Digital Rhetoric
James P. Zappen
Introduction to Digital Rhetoric/Digital Media
A. Issues in Rhetorical Theory
1. Rhetoric as Argumentation: "We are going to apply the term
persuasive to argumentation that only claims validity for a
particular audience, and the term convincing to argumentation
that presumes to gain the adherence of every rational being." (28)
2. The Nature of Audience: "What formulation can we make of audiences,
which have come to play a normative role, enabling us to judge on
the convincing character of an argument? Three kinds of audiences are
apparently regarded as enjoying special prerogatives as regards this
function, both in current practice and in the view of philosophers. The
first such audience consists of the whole of mankind [i.e., humankind],
or at least, or all normal, adult persons; we shall refer to it
as the universal audience. The second consists of a single
interlocutor whom a speaker addresses in a dialogue. The third
is the subject himself [or herself] when he [or she]
deliberates or gives himself [or herself] reasons for his [or her]
actions . . . . Each speaker's universal audience
can, indeed, from an external viewpoint, be regarded as a particular
audience, but it nonetheless remains true that, for each speaker
at each moment, there exists an audience transcending all others,
which cannot easily be forced within the bounds of a particular
audience . . . . Hence the primordial importance of
the universal audience, as providing a norm for objective argumentation,
since the other party to a dialogue and the person deliberating with
himself [or herself] can never amount to more than floating incarnations
of this universal audience." (30-31)
Ch[aïm] Perelman and L[ucie] Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric:
A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver
(1958; Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969),
28, 30-31.
3. The Structure of Argument: "Harry was born in Bermuda [D] So,
presumably [Q], Harry is a British subject [C] Since A man [i.e.,
person] born in Bermuda will generally be a British subject [W] On
account of The following statutes and other legal provisions [B] Unless
Both his [or her] parents were aliens/he has become a naturalized
American/ . . . [R]." (104-5)
Stephen Toulmin, The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1958), 104-5.
4. Rhetoric as Monologue: "In rhetoric there is the unconditionally
innocent and the unconditionally guilty; there is complete victory and
destruction of the opponent. In dialogue the destruction of the opponent
also destroys that very dialogic sphere where the word lives." (150)
M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin, "From Notes Made in 1970-71," in Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
trans. Vern W. McGee, University of Texas Press Slavic Series,
no. 8. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 150.
5. Rhetoric versus Dialogue: "For any individual consciousness living in
it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a
concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the 'taste'
of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work,
a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour." (293)
M[ikhail] M. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist, 259-422, University of Texas Press Slavic Series,
No. 1 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 293.
6. Rhetoric as Identification: "A is not identical with his [or her]
colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is
identified with B. Or he [or she] may identify himself
[or herself] with B even when their interests are not joined, if
he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so." (20)
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), 20.
7. Rhetoric as Transcendence: "The key term for the old rhetoric was
'persuasion' and its stress was upon deliberate design. The key term
for the 'new' rhetoric would be 'identification,' which can include a
partially 'unconscious' factor in appeal. 'Identification' at its simplest
is also a deliberate device, as when the politician seeks to identify
himself [or herself] with his [or her] audience. In this respect,
its equivalents are plentiful in Aristotle's Rhetoric. But
identification can also be an end, as when people earnestly yearn
to identify themselves with some group or other. Here they are not
necessarily being acted upon by a conscious external agent, but may
be acting upon themselves to this end . . . . But
we are now ready for our second stage. For, if identification includes
the realm of transcendence, it has, by the some token, brought us into
the realm of transformation, or dialectic. A rhetorician, I take it, is
like one voice in a dialogue. Put several such voices together, with
each voicing its own special assertion, let them act upon one another
in co-operative competition, and you get a dialectic that, properly
developed, can lead to views transcending the limitations of each." (203)
Kenneth Burke, "Rhetoric—Old and New," The Journal of General
Education 5: 3 (1951), 203.
B. Digital Rhetoric/Digital Media
1. Collective Intelligence. "What is collective intelligence? It is a
form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced,
coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization
of skills. I'll add the following indispensable characteristic to
this definition: The basis and goal of collective intelligence is the
mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals rather than the cult
of fetishized or hypostatized communities.
