Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities

by Alex Reid

Overview

Redefining writing and communication in the digital cosmology
 
In Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities, author Alex Reid fashions a potent vocabulary from new materialist theory, media theory, postmodern theory, and digital rhetoric to rethink the connections between humans and digital media. Addressed are the familiar concerns that scholars have with digital culture: how technologies affect attention spans, how digital media are used to compose, and how digital rhetoric is taught. 
 
Rhetoric is now regularly defined as including human and nonhuman actors. Each actor influences the thoughts, arguments, and sentiments that journey through systems of processors, algorithms, humans, air, and metal. The author’s arguments, even though they are unnerving, orient rhetorical practices to a more open, deliberate, and attentive awareness of what we are truly capable of and how we become capable. This volume moves beyond viewing digital media as an expression of human agency. Humans, formed into new collectives of user populations, must negotiate rather than command their way through digital media ecologies. 
 
Chapters centralize the most pressing questions: How do social media algorithms affect our judgment? How do smart phones shape our attention? These questions demand scholarly practice for attending the world around us. They explore attention and deliberation to embrace digital nonhuman composition. Once we see this brave new world, Reid argues, we are compelled to experiment.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809338344
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	01/31/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	206
File size:	637 KB

About the Author

Alex Reid, an associate professor of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, is the author of The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition and coeditor of Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Professional Writing Programs. The author also maintains an award-winning blog, Digital Digs. 
 

Read an Excerpt

Preface

I entered my doctoral program in August of 1994. During that semester, the earliest versions of Netscape Navigator were released, so I often think of my professional career as roughly paralleling the birth and expansion of internet culture. A few years earlier, largely by chance, I had gained some practical knowledge of computers working for a small computer business while I was an undergraduate, so I already had some interest in computers, but I hadn’t given them much thought in relation to my studies. In that first semester, I read Gregory Ulmer’s Heuretics and Victor Vitanza’s “Three Countertheses: Or, a Critical Intervention into Composition Theories and Pedagogies,” and those two texts convinced me that I could integrate my interest and experience with computers and the postmodern theories that fascinated me at the time with a study of rhetoric. Even in those early days of the web, it struck me as obvious that writing and rhetoric were being transformed by the internet and that postmodern theory, particularly the work of Deleuze and Guattari, offered useful insights into how that was happening. I was hardly alone in arriving at that realization in 1994, though it is fair to say that computers and composition remained a niche specialization. From there, things picked up speed. I learned HTML, served as the editor of an online literary magazine, and wrote a dissertation about technology and writing. I taught students to compose multimedia essays in computer labs. A decade after starting as a doctoral student, my first three articles had been published in online journals, two of them composed in Flash, and I had started a blog. I was a professor teaching digital composing and rhetoric to professional writing and English education majors. In short, my disciplinary identity had been formed. Still, all of that was before the arrival of Web 2.0 and social media, before the smartphone and mobile technology revolution, and before the term “digital humanities” became familiar to most English scholars.

That was the context, the mid-2000s, in which I wrote my first book, The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition. Though English studies was certainly already concerned with the effects of computers and the web on writing and reading, and there were worries about declining interest among undergraduates in our majors, we had yet to encounter the revolutionary impact of the iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube and had not experienced the 2008 economic recession, from which the MLA job market has still not recovered. In short, it was an optimistic time, one in which, as Kathleen Yancey remarked in her 2004 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) keynote address, we had “a moment,” one in which literacy was “in the midst of a tectonic change” (298). Optimism is cyclical, of course, and Yancey was not the first to make this claim. Indeed she was not even the first to make this claim in a CCCC address; Lester Faigley had made similar remarks about hypertext in his address in 1996. However, the mid-2000s, like the mid-1990s was a moment when English studies, or at least rhetoric and composition, might have decided to embrace digital media and to pursue what Yancey called a “composition in a new key” (321). The Two Virtuals made a similar argument about the need to explore new media, as did many other monographs and journal articles, as well as popular books at the time such as Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous.

