Dr. Will X. Uly

One of coolest things about teaching rhetoric imo is getting to share articles with my students from people I actually know.

I wonder if I’ll ever stop being angry all of the time.

If you can't write a grad school application on your own, you absolutely should not go to grad school. That's actually a good sign that it's not for you. There are other things you can do with your life.

Man, I love teaching rhetoric. And I love this discipline. There are some days when I feel really down about academia, but when I’m back in the classroom teaching rhetoric, it reminds me what I’m doing here, and it feels really wonderful.

(Also interested in traditional theory, pedagogy/writing, etc. -- I just want to make sure that we have a representative mix of scholarship to share with RSQ!)

Submit by next Friday (jan 16) if you are interested!: forms.office.com/r/V4x5ZFhr6u

Note: if your abstract is chosen, it's not a promise of publication -- it will be included in the proposal to RSQ for the issue.

​​PROPOSAL: Conspiracy Theories: A Challenge for Rhetoric? ​​PROPOSAL: Conspiracy Theories: A Challenge for Rhetoric? Submit your abstract here: Conspiracy Theories: A Challenge for Rhetoric Collective life requires a shared commitment to problem-solving, ...

Call for abstracts is here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Hey #teamrhetoric:

I'm part of a team submitting a proposal to RSQ for a special issue on conspiracy theories. If you're doing work on conspiracy rhetoric outside of the US or using a feminist/queer/trans or BIPOC lens, I want to know about it!

Please reach out or share with a friend!

In social movement studies, we talk about how marches and protests expand the threshold of acceptable risk so that people take more and bigger social risks IN PUBLIC, EN MASSE. This is extremely important for the bourgeois white folks holding signs and building social rapport.

Student media rules. They are lapping a lot of the spineless media orgs this year and showing how solidarity is the way.

Oh, I’m sure it’s not the best solution for sure. But there has to be away for folks to pay for individual reporting without having to commit to a larger recurring payment because nobody is going to pay for it (esp for one-off articles in local papers). There are just too many subscriptions now.

Also, just in response to the actual post I quoted, I think journalists should get paid for their work and it is absolutely rude too whine to them about not wanting to pay them. I just think the industry needed to have changed a long time ago to make that happen more effectively.

I’ll gladly pay a couple of cents or even a buck to read one article. Especially for an article that goes viral, that stuff will add up. Way better for the industry than people relying on gift articles or simply reading the headline and forming an opinion…

Yes and… I still can’t believe that major and local newspapers haven’t taken to a pay per article model. I am drowning in subscriptions and I cannot afford a subscription to every single media outlet, especially if I’m only reading one or two articles per year if that.

I think businesses asking people to rate every single experience has furthered this damage. We shouldn't have this many opinions about this many things, and we certainly shouldn't expect other busy people to care if we do.

If I see you posting AI slop, it's an instant block. Even if you think it's cute or says a lot about society. If you are purporting that some AI slop is real news, I will report you for misinformation, and then block you. Sloppers should be marginalised.

I’m so sick of AI boosters saying that we have to just accept this. I do not accept this. This is making everything harder and worse.

Instead of making us more productive, AI companies have given us more work to do in the form of questioning every single frame of a video or triple checking that ChatGPT can’t write the exact same essay as a student. It’s already been shown to make corporate work worse with work slop too.

Yes, and…

It is so BEYOND frustrating that I have to waste my own time scouring literally every image and piece of text I see. We should be able to start with a baseline of trust for credible sources, and the AI companies have taken that away from us.

it’s said all the time but I think we should continue to hammer home how insane it is that we got dead-eyed bros trying to sell us robots that will free us from the supposedly cruel burden of “creative careers” instead of the actual cruel burden of “doing menial household chores”

nothing like watching a presentation about ed tech tools to radicalize you against them

He Wrote a Book About Antifa. Death Threats Are Driving Him Out of the US Rutgers historian Mark Bray is trying to flee to Spain after after an online campaign from far-right influencers was followed by death threats. He was turned back at the airport on his first attempt.

“I’ll kill you in front of your students.”

This is just one of the death threats that has driven @mark-bray.bsky.social to try and flee the US.

But at the airport last night, after checking in and clearing security, his booking mysteriously disappeared

www.wired.com/story/mark-b...

My entire career summed up in one post:

Giant, giant shout out to @rhetrickery.bsky.social for the rice vs. pasta vs. potatoes op-ed lesson idea…my students had a great time (we ended up in a duel between rice and pasta), and they were surprisingly better behaved than a room full of rhetoric professors and grad students 😆

The media ecosystem doesn’t work where democratic messaging reaches anyone who doesn’t already mostly align with it. I think we have to rethink how “messaging” works, tbh.

I would agree with this on principle, but after spending a LOT of time reading maga posts & squatting in right wing comments sections, I think there’s a lot of folks who will cheer for this. Also, there’s no democratic messaging that will change anyone’s mind b/c they’re not listening.

Exactly. It’s why the idea of “debate” or “persuasion” through messaging is a fiction now. And I’m so tired of hearing folks on the left waste time bickering over semantics as if that will effect substantial change…

But journalists and pundits and researchers need to get real: the messaging war was lost a long time ago. No amount of yelling on YouTube and TikTok or finding a Joe Rogan of the left or shaming the New York Times is going to convince someone who is experiencing a different reality to come back over

Y’all, there is no messaging that’s going to change minds. There is no active voice that will convince them otherwise. There is not even a shared media ecosystem. The only thing that fixes this is the end of social media and a return to shared news sources, and I don’t think that’s gonna happen.