The Languages of Edison's Light

Abstract

Technology is business, and dealing with the media, the public, financiers, and government agencies can be as important to an invention's success as effective product development. To understand how rhetoric works in technology, one cannot do better than to start with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and the incandescent light bulb. Charles Bazerman tells the story of the emergence of electric light as one of symbols and communication. He examines how Edison and his colleagues represented light and power to themselves and to others as the technology was transformed from an idea to a daily fact of life. He looks at the rhetoric used to create meaning and value for the emergent technology in the laboratory, in patent offices and courts, in financial markets, and in boardrooms, city halls, newspapers, and the consumer marketplace. Along the way he describes the social and communicative arrangements that shaped and transformed the world in which Edison acted. He portrays Edison, both the individual and the corporation, as a self-conscious social actor whose rhetorical groundwork was crucial to the technology's material realization and success.

Techne or Artful Science and the Genre of Case Presentations in Healthcare Settings

“…So, for example, in our study, medical clerks transformed past information (gathered from interviewing patients and consulting patient records) into a present event (case presentation), which will have future consequences (updated records, consultation letters, and the clerk's grade). Bazerman (2002) notes as well that participation in these genre events "shapes intentions, motives, expectations, attention, perception, affect, and interpretive frames" (p. 14) and that well-placed, expert users (Newton, Edison) develop a self-conscious sense of agency as they manipulate the genre systems that shape them (Bazerman, 1988(Bazerman, , 1999.…”

Individual Conceptual Structure and Legal Experts’ Efficient Communication

“…in setting up systems of concepts that experts could take over in order for them to have an identical basis for their communication. 3 We find the same type of basic assumptions underlying cognitively oriented approaches to general semantics that suggest systems of semantic universals (e.g. [48]) or postulate mutual mental resources like a languageindependent ''language of thought'' (e.g.…”

“…Relevant work, which has functioned as inspiration for me, is, e.g. Ahmad and Musacchio [1], a corpus study of how the Italian physicist Fermi together with his colleagues constructed an Italian vocabulary for the field of nuclear physics in order to express their newly developed ideas, Bazerman [3] on the rhetorical presentation of light by the inventor and producer of the light bulb, Thomas Edison, and Laurén [26] and Nordman [31], both on the idiolects of individual Swedish sociologists. 2 Focusing upon the knowledge of the individual expert has an important consequence in the way that it brings up the question, what this knowledge actually looks like in its individuality: Is the knowledge of the individual expert an exact mirror of the knowledge of the field, in which case experts share concepts; or is the disciplinary knowledge of individuals exactly individualised, i.e.…”

Is it ‘augmented reality’? Contesting boundary work over the definitions and organizing visions for an emerging technology across field-configuring events

“…Emerging technologies are the result of complex social, technical, and organizational negotiations (Abbate, 2000;Bazerman, 1999;Bijker, 1995;Marvin, 1988;Swanson & Ramiller, 1997). In the earliest stages of emergence, they exist as a combination of ideas, blueprints, prototypes, and promises, often surrounded by speculation and speculators hoping to push the technology forward (Brown, Rappert, & Webster, 2000;Flichy, 2007).…”