Section Three - Understanding Writing and Communication Practices
In "Technology, Genre, and Gender: The Case of Power Structure Research," Susan Wells expands on the concept of affordances, which she defines as the network of relations between the design of a technology and what rhetorical activities it permits or excludes. Affordances, an admittedly expansive term, Wells helps to explain by using offset printing in the 1960’s and 1970’s in relation to the genre of the power structure research report. This allows her to examine how the affordances of past underground publication practices shed light on contemporary technologies of writing. With this in mind, Wells provides a model for rhetorical scholars to analyze how the affordances of technology reciprocate the affordances of genre.
James Porter's "Rhetoric in (as) a Digital Economy" shifts focus to the economics of rhetoric. This entails acknowledging that the reproduction and distribution of cultural and rhetorical capital is not limited to monetary value. By focusing on the accompanying economy of Web 2.0, Porter provides a more complete understanding of how literacy is being redistributed by the affordances of new rhetorical contexts that alter the role of the reader and writer. For example, the technology of social networking, as Porter notes, changes the matrix of personal and collective ethos. His perspective is essential to this collection because it provides a cogent way to consider both the positive and negative aspects of technological change. Stated a different way, “Network-based technology will dramatically change rhetoric theory and the practice of writing” (173).
In the final chapter, "Literate Acts in Convergence Culture: Lost as Transmedia Narrative," Debra Journet investigates new rhetorical concerns that emerge from remixing video games and television shows. Her chapter more generally provides insight into combined and remixed media spaces. As several authors in this collection have argued, the role of the audience is expanding, or at least changing in significant ways. To provide an example of these new challenges, Journet emphasizes that “we will need to pay attention to a set of complex interpretive and epistemological questions, such as: What constitutes a 'text'? How do we define such concepts as 'author' or 'intention'? How do visual, aural, and textual modalities interact? What is the relation between low and high culture, as they are currently defined?" (213). These questions are all central to better understanding new writing and communication practices. These are also the kinds of questions that Selber’s collection brings into focus by analyzing the relationship between rhetorics and technologies.
Conclusions
When composing a textual document in Microsoft Word, oftentimes we naturalize how this particular writing technology has made certain forms of communication possible and others more difficult. We lose sight of technological affordances. It is often when we learn to compose in new programs that we see these possibilities and limitations anew.
To give a personal example, I spend as much time, if not more, using Adobe's Dreamweaver. I design course spaces, class activities, tutorials, and professional documents in Dreamweaver--including this one. For my purposes, I have become proficient with this interface. Nonetheless, every time I open a new document I know the kind of work it will take to manipulate the code to my liking, and this sometimes means weeks of technical and rhetorical revision. While it is somewhat similar to the feeling of opening a Word document and putting your name in the top left-hand corner and staring down the abyss of white space, there are undeniable technological affordances that encourage certain forms of communication and discourage others. In this example, the most obvious difference has to do with developing a rhetoric equipped to negotiate the multimodal form of web design. Selber's collection addresses this rhetorical need that accompanies new communication technologies.
By using this example, I am suggesting that writing a book review using a web development application allowed me to work between two interrelated arts: rhetoric and technology. It allowed me to make tangible connections between form and content that would have been different, and perhaps less apparent in a print-based book review. This particular review has allowed me to write about, while simultaneously actualizing connections between rhetoric and technology. And while this connection may not be totally new, it is becoming more obvious that rhetorical scholars increasingly need to revisit and rethink the rhetorical tradition.
