Entitled Opinions: Doxa after Digitality

By Caddie Alford

A landmark rhetorical theory of the formation and functioning of opinions in social media contexts

Entitled Opinions: Doxa After Digitality offers a rhetorical theory of opinions, especially as opinions operate within social media.

Many urgent contemporary issues—from demagoguery to white ethno-nationalism—compel us to consider opinions seriously. Yet while clichés like “he tells it like it is” and newer imperatives such as #BlackLivesMatter seem straightforward, haptics, emoji, and “like” buttons belie unexamined collective assumptions about how opinions in the digital realm function.

Caddie Alford illuminates this function by deploying the ancient Greek term for opinions: doxa. Doxa translates to “opinion,” but the term can also signal seemingness and expectations. Doxa’s capacious meanings reveal opinions to be more than static or monolithic: With doxa, opinions become emergent, dynamic, relational, and pluralistic.

Masterfully combining rhetorical frameworks as well as scholarship on opinions and digital media entanglements, Alford puts opinions into conversation with such case studies as algorithms, infrastructure, digital illiteracy, virality, and activism. She shows how “doxa” reveals gradations of opinions, from more reputable to less reputable. She demonstrates that these gradations are multifaceted and susceptible to interventions.

Entitled Opinions sheds much of the baggage associated with opinions while opening up more fertile pathways of inquiry. In a world that says, “don’t read the comments,” this book reads the comments, taking seriously content that could be easily dismissed otherwise and alchemizing judgments into implications.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9780817394950

Book preview

ENTITLED OPINIONS

RHETORIC + DIGITALITY

Series Editors

Casey Boyle

Michele Kennerly

Damien Smith Pfister

Editorial Advisory Board

Angela J. Aguayo

André Brock

James J. Brown Jr.

E. Johanna Hartelius

Byron Hawk

Robert Glenn Howard

Jiyeon Kang

Krista Kennedy

Bonnie Mak

Jeff Rice

Catherine Knight Steele

M. Remi Yergeau

ENTITLED OPINIONS

Doxa after Digitality

Caddie Alford

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2024 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Arno Pro

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2192-5 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-0-8173-6141-9 (paper)

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9495-0

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Doxa + Sociality

2. Doxa + Infrastructure

3. Doxa + Bodies

4. Doxa + Time

5. Doxa + Invention

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No book project on doxa would be complete without some tried-and-true clichés extolling support received over the years. Clichés are a metonymic representation of what I hope will be Entitled Opinions’ most enduring reminder: rhetoric does not end at the trite, the worn, or even at the wildly inaccurate. Rather, rhetoric really begins when the means to respond or create are out of sync with the challenges of a given situation.

Gratitude is one such challenge—it suspends us even when we must acknowledge it. We search for ways to convey it. We stumble in its enormity. Gratitude humbles us. Clichés, in a way, are fitting responses. Although clichés make us feel as if we have missed the mark, they help position us where we want to be: awed and sincere. We fall into them as a way of communicating something that often escapes language, gesture, or sense. With clichés, we swim in a vast uncertainty shared by others in their moments of need. When gratitude leads to a cliché, I feel that we are communicating that we treasure the fact that we are rhetorically bound. What better way to honor people?

Dynamic teams like the editorial one at The University of Alabama Press Rhetoric + Digitality series are few and far between. I am so grateful to the series editors for their encouragement and insight. Whether they were stopping me at conferences to congratulate me or working through questions that came up, Casey Boyle, Michele Kennerly, and Damien Pfister have been truly the definition of supportive colleagues. And to top it all off, my managing editor, Dan Waterman, has been gracious with his time and patience. His reliable guidance has been so appreciated. Thank you also to the anonymous reviewers—your feedback made this book better.

I’m grateful to the mentors I have had throughout the years, but I especially wouldn’t be here without the real deal, John Schilb. I tried to write a book that would reflect the same level of generosity, playfulness, curiosity, and associational thinking that John has perfected. I’ve learned so much thanks to him and other formative mentors and interlocutors during my career thus far. All my thanks to Michael Adams, Dana Anderson, Scot Barnett, Christine Farris, Walton Muyumba, Robert Terrill, and Freya Thimsen, to name a crucial few.

