Complex Rhetoric

As I was reading the section of the book where Arthur and Kauffman are discussing bootstrapping and self-replicating systems (‘round page 126 or so), I began to wonder what the implications of these systems were for the study of rhetoric. Kauffman’s genetic networks and the book’s discussion of emergent properties had put me in mind of the connectionist diagrams Hutchins had in chapter 7 (?) and their implication that too much information was a bad thing—it tended to bias all the agents to a particular outcome. This interpretation seemed to dovetail nicely with Arthur’s ideas about the ways in which technology gets a foothold and tends to root out other technologies: VHS tape killed Beta, cars relegated horses to the care of enthusiasts, gasoline engines beat out steam-power. It seemed to me that similar sorts of phenomena occur in persuasive situations. Consider the Al Qaeda link to Iraq. Near as I can tell, this particular link was always a little fuzzy, but it was insinuated so often that it was accepted as true by a majority of Americans long after it had been shown to be ill-founded. Why—when the information that would counter that claim was so widely available between TV news and the Internet—why did it persist? Perhaps Arthur’s theory of “early adoption” or “self replication” indicates how it was initially privileged so that it was almost impossible to eradicate quickly.

Does this seem like a plausible reading of that event? Can you guys think of similar sorts of events that would support or contradict a self-replicating kind of rhetoric?