The idea of consumer products as narrators is nothing new. It might one of the principle axioms of cultural criticism as informed by rhetorical theory — anything can be a text, all texts make arguments, and these arguments reveal value systems (Sellnow 5). Fisher further elaborates that arguments are most fully understood as narratives. The popular culture is therefore full of narratives, and their apprehension is not necessarily predicated on awareness of the narrative itself . Every day, in a variety of ways, popular culture successfully communicates arguments that its consumers cannot directly distinguish. The most important targets for criticism should follow from this notion and include artifacts with the most ubiquity and the highest degree of assimilation. As of yet, little rhetorical scholarship has been devoted to the Apple brand as a cultural artifact, despite its growing satisfaction of these criteria. Clearly the brand aggressively promotes its narrative, which is mediate
Cyberpunk, as a storytelling genre and as a subcultural paradigm, has offered critics material rife with opportunities for analysis. It deals explicitly with the organic/synthetic dialectic, theories of consciousness, and notions of freedom and agency in its dystopian iterations, and thereby plays with the larger science fictional question of what is the human condition. Further, as a form of futurism it can throw the cultural norms contemporary to its creation into relief. Ghost in the Shell makes a particularly good subject because of its relative complexity and because of the influence it has had on the cyberpunk phenomenon. Whether or not it actually originates all of the genre elements generally attributed to it is not an essential question, because its particular use of these elements is unique and seminal. For the narrative critic (or dramatist critic, in Sellnow's terms), several potential implications emerge from film's narrative that call for closer scrutiny. Kusan