Volume 15, Issue 3
Caddie Alford & Jonathan Carter
While many commentaries on Twitter’s decline under Elon Musk focus on his authoritarian management style, we argue that the platform’s worsening is also a byproduct of Musk’s commitment to a reactionary free speech ideology. Musk claims that his approach to speech is neutral, yet after drastic technical changes, X is now widely perceived as a right-wing platform. To make sense of this shift, we introduce “adoxastic enshittification,” which combines Cory Doctorow’s notion of “enshittification,” or the decline in user experience due to market forces, with “adoxastic affordances,” or our term for platform design choices that center disreputable opinions. Analyzing corporate statements, tech reporting, and platform affordances, we synthesize and name the “free speech” paradigms that have shaped Twitter/X’s moderation practices. With that overview, we demonstrate that X initiates adoxastic enshittification of free speech to bolster reactionary rhetorical ecologies. We conclude by offering the concept of isegoria (equal democratic participation) as a counterpoint to the enshittifiying mobilizations of parrhesia (liberty to speak freely). We argue that embracing both of these competing notions of free speech provides a foundation for more robust ideologies of free democratic discourse to prevent adoxastic enshittification’s spread across platforms.
Volume 15, Issue 2
The “Equal Partner”: The Ritualized Remembrance of First Lady Rosalynn Carter
Sara R. Kitsch
In this essay, I argue the mainstream press rhetorically constructs a public memory artifact through their eulogizing of national figures, which I have called “ritualized remembrance.” Examining news texts after the death of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter in November of 2023, I unpack the overarching narrative of Carter as an “equal partner.” As a memory artifact, ritualized remembrance brings to the forefront how and why a society might eulogize a person, institution, or even a place, to address current and/or future needs. While ostensibly progressive, I suggest the media discourse’s singular emphasis on “equal partner” instead tethers Carter’s identity to that of her husband, impeding the first lady’s public memory as a site of agency, while quietly quelling current anxieties surrounding marriage, individualism, and feminism.
Reception and Resistance: How an Audience’s Schemata Affect Its Collective Memory
Eric Sentell
Public memories demonstrate the potent feedback loop of social narratives and collective schemata. Social narratives create a group’s collective schemata or shared conceptual frameworks. The audience’s collective schemata determine which narratives arrest its attention and become dominant in its recollection, resulting in a collective memory that then contributes to receptivity or resistance to future narratives. This essay focuses on the collective schemata that predisposed political conservatives to accept reframing narratives throughout 2020-2024 about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, Capitol rioter Ashli Babbitt, and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. It recommends intervening in the formation of schemata and attempting to redirect a resistant audience’s attention to new or different schemata that may lead to a more truthful public memory and facilitate persuasion.
Canceling Columbus: The Rhetoric of Redemption in Courage and Conviction
Brian J. Snee, Kimberly Pavlick, and Rebecca Mikesell
This analysis uses Burkean theory to examine how the documentary film Courage and Conviction makes its case against canceling Columbus. First, we argue the film represents a new variation of “amnestic rhetoric”: a type of public memory discourse that normally encourages its audience to forgive and forget. Second, this Catholic documentary closely follows the formula of Kenneth Burke’s guilt-redemption cycle. Third, the film addresses two different audiences simultaneously: the sympathetic but silent Columbus supporter and the so-called “cancel culture crusaders” who might be persuaded that they have been misled about the legacy and intent of the movement to cancel Columbus.