It takes a village to write a book—I couldn’t have asked for a better cohort than the many rhetorical studies colleagues who cheered me on, gave me advice, read my writing, boosted my content, wrote alongside me, and let me vent. Among these key players are Joshua Abboud, Lois Agnew, Ira Allen, Collin Brooke, Allison Carr, Jon Carter, José Cortez, Eric Detweiler, Ben Harley, Byron Hawk, Steve Holmes, Jordan Loveridge, Trevor Meyer, John Muckelbauer, Derek Mueller, Bess Myers, Jeff Rice, Nathaniel Rivers, Brooke Rollins, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Scott Sundvall, and Nathaniel Street. All of you (and many more!) went above and beyond to support me. That means the world.

In a lot of ways, an academic book is a labor of love that requires a stable and positive homebase. VCU has been that home for me. First, I would like to thank Dave Coogan who, as the only other rhetorician in our department, has made me feel welcome and valuable. All my thanks to other insightful and kind VCU colleagues and friends for the conversations, comradery, advice, and room. In particular, thanks to Geoff Bouvier, Gretchen Comba, B. Coston, Eli Coston, Shelli Fowler, Catherine Ingrassia, Michael Hall, Les Harrison, Kate Nash, Jess Nelson, Michael Paarlberg, Archana Pathak, Jenny Rhee, Sachi Shimomura, SJ Sindu, and Rivka Swenson, among others.

This book would not be what it is without the conversations I have had over the years with incredibly sharp graduate and undergraduate students. A hearty thanks in particular to Emma Carlson, Faith Centa, Julia Concepcion, Emily Csukardi, James Melton, Taylor Moore, Shannon Roberson, Ris Rodina, Jacynth Rodriguez, Mai Senser, Holly Smith, Noah Vickers, and countless others.

The light at the end of the tunnel was always knowing I had networks outside of academia. These people are a constant reminder that every cloud has a silver lining, every bar can be a spot to dance in, every bike is a gravel bike, and every success can and should be celebrated. All my thanks to Katie Anderson, Aly Bell, Jessica Chapman, Collin Hafen, Lucia Jason, Jeff Kessler, Joey Long, Emily Monroe, Bryan Oprel, Kristin Roberts, John Walters, and so many others. All my love to The Vest Gang and Safe Space for being a source of strength and light. My Sweet Spot team always champions me. And so many thanks to Chris Thomas, who not only looked at drafts of these chapters but also helped me figure out my best self.

Finally, I want to thank Brandon, whose reliable love, patience, and optimism gave me the stability and inspiration I needed to work on this project. I know I sound like a broken record, but gratitude doesn’t come close to what I feel toward you.

The rest, as they say, is history.

An early and shortened version of chapter 1 appeared as Adoxa in A New Handbook of Rhetoric: Inverting the Classical Vocabulary (2021). I am grateful for the permission to revise and reprint. I tried out the first notions of this book in a 2016 enculturation article Creating with the ‘Universe of the Undiscussed’: Hashtags, Doxa, and Choric Invention. Thank you for the ongoing support. I was given the opportunity to explore seeds of chapter 2 in a 2019 Media Ethics Magazine article ‘The Gods Wish More of Me’: Infrastructural Violence Between Ethics and Doxa. Thank you so much to both Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman for the permission to print their amazing artwork from both #Geolocation and #Mobilize. You can find out more about their art at their website: https://www.larson-shindelman.com/. Thank you also to Hudson Hongo for the permission to use some of his Literally Unbelievable collections in chapter 3. I am so grateful.

INTRODUCTION

In 1970 analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine was commissioned to write The Web of Belief for English undergraduate courses.¹ Addressed to students, the writing is clean and relatively simple. The blurb on the back of the first edition promises that readers will learn how to convince others to believe what they believe while exploring the role of language in idea formation.² All in all, it just seems like your average argumentation textbook.

