Presentation for ENGL 490

1. Disgust, Distributed:
Virtual Public Shaming as Epideictic Assemblage

2. JN’s typical
pre-research
question:
“what’s up
with that??”

3. Justine Sacco
Adria Richards
Lindsey Stone

4. What’s the difference between a
rhetorician’s approach to research
vs. that of a literary scholar?
• sometimes not much.
• the material/archive to be studied.
• the questions to be asked.

5. My evolving question for this project:
• What’s up with public shaming on the
Internet?
• How does shame work, rhetorically?
• How does the technology of Twitter &
search engines aid and abet shamings?
• What does the technological nature of
this rhetorical phenomenon
reveal/confirm about the technological
nature of ALL rhetoric?

6. deliberative
forensic
epideictic

7. deliberative
forensic
epideictic as
technology

8. shame

9. Google Search,
March 31, 2014

10. “It is not the
simple act of
reflecting on
our
appearance,
but the
thinking of
what others
think of us,
which excites
a blush.”
(Darwin 325)

11. disgust shame

12. etc.
etc.
etc.

13. “Core disgust may have been
preadapted as a rejection
system, easily harnessed to
other kinds of rejection.”
(Haidt et al 124)

14. strong
ties
weak
ties

15. “The feelings of love and regret are not as easily
definable as the feelings of disgust….Disgust thus
communicates rather better than most emotions.”
(Miller 194)

16. Questions we could ask:
• What forms of behavior currently
have been getting called out/shamed
on the Internet?
• What kinds of things would you be
ashamed to post, and why?
• How do you think shaming will
change in the age of Trump? (i.e.,
blatant disregard for truth and/or
conventions of communication). As a
scholar, how would you study that?

17. the endjnicotra@uidaho.edu