The Rhetoric of Google Lens: A Postsymbolic Look at Locative Media

ABSTRACT

This article examines textual artifacts surrounding Google Lens, an image recognition application, to reveal how it forwards reductive representations of the complex sets of relations constituted through locative media and augmented reality. Working across textual and posthumanist traditions, this article introduces a theoretical approach for investigating the rhetoric of technology, termed the postsymbolic. In acknowledging the formative and ontological role discursive rhetoric plays in the spatial operations and user experiences of and through locative media, the postsymbolic asserts the need for an integrated approach in which symbolic artifacts might be examined through the lens of both discursive rhetorical theory and posthumanism.

Notes

1. The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to Hugh Burns and Brandee Easter, reviewers of this manuscript, for their feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brent Lucia

Brent Lucia is an Assistant Professor In-Residence at the University of Connecticut School of Business. He has a PhD in Composition and Applied Lingustics from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His current research explores the rhetorics of technology and its relationship to the production of space. His past scholarship on comparative rhetorics can be found in Enculturation and China Media Research.

Matthew A. Vetter

Matthew A. Vetter is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Vetter’s work has appeared in journals such as College English, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, Technoculture, Pedagogy, and publications sponsored by the Wiki Education Foundation.

Oksana Moroz

Oksana Moroz is a PhD Candidate and Teaching Assistant in the Composition and Applied Lingustics PhD program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include gender and teaching identity, digital identities of pluralinual students, issues of accent and language ideologies, and teaching with Wikipedia. Oksana is originally from Ukraine and came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Graduate Student Scholarship.