2018/10/02 by Elizabeth Brunner, Hui Li · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Rhetoric and Communication Studies #Music History and Culture #Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
paper · doi:10.1080/10511431.2018.1509596
openalex publication_date 2018/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The contemporary mediascape, which is composed of 4.15 billion internet users distributed across the globe engaged on various mobile devices and social media platforms, is one that privileges argumentative fragments. These changes have impacted the ways in which activists cull support and organize outrage into movements, in part, because they have changed the very scale of argument. This essay weaves together scholarship in image and sound studies via panmediated networks, affective winds, and vibrational force to illustrate the importance of not only argumentative fragments, but flows of these fragments. In so doing, we advance existing literature via the proposed concept of force majeure, which offers scholars a new ontological orientation by which to consider various argumentative fragments and how they can coalesce to form a type of affective winds and vibrational intensities that resonate far beyond their origin.