Brian L. Ott

Efforts to create a sustainable future require careful and complex thinking, interdisciplinary and cross-organizational collaboration, and effective and ethical communication. However, the structural biases of digital communication technologies foster modes of thought and expression that undermine or impede these necessities. While one possible solution to this problem is digital literacy, the two prevailing paradigms of digital literacy both reproduce the myth of technological neutrality. This myth further inhibits sustainability by wrongly suggesting that digital technologies are appropriate to all communication goals and tasks. As a corrective to these models, I propose a new paradigm of digital literacy, one rooted in media ecology. The adoption of this model, I maintain, allows us to consciously co-create our social world rather than merely inhabit it.

Toy unboxing videos are a popular and lucrative form of children’s entertainment on YouTube. This essay undertakes a media (auto)poetics of these videos and their relationship to children’s play through an integrated analysis of technology (media ecology), text (rhetorical criticism) and participant experience (autoethnography). Based on this analysis, I argue that toy unboxing videos foster and promote a form of ‘play as advertising’ via three key structural features: (1) repetition of the interest-excitement affect, (2) object fetishization and (3) direct address. In a concluding section of the essay, I reflect on the implications of the preceding analysis for digital media criticism, online advertising and children’s play.

Employing a critical approach typical of humanities-based research, this article investigates the changing nature of toxic leadership in our digital world. Drawing on the perspective of media ecology, which asserts that the prevailing communication technologies at a given moment create the social conditions that, in turn, condition us, the authors illustrate how the digital logics of publicity, intransigence, impertinence, and impulsivity remake the contours of leadership. Based on a critical case study of Elon Musk’s public management of Twitter, which has subsequently been rebranded as “X”, it is argued that the four digital logics transform toxic leadership into digital authoritarianism, an unabashed form of authoritarian rule. A concluding section of the essay explores the implications of this evolution for traditional categories of leadership; the importance of attending to communication technologies in leadership research; and the individual, institutional, and social harms of digital authoritarianism.

Technologies of communication condition human sense-making. They do so by creating the social environment we inhabit and extending their structural biases and logics through human use. As such, this essay inquires into the prevailing habits of mind in the digital era. Employing a media ecology of communication, I argue that digital computers and microprocessors are defined by three structural properties and, hence, underlying logics: digitization (binary code), algorithmic execution (input/output), and efficiency (machine logic). Repeated exposure to these logics cultivates a digital mind, a model of thinking, communicating, and sense-making characterized by intransigence, impertinence, and impulsivity. I conclude the essay by exploring the broader implications of a digital mind, paying particular attention to the challenges it poses to democratic politics.

Chapter 4, “In Defense of Democracy,” outlines how Trump’s rhetorical style—in both manner and modality—gravely threatens American democracy, attending to the ways in which it undermines civility and degrades the level of political discourse in the US, erodes democratic norms and institutions, weakens the rule of law, fuels racial hatred and fosters discrimination, favors anti-intellectualism and undermines critical thought, and promotes mistrust of the mainstream news media and facilitates a post-truth politics. To combat the material harms of Trump’s rhetoric, the chapter ends with a call for mobilizing reasonable disgust at Trump’s affective politics of white rage to realize a more progressive politics rooted in James Baldwin’s radical understanding of love.

Chapter 1, “Situating Trump,” seeks to locate the study of Trump’s discursive and communicative practices in the appropriate academic literatures. It begins by examining the scholarship on style, highlighting the fundamentally rhetorical, political, and collective character of style. It then examines the history of political campaign communication and presidential rhetoric, paying special attention to the role social media plays in contemporary politics. As it synthesizes the literature in these areas, it reviews the rapidly growing body of literature on Trump’s campaign and presidency. It concludes by arguing for the importance of attending both to the uniquely affective appeal of his rhetorical style, which is rooted in an aesthetic of white rage, and to his preferred modality of communication, Twitter, which the president expertly mobilized to achieve maximum affective effect (reach and influence).

Chapter 3, “Trump Tweets,” explores how Trump’s rhetorical style was well suited to the defining characteristics of Twitter as a social media platform. It is based upon, or more accurately “inspired by,” a previously published essay on Trump’s use of Twitter during the campaign. It significantly revises that essay, however, by expanding its historical scope to include Trump’s use of Twitter as a citizen, as a candidate, and as president. While we argue there is a certain consistency in Trump’s Twitter habits over time, mostly notable in his tonality and temperament, there are also key differences. Early on, Trump employed Twitter principally for self-branding, self-promotion, and airing personal grievances. As he transitioned into the role of candidate, Trump’s tweeting became tactical, focusing on message repetition, unconventional use of the platform to disrupt political norms, and aggressive and demeaning attacks on his Republican challengers and Hillary Clinton. Finally, following the election, Trump’s Twitter habits shifted again, reflecting a strategic set of practices designed to promote his distorted, self-involved view of reality, to distract from potentially harmful news stories and investigations, and to discredit the mainstream news media as well as other perceived threats through persistent and perfunctory attacks.

Chapter 2, “The Politics of White Rage,” explores how Trump’s brand of politics appeals to voters not because of its ideology or policy positions but because of its affective resonances. Specifically, it argues that Trump utilizes an aesthetic of white rage, a rhetorical style animated largely by fears and anxieties about the decentering of White masculinity. This style, we further argue, is evident across his managerial, physical, and linguistic performances. While Twitter offered the president a new modality for communicating white rage, it is crucial to recognize that the aesthetics of white rage are old and deep, rooted in the slave trade, and woven into the nation’s fabric. Understanding the ways that Trump’s rhetoric expresses, particularly on an affective level, this already available racist aesthetic begins to explain why counter-appeals to logic and reason constantly fail to combat it. Engaging this rhetoric at the aesthetic and affective registers will be the only way to undermine its power.

(2018). Trump and Twitter 2.0. Critical Studies in Media Communication. Ahead of Print.