From May through July 2020, we collected several hundred images shared on Facebook depicting blame for U.S. Covid-spread. Across these posts, we identified recurring patterns of blame accomplished through two rhetorical devices: attenuation and augmentation. We found two themes in these patterns of blame: individualizing social unsafety and identifying Americans as outsiders. In this article, we explain the processes of panopticonning, and provide examples of the two discourses of blame that result from panopticonning in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this article, we investigate the platform politics and technological dynamics at play on Facebook that allowed Russian politically motivated advertisements to be purchased with Rubles during the 2016 election season. These ads were purchased using a currency that clearly indicated an attempt by a foreign power to influence a US election, something prohibited by the FEC (Federal Election Commission, “Foreign Nationals”). In the Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing, Senator Al Franken asked Facebook VP Colin Stretch, “American political ads and Russian money: rubles. How could you not connect those two dots?”

“Together, these two books present a strong justification for incorporating social media into schooled literacies because youth are engaging with social media, and bringing them into schooled literacies allows educators to foster critical thinking and awareness of these technologies.”

“Researchers must be mindful of the identities they create on social media, being sure to consider the ethics of these platforms as both user and researcher. Social media platforms are powerful research tools, but they are above all rhetorical, and therefore deserve our continued methodological attention.”

“In the end, GamerGate activism resembles a churn of constant invention, moving from one celebrity to another, whether as friend or foe . Rather than possessing a single, authoritative argument, GamerGate welcomed whatever argument caught fire.”

“Yik Yak was simply too open, too democratic, too anonymous, and too ephemeral to survive in the monetization-driven world of social media platforms today. Unlike Snapchat, which we use as counterpoint in this article, Yik Yak appears to have been incompatible at the structural level with what we call corporate kairos.”

Present Tense is happy to announce that one of our Editors has started a tenure-track position this year. Don Unger, our Social Media Editor, is now an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at St. Edward’s University.

On August 27, 2015, Multimedia Editor Alexandra Hidalgo and Guest Editor Donnie Johnson Sackey discussed special issue 5.2 on race, rhetoric, and the state on Twitter. The Q&A has been curated with Storify below in hopes of continuing conversation on states’ questionable treatment of people of color until the issue’s release in late fall. See: […]

“The enthymeme, while serving as the central basis for heuristic invention, also works at the local or sentence level as a rhetorically oriented algorithmic procedure through which a rhetor determines the most probable success in persuading an audience to action”

“the book advocates for experience architects to participate in the systems they build and to invite other participants to comment on the design of those systems, thus encouraging a greater fit between a design and implementation.”

Volume 2.1 continues our publication’s trend of especially timely work. The articles of Volume 2.1 describe political and technological developments with ongoing consequences: a US public relation firm’s promotion of Gaddafi’s dictatorship; Arizona’s subjugation of immigrant bodies; epistemological production through social media.