Memes on Electracy: (The Power of Advertising and Rhetoric)

Oct 17, 20242 min read

Background

As we turn our society in digital media, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we are now creating communities and thoughts of importance and relevance in digital spaces. We create, sell, advertise using memes of popular culture related to real world habits and experiences. In our digital spaces, we as content creators can turn real life items into fictional characteristic pictures to communicate real world scenarios. This is what we call memes. Back to the pharaoh, hieroglyphics played a tremendous part in communication. Then, these writings constituted an apparatus in figuring out picturesque form of communication. It took a community to understand these writings and pictures.

Electracy started in the late 18th century, at the beginning of the Revolution. Apparatus is a social machine. This is how Ulmer defines digital literacy.

The Twenty-First Century

Walter Ong stated that "the noetic, the rhetorical characteristics of feeling, sensation, and intuition applied to a given communicative situation or act-stems from the oral tradition" (Rice, 1). With the emergence of print culture, Ong notes that the noetic dissipated at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ong notes:

Oral memory works effectively with ‘heavy’ characters, persons whose deeds are monumental, memorable, and commonly public. Thus, the noetic economy of its nature generates outsize figures, that is, heroic figures, not for romantic reasons or reflectively didactic reasons but for much more basic reasons: to organize experience in some sort of permanently memorable form. (Orality and Literacy 69)

The Fifth Estate

Ulmer recognizes the digital community as a fifth estate. He notes that surveillance is the biggest problem regarding electracy. Electracy is used in the digital community as an apparatus that generates behavior and thought processes. Ulmer concludes society dreams, so that our digital media with electracy as an apparatus substitutes these dreams into reality.

Electracy offers institutional communities. An institution to mediate and intelligence into the world that rectify and mediates the tension on political communities.