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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.
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