- The first rhetorical move that I noticed in Bogost’s article “The Problem with Diversity in Computing” was in the first few paragraphs. It begins with a personal anecdote and the fifth paragraph sums it up nicely when it quotes Webb, the storyteller, stating that “her airport experience can be traced back to the fact that “someone like me wasn’t in the room” when the system was designed, or when it was trained on images of human forms, or when it was tested before rollout”. This experience sets up the focus of the article and leads into the main argument.
- Another rhetorical move that I noticed was that Bogost uses the device logos frequently throughout his article, but specifically when he states, “At Google, for example, more that 95 percent of technical workers are white or Asian”. This quote helps solidify the argument that the reader has seen so far.
- “It will also give more people of color access to the economic opportunities the tech industry offers. But there’s a risk of tokenization; inviting a black man or a curly haired woman into the room could make a difference in the design of the systems that produced Webb’s experience at airport security”. This quote from the article shows the Bogost started off with a sentence that helps his argument, but in the next sentence we see that he actually contradicts his previous statement.
- When Bogost quoted Isbell, he made me rethink the article thus far and contemplate what the argument in now trying to prove. “Diversity is just membership,” Isbell said. “Integration is influence, power, and partnership.”
- The final rhetorical move that I noticed was when, in the last paragraph, Bogost goes back to Webb’s anecdote in the beginning stating “For Webb, the underrepresentation of women, black people, and others is a real problem, but it’s not the fundamental one. “We’re all discriminated against by computing.”” Bogost reaches his final argument the computing discriminates against everyone which leads him to wrap it up in the last paragraph.
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Writing and Organizational Cultures
Think about this move that you point to in #4–Bogost uses this quote to ask us to rethink something we think we already know and understand. That kind of reframing is crucial to his argument. We tend to think about diversity as a *end goal,* but here he identifies it as a step along the way.