Early on The Web of Belief situates itself in an anti-rationalist turn, referring to an age when it is popular to distrust whatever is seen as the established view.³ The book doesn’t spend any time, however, contextualizing this turn or speculating about what conditions gave rise to it. There’s no mention of the series of events after World War II that would situate the book in the disbelief about The Vietnam War, or the ongoing student revolts against the academy, or the impending oil and inflation crises. Curiously, a book that starts off expressing concern over reason and the loss of trust in scientific findings quickly pivots into a book that makes beliefs seem like wildly intriguing and complex phenomena. Quine’s conjectures and questions seem eccentric, almost new-agey: there is no such thing as a whole truth, he writes,⁴ the lifecycle of beliefs builds on the ongoing retention of foundational beliefs,⁵ people gain something by voicing their beliefs even if no one accepts what they have to say,⁶ and, once and for all, what exactly is the object of belief?⁷ You can’t help but think that anything rational pales in comparison.

And so The Web of Belief is, actually, very much to the point for a book that explores opinions in relation to social media. It almost doesn’t matter that Quine’s efforts didn’t effect much change in how beliefs are perceived or handled. The fact is Quine wasn’t commissioned to write a textbook so much as he was commissioned to make an intervention in what clearly felt like an urgent moment for young thinkers. Entitled Opinions is going to respond to yet another similarly urgent post-truth era, but like Quine, only as a set-up—or perhaps as a permission—to explore what I argue have always been more robust, inventive, and less studied than so-called truths: opinions.

Such a project might strike readers as overly idealistic or even somewhat wrongheaded. After all, the standard definitions of post-truth imply that opinions and beliefs are somewhat to blame for the public’s increasing dismissal of facts.⁸ Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 Word of the Year, post-truth, gets linked to the state of preferring truths that are either ones already believed in or ones that simply feel or seem true—in other words, truthiness, a term popularized by comedian Stephen Colbert in 2005. Truthiness names the shift from what was once confidence in the press to confidence in oneself and one’s community. Writing in 2018, Lee McIntyre confirms that Americans’ trust in mass media dropped from 72 percent in 1976 to 32 percent today.⁹ Opinions are often regarded as the villain in the post-truth story because opinions appear to have displaced truth, and truth seems better than opinions, even as both the idea of truth and the fact of opinions remain axiomatic in most post-truth discourse.

Despite its name, the twenty-first century post-truth era is not so much beyond truth as it is full to the brim with truths, from the stuff of common sense to alternative facts. This post-truth period is one in which it became apparent just how many truths there can be, all of which vary drastically in scope and in kind. Most of these truths, however, have not been canonized as knowledge even as they both act like knowledge and throw knowledge into critical relief. Perhaps, as Quine mused about his own post-truth moment, philosophers have done us a disservice by focusing so much on knowledge and so little on belief.¹⁰

Whether at the height of the counterculture movements in the sixties or the emergence of satire in eighteenth-century England, each post-truth revolution gives way to an outpouring of theories for processing truth’s slippage. Such theoretical outpourings are variations on the same theme: truth as opposed to opinions or opinions as opposed to truth, depending on how you look at it. The theory of objectivism, for example, wants to safeguard truth against subjectivism. Neoliberalism is said to enjoy the effects of truth’s demise, while democratic socialism offers a dialectical relation between truth and opinions. Maybe relativism has a point, but maybe absolutism also has a point. And so on and so forth.

Post-truth revolutions have occurred countless times. Maybe, however, that is not an issue or even at issue. Rather, maybe the current post-truth rhythms are an opportunity to not only revisit but also reinvent the fraught dynamics between knowledge and opinions. After all, each post-truth era acts like a barometer for measuring how we feel about opinions. Again and again, just to notice opinions and beliefs is to identify a historic and alarming turn in knowledge structures. The very real existence of opinions authorizes all manner of panic. Quine himself, for instance, detected an oscillating in the presence and significance of opinions when he claimed that expert credentials seemed increasingly less valued. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he opens the very next paragraph with and so come the cults.¹¹ Replace cults with conspiracy theorists, and I think you get the picture.

