Project Free-Write

This week I did a free-write to try and stimulate my mind on writing a prescriptive cyborg rhetoric. I took a look a Burke’s ideas on rhetoric and this is what I began to somewhat generate:

How will humanity reach its pinnacle of destruction? Kenneth Burke suggests that part of being human is to be rotten with perfection (bradley.edu). To its fault humanity has turned to technology in its quest for perfection, and will eventually evolve into the cyborgs, which will then become the new human. As a result, technology has acquired the use of language, and strives to be human, for that is its idea of perfection. A modern day example is the database programs, which try to convince its user that it is human, but fails, for it lacks identity, even through it maybe flawless in its persuasion.

Burke also suggests that rhetoric is based on identity, and that identification allows for individuals to divide others into “us verse them” categories (bradley.edu). Bicentennial Man, is a fictional demonstration, which illustrates this phenomenon in the future. A household appliance learns to use language to persuade that it is human, but before the argument is accepted, a transition takes place where the appliance must find a suitable flesh form. It is only when it develops the ability to age and dies, does society consider its identity that of human; hence, while humanity strives for perfection, it is an unattainable ideal, for immortality is not within the identity of human.