Abstract
The failure to advance our understanding of intellectual rhetoric prevents opening up new avenues for rewriting the future through rhetorical technology. Rhetorical technology is the intellectual ability to use the power of empathy for human evolution through imagination and rhetorical data analysis. It draws attention to the fact that human beings can avoid repeating the same catastrophic events that their ancestors experienced with rhetorical data analysis. Within the context of this study, rhetorical technology has indeed a magical and intellectual power, and teaching empathy through writing and world languages can offer more sophisticated worldviews for humanity to evolve. For this purpose, it is quite futuristic and technological to treat writing as a resource for guiding the next generation to rewrite the future through empathy and technology.
TopRewriting The Future
The future is not guaranteed, and there is no guarantee on what the future might be or look like. Many scholars, notably Timothy Morton (as cited in Sundvall, 2019), have argued that we have already marked the end of the world—determined by the advent of soot and nuclear technology—to be inevitably delivered on a later date. We present a similar yet different diagnosis: the end of the future arrives not with the technologies that we produce that take no heed of the future, but rather, and more fundamentally, with an approach that takes no heed of the future in the first place. We need not only cease taking the future for granted; we must proactively (re)invent the future, appropriating and employing emergent technologies in the service of the future we desire to inhabit (Sundvall, 2019, pp. 18-19).
Examining the delicate nature of the writing discipline, or any other discipline, to reinvent it for its future advancement is an undeniably complex discussion that unsettles numerous facts to consider. Beyond question, what the future holds for humanity is unknown; yet people have a greater tendency to believe that the future will hold better advancements in disciplines with the aid of progressive technological devices. In the first place, this technological formulation seems to open up a whole world of possibilities for imagining and considering the future as advanced as science fiction movies, where anyone could travel to space at the speed of light, and people are finally disease-free and immortal with advanced brain functions (Smith, 2014). Logically speaking, it would be easier to imagine such an advanced technological scene if humanity did not lately travel back in time. Despite all smart technological devices, people surprisingly and unfortunately act less smart without the ability to communicate, judge, analyze and evaluate with frozen facial expressions when exposure to technology become uncontrollably ineffective and even addictive (Gerhart, 2017; Sert et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2019). Instead of providing higher quality living standards for a perfect future, technological advancements in the wrong hands without critical thinking skills can be the absolute cause of devolution in humanity’s intellectual growth.
When technology overpowers the real communication skills of human beings, people limit their imagination and creativity with technologically automated or generated responses, and their feelings of empathy fall short in a virtual world by missing real life. Without empathy, people cannot even relate to their ancestor’s failures when they have the chance to avoid the same pattern of catastrophic events. “From a biological perspective, there is no such thing as devolution” (Scientific American, para.1); however, human beings are intellectually devolving into the future by repeating the very same mistakes that the communities before them factually suffered from. Such criticism stems in part from people’s lack of understanding on how human beings repeat history without analyzing what specific dynamics, failures, and sequence of actions push them towards repeating the same catastrophic events. Einstein saw the future through his analytical thinking and defined this cycle of ignorance that is caused by lack of empathy and claimed that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” (Hamm, 2020, para. 1). Following this idea, the advancement of technology without conceptual, logical and consistent analysis and application is absolutely not facilitating to improve and enhance the attitudes of future generations. It is therefore important to be clear regarding how technology fails at reinventing the future in dreams due to lack of empathy, imagination, and rhetorical analysis.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Educational Landscape: A contextual and purposeful collection of teaching styles, attitudes, principals that reflect a specific time and environment.
Emphatic Education: A global and inclusive type education that aims for peace and tolerance for all positive ideas and cultures.
Knowledge Economy: A futuristic approach to intellectual production that is central to logic knowledge and technology rather than the consumption of goods that is money dependent.
Customization of the Learning Process: Modifying and arranging the steps of an education regarding individual talents and preferences for previously planned desired outcomes.
Intellectual Rhetoric: The empathic and futuristic power of logic in writing.
Rhetorical Technology: The negotiation of meaning with logic and empathy for forming the future in dreams through the power of technology.
Emoji: An expression of an emotion or an idea through a small digital image, sign or symbol.
Intellectual Devolution: Transferring to a state of mind that is less intelligent, logical, and knowledgeable despite the passing time and advancing technology.