My initial premise is based on the notion of a
universally distributed intelligence. No one knows everything, everyone
knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity. There is no
transcendent store of knowledge and knowledge is simply the sum of what
we know." (13-14)
Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging
World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Perseus Books Group, Helix Books, 1997), 13-14.
2. The Wisdom of Crowds: "Four
conditions . . . characterize wise crowds: diversity
of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if
it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts), independence
(people's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around
them), decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local
knowledge), and aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private
judgments into a collective decision)." (10)
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Random House,
Anchor Books, 2004), 10.
3. The Problem of Authorship: "Aristotle defines rhetoric as 'an ability
in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion.' His
conception of the rhetorical art emphasized the role of the persuader
in using resources to craft a message text. In large part, discourse
produced by specific authors or speakers is usually viewed as emanating
from a message source. Aristotle's emphasis is still reflected in a
focus on the author or speaker's roles as origin of the message. Many
forms of online discourse have no single author, however. Is authorship
of a major corporate site the product of programmers, Web designers,
content authors, automated assembly processes, or other forces? Although
corporate authorship is not unique to electronic communication,
underlying technologies and current modes of production make using
authorial intention as a primary means of judging online message quality
problematic." (25-26)
4. The Problem of Audience: "To expand on this idea, we might think of
the user as a participant in the creation of meaning in a somewhat
different sense than the reader of a book or the audience of a speech.
New media theorists characterize the user as a vital element in the
creation of meaning and experience because the user creates the text
and experiences it as appropriated and altered by means of his or her
participation . . . . In their book Windows and
Mirrors, Bolter and Gromala describe a participatory art
installation with two large parallel screens—one featuring
projected video and the other a backdrop. A rain of colored letters
falls from the top of the screen, and as people pass by, their
silhouettes are projected onto the screen while the colored letters
settle around them. By changing how they hold their hands and arms,
viewers can create different reflections on the screen. Bolter and
Gromala conclude that 'the experience of this piece comes from the
interaction of the viewers with the creators' design.'" (30)
Barbara Warnick, Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the
World Wide Web, Frontiers in Political Communication, Vol. 12 (New
York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007), 25-26, 30.
5. Media Remix: "Unlike text, where the quotes follow in a single
line—such as here, where the sentence explains, 'and then a quote
gets added'—remixed media may quote sounds over images, or video
over text, or text over sounds. The quotes thus get mixed together.
The mix produces the new creative work—the 'remix.'" (69)
Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 69.
6. Media Convergence: "Call me old-fashioned. The other week I wanted
to buy a cell phone—you know, to make phone calls. I didn't want
a video camera, a still camera, a Web access device, an MP3 player, or
a game system. I also wasn't interested in something that could show me
movie previews, would have customizable ring tones, or would allow me
to read novels. I didn't want the electronic equivalent of a Swiss army
knife. When the phone rings, I don't want to have to figure out which
button to push. I just wanted a phone. The sales clerks sneered at me;
they laughed at me behind my back. I was told by company after mobile
company that they don't make single-function phones anymore. Nobody
wants them. This was a powerful demonstration of how central mobiles
have become to the process of media convergence." (4-5)
7. "And yet another snapshot: Intoxicated students at a local high school
use their cell phones spontaneously to produce their own soft-core
porn movie involving topless cheerleaders making out in the locker
room. Within hours, the movie is circulating across the school, being
downloaded by students and teachers alike and watched between classes
on personal media devices.
When people take media into their own hands, the
results can be wonderfully creative; they can also be bad news for all
involved." (17)
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 4-5, 17.
C. Design Theory and Practice
1. Functional Design: "Usability is defined as the degree to which
people (users) can perform a set of required tasks. It is the product
of several, sometimes conflicting, design goals:
-
Functionally correct: The primary criterion for usability is that the
system correctly performs the functions that the user needs. Software
that does not allow users to perform their tasks is not usable.
-
Efficient to use: Efficiency can be a measure of the time or actions
required to perform a task. In general, procedures that are faster tend
to be more efficient.
-
Easy to learn . . . .
-
Easy to remember . . . .
-
Error tolerant . . . .
-
Subjectively pleasing . . . ." (2-3)
Tom Brinck, Darren Gergle, and Scott D. Wood, Usability for the Web:
Designing Web Sites That Work, Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive
Technologies (San Francisco, California: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers,
Academic Press, 2002), 2-3.