Opinions start to seem particularly troubling right around the time of another technological development. This makes sense: technological developments expand the number of narratives and rumors in circulation, closing the distance between time and cultures and even revealing previously obscure or naturalized mechanisms of power, all of which affect the bent and intensity of public opinion. From the printing press to automation, each technological shift ends up exposing just how ubiquitous yet underestimated opinions really are. Currently, it is the everyday incorporation of social media that is casting a reductive light on opinions. Cultural critic Jia Tolentino said it most succinctly when she claimed that social media encourages us to overvalue our opinions.¹² Social media and opinions have become synonymous and synchronous: critiquing social media is often also a critique of surround-sound perspectives—perspectives that are themselves partially reflective of the values of social media platforms, which in turn regulate what proprietary algorithms are designed to do and not do . . . and so on and so on. If we are more aware of opinions now than we have ever been, it is because of social media. And on the flipside, if we are more aware of social media now than we have ever been, it is because of opinions.

I think we are right to be worried: the product of social media—the money maker of social media—is opinions. Our opinions. Your friends’ opinions. Your friends’ opinions of your family’s opinions. Silicon Valley’s monetization of all manner of opinions enacts the contemporary style of neoliberalism, which is, as Barbara A. Biesecker lays out, a rationality that lends market sense even to so-called interpersonal relations and the micro-practices of everyday life.¹³ This is a rationality that finds its ultimate expression in the mining, producing, calibrating, and amplifying of opinions. Toward one extreme lies the dark catchphrase of Dave Eggers’s dystopian take on Facebook in The Circle: Sharing is caring.¹⁴ What do social media users have to share but preferences, beliefs, and learned wisdom? Platforms’ premium on sharing enforces authenticity, which, Byung-Chul Han claims, is a neoliberal form of production because it requires each person to turn herself into a highly efficient site.¹⁵ Optimizing authenticity, though, requires a degree of navel-gazing, so social media content risks reflecting more of an individual’s selfsame truths. Scholars like Shoshana Zuboff specify that users’ behavior is the commodity of social media, but such behavior also gets activated by what users believe—mostly implicitly—about interfaces or mediated communication, and so on.¹⁶ Tony D. Sampson argues that what really brings in the money, though, are the qualitative relations established between users.¹⁷ People have always formed connections around similar viewpoints, but now those connections leave users vulnerable. It only gets worse: as Damien Smith Pfister attests, social media’s industrial grammatization of attention spawns echo chambers that give way to standardized opinions—give way, that is, to conditions ripe for fascisms.¹⁸ The same culture-coding that encourages the singularity of binary that Legacy Russell warns about gets ten times worse with targeted advertising.¹⁹ Duped (nudged?) into putting all our eggs in the one fantastical basket of bounded, hyper-introspective subjectivity, social media users get composed by what social media does, repeatedly, with and to opinions.

Of course, none of these power dynamics are easy to expose when faith in Big Data itself has surged. Data and self-regulating went from being novel and fascinating to becoming a truth and, indeed, their truth. Algorithmic solutionism, as articulated by danah boyd, is the rationale behind what Pfister and Misti Yang argue is a full-fledged technoliberalism, or the expansionist belief that private tech companies’ technological innovations can democratize well-being.²⁰ Thinkers like Yuval Noah Harari go as far as to say that believing in the flow of information will become its own religion, focused on revering the newly computing world simply in order to bear the mysteries of said newly computing world.²¹ What is happening to opinions on social media at the level of users is also shaping broader ideological frameworks.

