2010-2011 THE HUMANITIES CENTER

Brown Bag Colloquium Series

Bringing Humanists Together for Collaborative Research

If-Then-Else: Software, Procedural Rhetoric, and the Obama Campaign

James J. Brown
Assistant Professor
English

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER, 15  James Brown is an Assistant Professor

12:30 PM ‐1:30 PM  in the English department. His work has
appeared in the journals College
  Composition and Communication and
2339 FACULTY   Leisure Studies and in book collections
The Computer Culture Reader and The
ADMINISTRATION BLDG.  Responsibilities of Rhetoric. He is
  currently working on a book project that
examines the ethical and rhetorical
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!  underpinnings of software.

It is now commonplace to argue that new media technologies have fundamentally changed the nature of
political campaigning. While most scholarly work focuses on how technologies enable efficient communication
and organization, this presentation will discuss the arguments expressed by such technologies. Brown argues
that the Obama campaign’s software (the MyBarackObama.com website) and its phone-banking scripts
deployed procedural arguments. Software involves the crafting of procedures and rules that dictate what content
should be delivered in a particular rhetorical situation. But the authoring of procedures is not confined to
software, and the Obama campaign’s
phone-banking scripts are evidence of this.
Further, volunteers grappled with these
procedural arguments. Obama volunteers engaged
with these procedural arguments and, in some
cases, authored their own procedures. A study of
these procedures reveals arguments that
sometimes contradict the narratives put forth by
the campaign. By tracking these arguments, we
can gain a more complete picture of the
campaign’s various complex, conflicting, and
contradictory messages, and we can help cultivate
a broad notion of software literacy. Software is a
unique discursive realm, one that opens up new
possibilities for persuasion and expression. Brown
will argue that these possibilities invite us to
examine the arguments and expressions embedded
in software as it becomes simultaneously
ubiquitous and invisible.

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