2. Experience Design: "The computer window is such an effective design
because it can rely on the assumption of transparency. It is important
for digital designers to understand this because designers work within
and through such cultural assumptions. Like clever magicians, they
offer the audience an illusion that it is already prepared to believe.
In this case, hundreds of years of painting, printing, and photography
have prepared us to look through the new window that the computer
offers . . . .
Designers must also bear in mind that the strategy of
transparency, although popular, is not the only one available to them.
Wooden Mirror in fact uses another strategy, which is the
counterpart to transparency: the strategy of getting the user to look
at the interface or object of design rather than through
it . . . . This is the most important lesson, perhaps,
that digital art has to offer for digital design: an interface can be
not only a window but also a mirror, reflecting its user." (55-56)
Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, Windows and Mirrors: Interaction
Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, Leonardo
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), 55-56.
3. The "New Web": "Today the Net is evolving from a network of Web
sites that enable firms to present information into a computing
platform in its own right. Elements of a computer—and elements
of a computer program—can be spread out across the Internet and
seamlessly combined as necessary. The Internet is becoming a giant
computer that everyone can program, providing a global infrastructure
for creativity, participation, sharing, and self-organization.
How is this different from the Internet as it first
appeared? Think of the first iteration of the Web as a digital newspaper.
You could open its pages and observe its information, but you couldn't
modify or interact with it. And rarely could you communicate meaningfully
with its authors, apart from sending an email to the editor.
The new Web is fundamentally different in both its
architecture and applications. Instead of a digital newspaper, think of a
shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides
a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on. Whether people
are creating, sharing, or socializing, the new Web is principally about
participating rather than about passively receiving information." (37)
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass
Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Penguin Group, Portfolio,
2006), 37.
4. Participatory Design: "Computer applications that are created for
the workplace need to be designed with full participation from the
users—both from a democratic point-of-view and to insure that
competencies central to the design are represented in the design group.
Full participation, of course, requires training and active
cooperation, not just token representation in meetings or on
committees. We use the term cooperative design to designate such
cooperation between users and designers. However, to users, designing a
new computer application is a secondary activity whereas for designers
it is their primary work. This means that the designers should know how
to set up the process and need to make sure that everyone gets
something out of the interaction." (158-59)
Susanne Bødker, Kaj Grønbæk, and Morten King,
"Cooperative Design: Techniques and Experiences from the Scandinavian
Scene," in Participatory Design: Principles and Practices,
ed. Douglas Schuler and Aki Namioka, 157-75 (Hillsdale, New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993), 158-59.
5. The Inevitability of Participation: "Workers' innovations are seen
as symptoms of an underlying problem; the researcher's role is to pin
down that problem and the designer's role is to develop an idealized
solution, a solution that may incorporate, but ultimately obviate,
workers' local innovations . . . . On the other
hand, trained designers can avoid common pitfalls of workers' homegrown
solutions, which tend to be of the chewing-gum-and-bailing-wire
variety. Workers produce solutions that are devious, wily, and cunning,
but often these solutions do not involve a deep understanding of the
system . . . . Workers produce solutions that
work—but often they do not produce solutions that work well by
their own criteria, and often those solutions are not promulgated so
that other workers can take advantage of them." (19-20)
Clay Spinuzzi, Tracing Genres through Organizations: A Sociocultural
Approach to Information Design, Acting with Technology (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2003), 19-20.
6. The Tyranny of Participation: "Participation of community members is
assumed to contribute to enhanced efficiency and effectiveness of
investment and to promote processes of democratization and empowerment.
The conundrum of ensuring the sustainability of development
interventions is assumed to be solvable by the proper involvement of
beneficiaries in the supply and management of resources, services and
facilities. There are even claims that participation constitutes a 'new
paradigm' of development.
Despite such significant claims, there is little
evidence of the long-term effectiveness of participation in materially
improving the conditions of the most vulnerable people or as a strategy
for social change. While the evidence for efficiency receives some
support on a small scale, the evidence regarding empowerment and
sustainability is more partial, tenuous and reliant on assertions of
the rightness of the approach and process rather than convincing
evidence of outcomes." (36)
Frances Cleaver, "Institutions, Agency and the Limitations of
Participatory Approaches to Development," in Participation: The New
Tyranny, ed. Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, 36-55 (London: Zed Books,
2001), 36.