Another way of seeing the relationship between opinions and social media is to consider how conventions of communication have changed on a platform like Twitter, a predominant hub for politics and media to inform each other. In the early days of Twitter, tweets were much more impromptu, detached, and exploratory. The platform was originally designed as more of an information network, given its real time capacities, but that didn’t stop it from becoming an incredibly social space as well. People used Twitter to meet up: during the golden years of checking in, you could just throw it out there that you were about to go for a run and wanted company, or you could circulate a job opening in your network, and so on. It was the perfect place for comedians, for instance, to try out tricky content in a low-stakes way. Twitter was a sea of status updates that didn’t have much to do with anything else—true microblogging. Around 2009 onward, though, Twitter rolled out developments like photo posting and retweeting. Alongside those developments, founders of Twitter were surprised to hear that protestors in Egypt started using Twitter to communicate across the Arab Spring protests of 2010 and 2011.²² As one activist put it, We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.²³ And yet the architectural changes also meant that replies dwindled more and more as retweets soared and fake accounts became a problem, paving the way for viral outrage spikes. The prime example of those spikes occurred in 2013 when a PR director named Justine Sacco tweeted, Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white! She boarded a plane to South Africa, and by the time she landed, the tweet had exploded—sites picked it up, mention after mention ensued, a hashtag trended, and hours of reactions later, the now-common Twitterstorm or flame war was in full effect.²⁴ By emphasizing news updates and increasingly curating the timeline, Twitter eventually became what it is today: clique city. Each niche community now offers an anchor of perspective to their users, from Black Twitter to tech Twitter, from academic Twitter to the alt-right Twittersphere.²⁵ Twitter is kind of like a court of public opinion that doesn’t deliberate so much as it awaits a consensus. These days, tweeting an opinion seems more about the act of piling on than sharing an opinion because chances are the opinion is already, in some way, a group’s opinion. Cancel him; this GIF is everything; no, this meme is everything; we need a political uprising; an uprising would be going too far. I’m happy to announce that I don’t know who needs to hear this, but contemporary Twitter suggests that users have become increasingly hesitant to express opinions. When opinions are shared, they’re sometimes modified as unpopular opinions to convey that the tweet is . . . well, debatable. Ironically, though, many of these unpopular opinions are already popular, already conferred with sociocultural legitimacy.

At the same time, the phrase everyone is entitled to their own opinion has become more cliché and louder than ever, signaling that people are feeling more and more defensive about opinions as well as more and more disdainful of opinions that they don’t agree with. Opinions have been reduced to propositional beliefs and preferences that divide us from them and me from you. Opinions are discredited as uninformed and biased and also flaunted as untouchable in the same breath, they go without saying until they need to be shouted, shutting a conversation down, and we each feel entitled to stubborn opinions as our possessions without having spent any time interrogating just what opinions are in the first place. How did we get here?

While it is the case that social media exploits and transforms opinions, social media also expands what can be learned about opinions, and vice versa. If we think of social media as the rhetorical figure of the enthymeme—reasoning that relies on the audience anticipating the conclusion’s unspoken premise—its implicit substance would be opinions, and, you guessed it, vice versa. There is a poetic parallel here: both social media and opinions have been similarly black-boxed and rendered obvious, silly, and part of an unproblematic backdrop. In actuality, they are the code to the foreground. Entitled Opinions therefore treats this particular post-truth moment less as a problem and more as an invitation to finally create an expansive and affirmative theory of opinions, and it does so by using social media as its primary research site. Opinions are entitled to more.

This book is intent on reimagining opinions. If opinions seem larger than life, perhaps that is because we are finally waking up to their force and complexity. Post-truth rhythms might just be the shared hunch that what has been assumed about information, awareness, understanding, perception, facts, and familiarity has long been partial and even harmful. It is time to flip the switch on inherited western dynamics between knowledge and opinions as well as inherited receptions of these dynamics. Accordingly, this book aims to recast the dynamics between the ancient Greek terms for knowledge and opinions: episteme and doxa.

