Week 2 orientation for the UnderAcademy College course "Think Electrate: Inventing Electrate Thinking Practices"

1. Think Electrate:
Inventing Electrate Thinking Practices
Richard Smyth, C.M.
Full Digressor
UnderAcademy College
5 May 2013
Week 2: Orientation

2. Week 1 Review
--Introduced ourselves in Google Community
--Orientation to electracy
--Forum discussions about “decepts” and
“infinition”
--Google Hangout discussion

3. Week 2 Preview
--Continue Week 1 discussions
--read Jeff Rice “I am McLuhan”
--Week 2 discussion questions in forum
--launch discussion of key questions
--Google Hangout: time to be determined

4. The Rhetoric of Cool
Jeff Rice proposes six strategies for making
meaning in electronic environments:
 use of chora
 appropriation
 juxtaposition
 commutation
 nonlinearity
 imagery

5. Appropriation
--collage/montage
--writing as theft (Rice 57)
--“The mix speaks to you of the bricolage of
place where the ‘self’ exists as a deployed
network of personae” (Rice 69)
--“We often appropriate new identities and
alter-egos to parallel the rhetorical moves we
make…” (Rice 70)

6. Creating Deceptacles
--on developing alter-egos
--Ulmer's “Mr. Mentality from Bang Pot” as
conceptual persona
--Jeff Rice's out-of-control academic “Dr.
Fabulous” and forgotten rap star “Pelzure”
(Rice 163, n. 7)

7. References
Rice, Jeff. The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007.
Ulmer, Gregory. “Mr. Mentality.” 3 September 2009. Viewed 5 May 2013.
Youtube video. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwI-2agKOng>

8. Contact
Richard Smyth, Ph.D.
rsmyth1964@gmail.com