Cell Phone as Actant
- “I am specifically interested here in seeing cell phones (and the associated infrastructures which make them possible) as rhetorical agents. Cell phones, and particularly smartphones that host a range of apps, and those with GPS location services, are able to augment the networks of forces that make up our everyday lives in some powerful ways.”
- “In other words, things can be actants that persuade, cajole, obstruct, enable, etc.—in much the same way that people can do the same.”
- “In a similar reading of a smartphone, we might describe a human with a smartphone as no longer a human AND a smartphone, but a human–smartphone hybrid. Such a hybrid would act, function and think as combined human–nonhuman—comprising a single rhetorical agent and hybrid subject. The human-with-a-smartphone (or the smartphone-with-a-human) is a different kind of actant in the world than a human-without-a-smartphone, as it can connect with other humans (colleagues, friends, enemies, frienemies) through various mediums of text and visual image, geolocate itself and others, and access entire libraries of information while mobile.”
Key Terms
- Black box: “the unconscious interactions we have with many technologies. Here, a black box is a ‘low-maintenance’ interaction, something that we use, and rarely think about consciously, in order to perform other everyday tasks… These interactions could include the specific metaphors of the interface, but also the keyboard sensitivity, how we have to hold the phone to type with our thumbs, and the methods by which we monitor various auto-correcting features.”
- Access: “Adam Banks’s (2006) reworking of ‘access’ into different levels substantively questioned the assumption that functional access equals mastery. He identified a robust technological literacy as containing (at least) five different levels of access: 1) material, 2) functional, 3) experiential, 4) critical, and 5) transformative.”
** This is a multimodal text in that it incorporated video with linguistic text. However, watching the video was not necessary in order to understand the arguments Plugfender made.