The very disciplinary position of rhetorical studies begins with debates about the relationship between doxa and episteme. These debates write a through line for rhetoric, staking a fissure between philosophy and rhetoric or between using Plato or Aristotle as an origin point.²⁶ Generally, doxa was thought to give way to the teetering reflections of predilections, while episteme was framed as unchanging and universal. For Plato, episteme is knowledge that comprises scientific truth: episteme is the faculty to know what exists or to know about the nature of what is.²⁷ Conversely, Plato’s articulations and engagements of opinions paint them as less than ideal: more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance.²⁸ Plato’s distinctions between knowledge and opinions rest on distinctions between objects of everlasting being and that which would rather wander.

Standard receptions of Plato have maintained and even intensified this division. Plato is read to have elevated philosophy’s orientation to episteme over the sophists and their mesmerizing oratory full of agreeable and fluctuating opinions. John Poulakos notes that in this reading, the sophists cajole people into enjoying the sensual over mental pleasures . . . instructing people, if only indirectly, to prefer the ease of beliefs and probabilities over the rigor of knowledge and certainty.²⁹ With their games and wit, the sophists entertain—for money and status—more than they counsel. Plato thus became embroiled in what would eventually become a disciplinary split between sophistic rhetoric and philosophical dialectic, establishing a preference for one idea rather than myriads of linguistic representations already in circulation; one knowledgeable specialist rather than all the opinionated generalists in the society; and one truth above all the deceptions.³⁰ This reputation and all that it implies endures in western intellectual traditions. Donald R. Kelley confirms that historically speaking, philosophy has been tied to opinions, yet philosophically speaking, it has made every effort to deny, to downplay, or to denounce them.³¹ The threads running through today’s post-truth situation similarly marginalize opinions. On one hand, Robin Reames points out, are the structures of Platonist metaphysics, and on the other hand is sophistic nihilism.³² The former posits that reality can be represented and referred to accurately and accessibly, while the latter is committed to a multiplicity—even a cacophony—of contingencies. Sound familiar? Postmodernism appears to rupture truth while positivism seeks the remains. It all comes back to doxa and episteme.

To Aristotle, there remain some objects that are absolute in comparison with objects that can change. In this philosophy, knowledge differs from opinion and its object in that knowledge is of the universal and proceeds by necessary propositions; and that which is necessary cannot be otherwise; but there are some propositions which, though true and real, are also capable of being otherwise.³³ Therefore, Aristotle situates the differences between opinions and knowledge within more social contexts: even knowledge requires the right kind of demonstration just as opinions depend on their reception and circulation to stay relevant. In other words, Aristotle frames both knowledge and opinions as being a little more contingent. Such contingencies reach their peak in Aristotle’s concept of endoxa, which are credible and received opinions that can serve as premises for exploring a problem—these are different starting points from that which is necessary. In the Topics, he defines endoxa as generally accepted opinions that are those which commend themselves to all or to the majority or to the wise—that is, to all of the wise or to the majority or to the most famous and distinguished of them.³⁴ As opinions that just immediately seem right, these opinions had to have been in circulation, and being in circulation in Aristotle’s context required a specific kind of social status. By nature of what they were, endoxa were often passed down from exclusive circles of wealthy, powerful, free men, so endoxa, as a method, documented and transmitted the received wisdom of the elite. The stakes of this debate just got very social indeed. All told, Aristotle helped to introduce such complexities as probability, rank, and appeal to a conversation spanning cultures, identities, and investments.

Cross-cultural exchanges allowed for this debate to travel. The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were integrated, for example, into an Arabic-Islamic philosophy and science that took more shape because of the translation movement from Greek to Arabic.³⁵ Sometimes, tricky translation decisions meant that Greek philosophical concepts grew in application and range. A great example of this is Aristotle’s eidos. Peter Adamson explains that Aristotle uses "eidos to mean both ‘form’—as in ‘substances are made of form and matter’—and ‘species’—as in ‘human is a species that falls under the genus of animal.’ But in Arabic, as in English, there are two different words (‘form’ is ṣūra, ‘species’ is nawʿ). As a result, the Arabic translators had to decide,