CANCELLED: Guest Lecture: Prof. Jeff Rice, "Digital Outragicity"

All events provoke response. But digital events—those events expressed and engaged with through social media—provoke hyperbolic responses based on how individuals aggregate past events into the current one. Aggregation is the assemblage into one space of various items, and I argue that it is the basis of social media response.

When social media users become outraged at an event (a murder, a war, a police action), their outrage is not based on the event itself, but on previous beliefs, ideologies, images, and other items that are “aggregated” into the event.

This talk examines recent political events and the social media responses to those events by asking us to rethink digital response as a collection of other responses, as an aggregation, and thus, as an outrage at representations and not the event itself.

Prof. Jeff Rice is Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. His publications include The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media (2007) and Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network (2012), both published by the Southern Illinois University Press.

For more on Prof. Rice and his work, see his university homepage.