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The affordances of digital technologies increase the available semiotic resources through which one may speak. In this context, video remix becomes a rich avenue for communication and expression in ways that have heretofore been the province of big media. Yet recent attempts to categorize remix are limiting, mainly as a result of their reliance on the visual arts and cinema theory as the gauge by which remix is measured. A more valuable view of remix is as a digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make claims and provides evidence to support those claims. After exploring the roots of contemporary notions of orality, literacy, narrative and rhetoric, I turn to examples of marginalized, disparate artifacts that are already in danger of neglect in the burgeoning history of remix. In examining these pieces in terms of remix theory to date, a more expansive view is warranted. An approach based on digital argument is capable of accounting for the rhetorical strategies of the formal elements of remixes while still attending to the specificity of the discourse communities from which they arise. This effort intervenes in current conversations and sparks enhancement of its concepts to shape the mediascape.

Based on some of the current proposals interpreting users as the centre of creation in design (Norman, Jordan or Krippendorff), this article raises the question as to what the author defines as the conceptual possibilities and impossibilities (ponderables and imponderables) of industrial
design. It explores possible interpretations between the rhetoric world of increasingly competitive and economy-oriented markets and the rhetorical artifices that can be used by the industrial designer in order to accomplish the functional and emotional requirements of products (transformed
into a dream come true for the user). In this approach (and through the visitation of some rhetorical phenomena of consumerism underlying the current social, economical and behavioural context of developed countries) the author underlines the intention behind actions of marketing, design,
management and mainly economy-oriented policies that guide those countries responsible for the cyclical creation, in the user, of self-identification with a new necessity: attaining a greater happiness through the consumption of a given product. Linked to this phenomenon, there is the framing
of several possible balance strategies, for example: the satisfaction of needs of companies/markets and the careful and sensitive suppression or super-suppression of user-consumer needs.
Within this issue, and by resorting to the general notion of rhetoric in design and specifically
to the notion of biomorphological rhetoric applied to design, emphasis is drawn to the importance nature may have to industrial design as an inspiring entity of project methodological praxes, which are both efficient from a commercial standpoint and from a functional-emotional
standpoint for the user.
In short, considering the above mentioned scope of limitation of different contexts where the new rhetorical-semantic dimension of design is established, this article proposes that the functional-emotional humanization of solutions developed by designers are a result
of the harmonization between the subjectivity inherent to professional ethical deontological values, considering the human-user being, and the intrinsic objectivity of strategic-profitable values supporting producing companies, considering the human-user being. This is because (in the author's
perspective), today, more than in the past, both actions must always function as a whole.

A review essay on books by (1) Joseph V. Femia, Machiavelli Revisited (Cardiff: U Wales Press, 2004); (2) Mikael Hornqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2004); & (3) Paul A. Rahe [Ed], Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2006).