Table of Contents What Do You See? Historical "Thickness" of Advertising Demonstrative and Associative Ads Advertising & Consumer Psychology Bandwagon & Anti-Bandwagon Effects Social Marketing & Exploitation Computational Rhetoric of Hyper-Personalization What Do You See? Let’s begin today’s lesson with a quick glance at these sets of images. What do they remind you of? ...
On December 4, 2024, news broke that a lone gunman had assassinated UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive officer, Brian Thompson, outside the company’s headquarters.1 The killing itself was shocking, but what unsettled many observers was the wave of sympathy that quickly coalesced around the perpetrator—donations, online tributes, and statements of support that revealed a raw seam in America’s collective experience of health care.2 This dramatic act of killing is entangled with the dark trajectory in the devolution of the marketized healthcare industry in the United States: normalizing traumatic acts of takings, with increasingly unsustainable industry practices justifying the suspension of pre-existing taboos concerning the sanctity of life and the boundaries of wealth transfer.3 ...
Lesson Module by Keren Wang, updated 4 Nov 2025. This lesson module examines the contested and ambivalent relationship between media and violence from historical and transnational perspectives. 1. Violence as Ritual & Power: Historical and Global Perspectives Let's open this session with a reference from Greek mythology: consider the telltale of Prometheus, whose theft of fire from the Olympian gods for humanity’s benefit inadvertently brought both civilization and destruction. Like Prometheus’s fire, the development of media technology simultaneously brings enlightenment and cataclysm. 1.1 Rhetorical Artifacts and Human Sacrifice The history of the development of writing technology overlaps with the history of war propaganda and human sacrifice.[1] As early as the Narmer Palette, one of the earliest hieroglyphic artifacts ever found from circa 3200 BCE depicting scenes of conquest and violence: Similarly, during the height of the Chinese Bronze Age, also known as the Shang dynasty (c. 1250–1046 BC) produced ritual bronze artifacts at monumental proportions -- such as the 833 kg (1,836 lbs) Houmuwu Ding -- one of the heaviest bronze vessel from the ancient world -- and the 13-foot (3.96 m) tall Sanxingdui bronze tree (c. 1200 BC): ...
I’m excited to share that I was recently featured on Free City Radio in an in-depth conversation about my research on the concept of human sacrifice in capitalism. The interview, now available on SoundCloud, is part of an interview series that examines the foundational realities of modern-day capitalism, specifically shaped by the notion of human sacrifice as a necessary element of economic systems. Here’s a link to the interview: Author Keren Wang on Human Sacrifice as Inherent to Capitalism Today. During this conversation, I explore how this framework, traditionally viewed through ancient rituals, continues in modern contexts through the exploitation of labor, environmental destruction, and systemic injustices. ...
I am delighted to announce the publication of my latest article, “Legal and Ritualological Dynamics of Personalized ‘Pillars of Shame’ in Chinese Social Credit System Construction," featured in the latest issue of The China Review (Vol. 24, No. 3). This work explores the intersection of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) with the Confucian ritual legal tradition and the rhetoric of public shaming. It integrates insights from rhetorical studies and philosophy of law to examine how the SCS operates as both a governance-by-data experiment and a framework that aligns with—and diverges from—domestic and transnational constitutional norms. ...
Upcoming Feb. 6 public lecture: "Social and Moral Engineering in the Age of Big Data: Personalized 'Pillars of Shame' and the Chinese Social Credit System" Hosted by REALC Faculty Spotlight Series, Emory University Format: Online Time: Monday evening, Feb 6, 2023, 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM (US Eastern Standard Time) Event link https://emory.zoom.us/j/94409772969 For my upcoming Feb. 6 public lecture hosted by Emory REALC Faculty Spotlight Series, I will be discussing the legal and rhetorical dynamics of public shaming policy experiments in China, as a part of their ongoing Social Credit System project. The construction of the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS) represents one of the most ambitious social engineering projects in post-Mao China. It is also arguably the most significant governance-by-data experiment thus far the 21st century. This lecture explores the ways in which the SCS project was prompted by a ritual impulse to inculcate Chinese societal moral character in the big data age. ...
This presentation highlights a few key excerpts from my doctoral dissertation research: “The ritual taking of things that are of human value, including the ritual killing of humans, has been continuously practiced for as long as human civilization itself has existed. Sacrifices in the form of state-organized rituals have been observed in many societies throughout history. Existing scholarship also observed an interdependent relationship between ritual sacrifice and the maintenance of political power in a broad set of historical cases, ranging from Shang dynasty China in 10th century BCE to the witch-hunts in early modern Europe. Sacrificial rituals of the past should not be considered fundamentally divorced from our modern world: whereas the formal elements of sacrifice of the past may no longer be recognizable, their substantive political functions do remain, with rhetorical overtones that carry into the politics of the present time. The goal for this project is to give due consideration to the politics of sacrificial rites across a broad set of political-theological traditions, hopefully paving the way to a new unifying understanding of sacrificial rhetorics. This research goal revolves around two primary research tasks that are intimately connected. The first is to provide a working interpretative framework for understanding the politics of ritual sacrifice – one that not only accommodates multidisciplinary, intersectional knowledge of ritual practices, but that can also be usefully employed in the integrated analysis of sacrificial rituals as political rhetoric under divergent historical and societal contexts. The second conducts a series of case studies that cuts across the wide variability of ritual public takings in late-capitalism.” ...
“Ritualism and the Ethos of Chinese Legal Order,” presented at International Conference: New International Trade and Investment Rules between Globalization and Anti-Globalization, Penn State University, University Park, PA (April 22, 2017) 倬彼雲漢 昭回于天 王曰於乎 何辜今之人 天降喪亂 饑饉薦臻 靡神不舉 靡愛斯牲 圭璧既卒 寧莫我聽 Majestic is that Milky Way, brightly afloat in the firmament of the heaven. The King said, O! What crime is chargeable on us now? That Heaven thus sends down death and disorder, unrelenting famine and hunger grapple us! ...