Graduate Program

Communication Studies

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2007

Thesis Director

Shane Miller

Thesis Committee Member

Melanie Mills

Thesis Committee Member

Mehdi Semati

Abstract

Through an examination of disembodied forms of communication and technological discourse, this project explores the concepts of authenticity and its implications for communication research. Situated within phenomenological notions of embodiment, authenticity can serve as an important tool for doing rhetorical criticism. It provides an ethical component to criticism that is sorely lacking within many social scientific approaches to the study of human communication, which operate under the guise of objectivity. As authenticity, subjectivity, and embodiment are inescapably connected and as all three provide the foundation for this project, chapter one provides a working definition of each. It is argued that as embodied, the technologies we use to communicate impact our sensory installment within the world, which in turn both enables and constrains various modes of being. Chapter two demonstrates the therapeutic functions of technological discourse, which emerge in the form of various escapisms. Included are escapisms from clutter, from the confines of modern life, and finally the escape from essentially everything, through the incessant push of personalized, "around the clock" entertainment. Chapter three illustrates the disciplining function of technological discourse and maintains that when proselytized from various scientific pulpits, this discourse becomes an extremely influential power grid which encourages more debased and narrower forms of authenticity. Finally, the merits of authenticity based criticism are offered and it is argued that this form of criticism is valuable in that it avoids the traditional pitfalls of both modern and postmodern notions of subjectivity.

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