technological tradition, no user-

audience should be viewed as technologically illiterate but rather as always coming from a

tradition of expertise. On the darker side, the widened definition of technological literacy

nostalgia offers also reveals some of the stickiness of participatory designwhat if an audience

is nostalgic for something dangerous, like natural remedies that are poisonous or not getting

vaccinated? In a digital world that more and more welcomes multiple simultaneously right

traditions, how does a designer decentralize her ethos while still maintaining an ethical

responsibility to interject expertise to create the best design possible? Ultimately, I dont have

answers to these questions, and I admit that the comparisons Ive made between my cases arent

one-to-one, but, looking at the etymology of nostalgiaa portmanteau of the Greek nostos (to

return home) and algia (pain and longing), when designers and rhetoricians dismiss nostalgia,

they dismiss homes, and, thereby, dismiss the possibility of democratic designs. Thank you.