Complex Worlds: Digital Culture, Rhetoric and Professional Communication / Edition 1

by Andrienne Lamberti, Anne Richards

Overview

'Complex Worlds: Digital Culture, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication' is a collection of thought-provoking scholarly essays by teachers and industry practitioners in professional communication and technology-oriented fields. Scrupulously edited for a range of readers, the collection aims to help familiarize advanced students, teachers, and researchers in professional communication, computers and writing, literacy, and sister disciplines with key issues in digital theory and practice. An emphasis on the situations of and audiences for digital communication identifies 'Complex Worlds' as a rhetorical approach. In an era when globalizing markets and digital technologies are transforming culture around the world, readers should find the collection both engaging and timely. The collections' twelve essays constitute a diverse and thematically coherent set of inquiries. Included are explorations of topics such as cyber activism, digital 'dispositio', citizen and open-source journalism, broadband affordances, XML, digital resumes, avant garde performance art, best pedagogical practices, and intercultural communication between East and West, North and South. The text is especially well suited for advanced courses in professional and applied writing, contemporary rhetorics, and digital culture. The complexity highlighted in the collection's title is brought into relief by authors who address how the digital is daily unmaking our assumptions about the boundaries between work and school, the global and the local, the private and the public. 'Complex Worlds' offers readers an opportunity to build on their rhetorical awareness by expanding their understanding of the means, aims, and strategies of effective communication—today and in the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780895033994
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	02/15/2011
Series:	Baywood's Technical Communications
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Andrienne Lamberti, Anne Richards

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION Digital Divergence, Digital Complexity
Anne R. Richards and Adrienne P. Lamberti

PART I: TRANSFORMING ADVOCACY

CHAPTER 1 Cyberactivism, Viral Flash Activism, and Critical Literacy Pedagogy in the Age of The Meatrix Eileen E. Schell

CHAPTER 2 Retracing the Footprints from Print to Digital: An Assessment of Textual Structure Adrienne P. Lamberti

CHAPTER 3 The Fourth Estate in an Era of Digitally Mediated Democracy Leonard Witt

PART II: SHAPING THE PROFESSIONS

CHAPTER 4 Gertrude Stein in QuickTime: Documenting Performance in the Digital Age Jason Farman

CHAPTER 5 Digitizable Cultural Capital: Anticipations of Profit in the Web Market John B. Killoran

CHAPTER 6 A Case Study of the Impact of Digital Documentation on Professional Change: The WPA Electronic Mailing List, Knowledge Network, and Community Outreach Huiling Ding

PART III: BUILDING COMMUNITIES

CHAPTER 7 A South-North Online Collaboration between Professional Writing Students in Tunisia and the United States Faiza Derbel and Anne R. Richards

CHAPTER 8 Meeting Online Friends Offline: A Comparison of South Korean and U.S. College Students' Differences in Self-Construal and Computer-Mediated Communication Preferences Heeman Kim and William Faux

PART IV: INFORMING PEDAGOGY

CHAPTER 9 Teaching Effective Technology Use in Technical and Professional Communication Programs Based in Colleges of the Humanities Laura McGrath

CHAPTER 10 Technical Communication Pedagogy and the Broadband Divide: Academic and Industrial Perspectives Rudy McDaniel and Sherry Steward

CHAPTER 11 Sizing Up Single-Sourcing: Rhetorical Interventions for XML Documentation Aimee Kendall Roundtree

What People are Saying About This

Amy Koerber

Complex Worlds: Digital Culture, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication offers readers a blend of theoretical and practical content that is sure to capture the attention of professional communicators working in both academic and professional settings. Its eleven chapters, written in clear and engaging scholarly prose, cover an impressively diverse range of subject matter, including agricultural communication, Web 2.0 journalism, Web resumes, and XML authoring for technical communicators. The contributions are remarkably well focused around the major themes addressed in the introduction, covering each of these themes in depth. Readers can expect to walk away with a deep understanding of the complexity of issues such as digital divergence and a broad grasp of various disciplinary, theoretical, and political perspectives on such issues. (Amy Koerber, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric, Texas Tech University, Editor, Technical Communication Quarterly.)

Mark Zachry

Complex Worlds offers readers a strong sense of the range of issues that occupy the attention of digital technology scholars in English studies. The essays in this collection address such timely concerns as agency, governance, globalization, and cyberactivism. The breadth of the collection is considerable, and readers will be rewarded with a new, distinct perspective in each chapter. Whether interested in digital communication in the professions, distributed collaborations, classrooms, or society more broadly construed, readers will find something in this collection to stimulate their thinking. (Mark Zachry, University of Washington)

Ryan Jerving

This provocative collection asks us to complicate those machine-is-us mantras of Web 2.0 convergence (and their mirror image in essentializing assumptions about the "digital divide") that so far have set the tone for thinking about new media's impact on the classroom or other communities of engaged practice. As a teacher of professional communication, I am excited by the probing questions Complex Worlds raises about digital access, technological literacy and authorship, and online activism, advocacy, and agency. I am also heartened by its many practical applications for producing and/or thinking critically about citizen journalism, online resumes, electronic mailing lists, and collaborative writing projects that can be designed to cross not just classroom but also national and socioeconomic boundaries. I look forward to incorporating this collection's insights, examples, and pedagogical challenges into my classes. (Ryan Jerving, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Marquette University)