Digital Democracy

Building on his understanding of persuasive rhetoric, Bogost's procedural rhetoric, fits the bill for a system of delivery, if you will, that operates through processes, of necessity afforded by computers. At the core of procedural rhetoric is persuasion, just like in the rhetoric of old. However, procedural rhetoric is "devoted to representing, communicating, or persuading the player toward a particular biased point of view" (135). The core difference lies in the ability, by procedural rhetoric, to be "open to reconsideration" (143) through other procedures. Thus digital democracy fits in well with procedural rhetoric.

First, digital democracy has several artifacts:
1. Procedurality
2. participation
3. Spatilaity
4. Encyclopedic scope (124)
Digital democracy is played out in the form of social software resulting into social networks such as myspace

This is how:

Digitization allows for interrelations--interaction; so where a game has been designed to fit this genre, it afford gamers the opportunity to interact with the content at a cognitive level. In Take back Illinois, for example, players immersed in the process of debating/negotiating public policy can see how complex policy making is. If at the end of the game they are persuaded to take a position they were initially opposed to, they would have been interpolated.

However, while the goal of taking back Illinois seems to have been to get people involved in shaping public policy, I was taken aback by the process that prevents would-be-planners, form, say, affording the same school standards across the board.

Interesting issues
JFK Reloaded: does it teach strategic warfare? trench warfare? He seems to suggest that this deal was too sophisticated for a person like Harvey Lee Oswald to pull off. However he does say that the game procedure is constrained by the goal of the designer.

The reference to the Howard Dean campaign and how it failed in as procedure rhetoric because it was abstract in its communications strategy (135).

I wonder what Bogost would think of the Obama Campaign on procedurality.