About

Damien Pfister is a scholar involved in research related to digital media, rhetoric, and the social implications of algorithms and automated systems. His work explores how algorithms influence various aspects of life, including recommendations in entertainment, genetic matching, library book suggestions, and social credit systems. Pfister has contributed to the understanding of digital networks and their rhetorical dimensions, as evidenced by his co-edited volume 'Ancient Rhetorics + Digital Networks' and his solo-authored book 'Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics.' His research critically examines the efficiency and ethical considerations of technological systems, often critiquing their societal impacts and the ways they shape human behavior and social structures.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Law
• Geography
• Ecology
• Biology
• Philosophy
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Literature
• Linguistics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Digitality, Diversity, and the Future of Rhetoric and Public Address

  Rhetoric and Public Affairs · 2021 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract The pandemic and economic catastrophes of 2020 and the forms of resistance that surged against racist systemic and physical violence indicate, we contend, that studying public address in the present moment requires attention to the mutual contingency of rhetoric and digitality. Relying on interdisciplinary literatures and a global perspective, we direct such attention along three vectors: platforms, commons, and methods. We indicate how theorizing rhetoric and digitality transforms critical and historical traditions. In expanding the purview of the public address tradition while retaining the tradition’s hermeneutic potential, we emphasize the need to challenge disciplinary terms and the desirability of expanded analytical methods. We submit that by not attending sufficiently to the advent and diffusion of digital media technologies, public address scholarship misses opportunities to shape ongoing conversations about how rhetoric mediates public affairs; and that insofar as struggles for racial justice are bound up with, not just mediated by, digitality, the prospects of diversifying rhetoric’s professoriate increase when research on this topic is central rather than peripheral.

  PublisherDOI

• Aporia

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2021-07-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Aporia

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2021-09-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• APPENDIX:

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2021-09-09

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Abundance

  Information · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • Biology
  • Ecology
  PublisherDOI

• Digital Infrastructures of Affect and the Future of the Networked Public Sphere

  2021-01-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The more emotion words and emotion concepts people have, according to Barrett, the more granular the self-knowledge and self-control, and thus the more they are able to use emotions to invent ways of working through events, issues, or problems. To argue that digital infrastructures of affect reconfigure patterns of public argument requires elucidating the relationship between argument and emotion. The process of engaging with felt affects, of categorizing them and putting them into the socially shared language of emotion, informs the development of arguments. An argument is just affect wiggling into propositional form. The circulation of a message produces what Papacharissi calls affective publics that then find their way into public controversies. Neo-Nazi meme-makers produce feelings of affiliation and resentment as ways into the arguments of white supremacy. The message-centric nature of many social networking sites means that users can add emotional granularity through text posts and images.

  PublisherDOI

• Appendix:

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2021-07-12

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Digitality, Rhetoric, and Protocological Fascism; Or, Fascist Ants & Democratic Cicadas

  Journal for the History of Rhetoric · 2020-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Myths about pharmaka are especially useful during dramatic cultural and technical changes. This essay first explores a contemporary myth, Bernard Stiegler’s “Allegory of the Anthill,” as a warning about protocological fascism – the industrialized and undemocratic exercise of control through digital infrastructures. Following Stiegler, I suggest that the algorithms structuring many digital technologies threaten to impose ant-like efficiency logics on subjects, making them more susceptible to the homogenizing political impulses of fascism. If not the logos of the ant, what should we aspire to? To answer this question, I turn to the myth of the cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus. Lysias, Socrates’ antithesis in the Phaedrus, is associated with an ant-like practical rhetoric that prizes industry over virtue. Opposed to the ant’s efficiency logics is the cicada, associated with poetic world-making, joy, and mania. I argue that the cicada might be recuperated as an icon of democratic renewal, resonance, resistance, and re-enchantment.

  PublisherDOI

• Digitality, Rhetoric, and Protocological Fascism; Or, Fascist Ants & Democratic Cicadas

  Journal for the History of Rhetoric · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Art

  Myths about pharmaka are especially useful during dramatic cultural and technical changes. This essay first explores a contemporary myth, Bernard Stiegler’s “Allegory of the Anthill,” as a warning about protocological fascism – the industrialized and undemocratic exercise of control through digital infrastructures. Following Stiegler, I suggest that the algorithms structuring many digital technologies threaten to impose ant-like efficiency logics on subjects, making them more susceptible to the homogenizing political impulses of fascism. If not the logos of the ant, what should we aspire to? To answer this question, I turn to the myth of the cicadas in Plato’s Phaedrus. Lysias, Socrates’ antithesis in the Phaedrus, is associated with an ant-like practical rhetoric that prizes industry over virtue. Opposed to the ant’s efficiency logics is the cicada, associated with poetic world-making, joy, and mania. I argue that the cicada might be recuperated as an icon of democratic renewal, resonance, resistance, and re-enchantment.

  PublisherDOI

• How Technoliberals Argue

  2019-11-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jessy J. Ohl

  University of Alabama

  5 shared

• Michele Kennerly

  Pennsylvania State University

  4 shared

• Joshua P. Ewalt

  Northern Michigan University

  4 shared

• Mari Lee Mifsud

  2 shared

• Carly S. Woods

  University of Maryland, College Park

  2 shared

• Bess R. H. Myers

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2 shared

• Cory Geraths

  Eureka College

  2 shared

• Alessandra Von Burg

  2 shared

Labs

• Center for Political Communication & Civic LeadershipPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Pittsburgh