As new and developing technologies impact public and private life, rhetoricians would be remiss to overlook the deliberative rhetorics that justify their development, implementation, use-value, and impact. Using the 2013 joint congressional hearing “Next Generation Computing and Big Data Analytics” as an example, I argue that justificatory rhetorics about technology intersect with rhetoric from technology, obscuring information vital to critical deliberation. I demonstrate that the expert witnesses at this hearing draw upon rhetoric traditionally associated with American industrialization. Doing so allows them to articulate Big Data as a resource situated upon a metaphorical, American landscape and thus encourages the public to treat it as a natural resource that must be exploited for the betterment of the nation. Ultimately, I argue the use of this rhetoric dissuades critical analysis of the worth of Big Data and investigation of its technical aspects. This raises troubling questions about the ability of rhetoric about technology to both veil and guides what the public accepts as ethical rhetoric from technology.

When the late Aaron Traywick—self-styled biohacker and founder of Ascendance Biomedical—dropped his pants in front of a live audience and injected an untested, experimental, do it yourself treatmen...

ABSTRACT The landscape surrounding a memory site strongly influences how it is perceived by the people who visit it. As landscapes are prone to change over time, it is important to acknowledge the ways that such change exerts influence over visitors’ experiences. Through a historically oriented in situ investigation of Atlanta’s Civil War commemoration sites, I reconstruct a narrative from that city’s history that demonstrates how changing contexts, physical and social, can influence both the use of memory sites and the construction of future memory sites. I suggest that change in these sites’ fragmented surroundings prompted the construction of new monuments that were chiefly informed by ideological inadequacies created by transformed landscapes at older memory sites.