7. Participation and New Media: "There is a growing tension, then,
between a traditional view of the media environment, including new
media and information technologies, as sites for the production,
distribution, and consumption of media products, and an alternative
view that sees the environment primarily as a venue for participation,
speech, interaction, and creativity. The first perspective understands
media technologies and content in terms of property and gatekeeping.
The alternative view considers reputation, credibility, reciprocity,
trust, and voice to be as valuable as property, and media and
information technology as opportunities to create and communicate, as
well as consume." (115)
Leah A. Lievrouw, "Oppositional and Activist New Media: Remediation,
Reconfiguration, Participation," in Proceedings of the Ninth Conference
on Participatory Design: Expanding Boundaries in Design, Vol. 1
(2006), 115-24 (Trento, Italy, August 1-5, 2006), 115.
8. Users as "Produsers": "We must strive, then, to develop an even more
systematic understanding of the processes of communal and collaborative
development of content which take place here, and to develop the
terminology required to describe them fully. In collaborative
'communities the creation of shared content takes place in a networked,
participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries between
producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be
users as well as producers of information and
knowledge—frequently in a hybrid role of produser where usage is
necessarily also productive." (21)
9. Produsage and Participation: "Participation in produsage projects is
generally motivated mainly by the ability of produsers to contribute to
a shared, communal purpose . . . . Although content
is held communally, therefore, produsers are able to gain personal
merit from their individual contributions, and such individual rewards
finally are a further strong motivation for participation in produsage
communities and projects." (29)
10. Produsage and Authorship: "Produsage transforms conventional
understandings of intellectual property rights by detaching authorship
from ownership, and this is enshrined in the produsage principle of
communal ownership, but individual rewards, as we have discussed it:
while individual ownership in IP (a construct developed to enable
authors to extract direct financial benefit from their work) is largely
dissolved and converted to communal ownership, individual authorship (a
concept enabling authors to claim personal merit for the quality of
their work) remains respected, and is in some cases even highlighted
more prominently than under a hierarchical production model in which
financial and not reputational and social benefits provide the central
motivation and reward for participation." (277)
Alex Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production
to Produsage, Digital Formations (New York: Peter Lang, 2008),
21, 29, 277.
D. Issues in Design Theory and Practice
1. "What is it about the Internet that has made it such a fertile
ground for creativity?" (122)
2. "Let's begin with the Digital Natives themselves. What motivates
them to create and share digital content like videos, songs, and
podcasts? Why are they writing fan fiction, creating mash-ups and
spoofs? Why are hundreds of thousands of people working together for no
pay to build up a virtual world or compose an online encyclopedia?"
(123)
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First
Generation of Digital Natives (New York: Perseus Books Group, Basic
Books, 2008), 122-23.
3. "Imagine treating, the free time of the world's educated citizenry
as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that
surplus be?" (9)
Clay Shirkey, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a
Connected Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 9.
3. "An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic
status of a group of friends must learn to think in the terms of the
flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. So here is
another example of how people are able to lessen themselves so as to
make a computer seem accurate. Am I accusing all those hundreds of
millions of users of social networking sites of reducing themselves in
order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am." (53)
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2010), 53.
4. "When blogs (first called web logs) were introduced in the
late 1990s many of us were excited about this new form of Internet
journalism. The promise of blogs was that this new medium would allow
anyone to post his/her authentic thoughts and opinions in a virtual
diary that could be read by anyone with web access. But when you talk
with friends and colleagues about blogging today, much of the initial
fanfare that accompanied the introduction of blogging seems to have
faded away. Instead, many of us now have a difficult time discerning
if the content of blogs is anything more than sponsored advertising,
thus crippling the credibility of the content. what has transpired that
has so significantly altered the blogosphere?" (213)
Eric Jensen, "Blogola, Sponsored Posts, and the Ethics of Blogging,"
in The Ethics of Emerging Media: Information, Social Norms, and New
Media Technology, ed. Bruce E. Drushel and Kathleen German, 213-32
(New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), 213.
Latest Update: 2011-09-01
