Blog Juice for Educational Technology

In this corner,in the purple book cover, Mark Backman. Noted editor, child solitaire, imaginative designer, and, not least, author of the well regarded _Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self-Consciousness_(1991). As a young man he was quoted saying unlikely things: ‘Rhetoric is essentially an attitude about public expression’;
‘Rhetoric resides at the crux of the relationship between language and reality’; ‘The disposition to be rhetorical has always been controversial because it involves a kind of personal power, the capacity to influence the private thoughts of others through the public use of language’. Stealing from Heraclitus he once wrote: “Change is the only Reality.” Less controversial, yet also pointed he wrote: “Any structure well be effective, in the presence of chaos.” As a principle of life he was willing to assert: “Control implies consciousness of the self, the scene of enactment, and the other persons in the play.”