ARCHIVE FROM MY PREVIOUS WEBSITE.
After the first week of Technology and English Studies, which explores the field of composition and rhetoric studies known as Digital Rhetoric, I thought to myself: "This stuff is so interesting, does anything else even matter?" Of course, I was being facetious. As a first-year PhD student, and a student who had not taken a class in 4 years, I have remained open-minded to the different areas of composition and rhetoric studies to find my niche within the discipline. So, my comment from above does carry a great deal of weight in that I feel a though my interests have narrowed a bit, for now. As a student new to digital rhetoric, I am glad that the readings for this week grounded many of the terms that we will be using in discussion of the different theories, methods, and practices associated with digital rhetoric scholarship. I found interest in the updating the rhetorical canon of delivery to digital delivery in the article “Digital Rhetoric and Public Discourse,” by Laura J. Gurak and Smiljana Antonijevic, specifically in how “digital technologies provide new rhetorical forums where speaker and audience come together without regard for physical distance. Still, delivery does not disappear in cyberspace but rather changes form, developing into digital delivery” (525). I drew a connection between digital delivery as posited by Gurak and Antonijevic to the rhetorical situation as explained by Lloyd Biter, a rhetorician who Douglas Eyman draws upon a great deal in the second chapter of his book Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice. Eyman’s second chapter focuses on the digital rhetorical theory from both a historical perspective and a methodological perspective, and uses “three key elements: exigence, audience, and constraints” of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation to construct a digital rhetorical theoretical methodology. The connection I found was in thinking about how specific exigences, different audiences, and established constraints affect digital delivery and how this shapes our identity. One of the themes I discovered in all of the writings thus far is that many of them focus on identity in some way, such as the separation of the physical identity and the digital identity, or conversely, the meshing of these identities together. I appreciated Hess drawing on Kenneth Burke to form the idea of “technological unconscious consubstantiality” (that is a mouthful) and agree with the author in highlighting identification, not identity. As I worked through these readings, I identified a few of my novice interests in digital rhetoric, of which I hope to explore more this semester. I am interested in how taking part in digital communities forms our identity; I am interested in how digital rhetoric created by digital communities reshapes, reforms, redefines larger social and historical concepts; I am interested in the implications of a pedagogy informed by digital rhetorical methodologies on the composition classroom. Considering the unfortunate reality of the current political landscape of America, it is inspiring to know that early digital rhetoric scholarship was rooted in a discussion around the implications of technology on American politics.
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Charles WoodsPhD student focusing on Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication at Illinois State University. Archives
October 2019
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