In the decade or so since, it is undeniable that rhetoric and composition has become more digitally savvy. Immersed in digital media daily in their personal and professional lives, how could rhetoricians fail to do otherwise? There are greater baseline technological expectations for all rhetoricians, and the recognition of the integral role of digital technologies in composing has been incorporated into national organizational documents such as National Council of Teachers of English’s (NCTE) “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing.” The specialization of digital rhetoric has been named and recognized. The rise of digital rhetoric in the discipline is one of the defining shifts of the past two decades (just as the rise of the internet and digital culture is one of the defining shifts of human life across the planet during the same period). However, just as we largely ignored Ulmer’s mid-1990s call to invent a hyperrhetoric, we largely ignored the call of Yancey and others a decade later to reimagine the discipline for the digital age. Writing this book now, I suppose there is an opportunity to identify another “moment” like Yancey’s. It would probably be a moment connected to the challenges and opportunities of “big data” and critical making. Indeed, in her 2016 CCCC address, Joyce Locke Carter asserted that in the wake of ever-emerging web technologies, we are in “a golden age of literacy” (383). She exhorted her audience to become makers of apps, code, publishing ventures, technologies, and more, contending that “when I talk about making, I’m flipping the power and flipping the epistemology, and saying that when you make, you dictate what will happen” (390). So perhaps this is another moment when technological developments collide with rhetoric to give the discipline an opportunity to move itself beyond its print-cultural origins and intellectual horizons.

Of course, it is the task of an opening address of a national conference to energize and exhort the audience with the possibilities of what is to come. I suppose a preface might do the same. I agree with Carter, just as I agreed with Ulmer, Faigley, Yancey, and many others, that the discipline of rhetoric (and English studies in general) has been and currently is faced with such opportunities. Furthermore, I would argue that, regardless of the choices we make, individually or collectively, the world’s rhetorical capacities continue to change and continue to move farther from the print contexts on which our disciplines were founded. However, having watched English studies decline these calls to move beyond our print-cultural origins before, I am not optimistic of a different outcome now. What that will mean for English studies I cannot say. I am no more qualified to predict the future than anyone else. But my goal here is not to persuade the discipline or individual faculty to embrace change. That said, I am very interested in understanding the changes to rhetorical practice that are happening and offering a productive perspective on the rhetorical capacities we might develop within digital media ecologies. Perhaps that perspective will provide readers with a starting point for discovering and inventing new capacities, as Ulmer invited his readers and Carter her audience. Certainly my own intention is to continue along those lines.

As I re-read this text in its final stages of preparation, I find I cannot help but reflect briefly on recent events. I completed this manuscript in the first week of March 2020. A week later, in response to the spread of COVID-19, my university, along with others across the country, moved to socially distanced working conditions and fully online instruction. Basically, as faculty and students, we were all working from home. As many of us in academia experienced, this included using video conferencing, course management systems, social media, and related technologies. Indeed, social distancing meant arranging for much of our lives through digital technologies. These technological changes may have been the least of our worries, but they were significant nonetheless. As I write this in July 2021, here in New York, many of the social restrictions of the past fifteen months have been lifted, and my university plans to return to on-campus life next semester. In terms of this book, I believe that the intensification of our digital lives created by our months of social distancing has brought into sharper focus its major topics: our participation with digital media ecologies in making judgments (for good or bad); our partnership with personal digital devices in shaping our capacities for attending to the world; our negotiations as scholars with technological and academic assemblages; and our pedagogical experiments as parts of digital collectives with our students and colleagues. In short, though this text does not address the pandemic, the digital experiences of social distancing address themselves to the matters I discuss.

As I’ve already suggested, I have been at this work for more than twenty years, which should make it obvious that I have only done so with a great deal of intellectual, material, and personal support. My colleagues at SUNY Cortland, especially Mary Lynch Kennedy, Victoria Boynton, and David Franke, are remarkable and generous individuals who granted me a terrific opportunity to develop as a scholar and a teacher in our professional writing program. For the last twelve years, I have been a professor at SUNY Buffalo, first in the English Department and recently in the Department of Media 

Study. In Buffalo I have been fortunate to have a community of colleagues who support the digital humanities and my work in digital rhetoric including Neil Coffee, Jeff Good, Cristanne Miller, and Kristen Moore. For nine years I served as director of composition and teaching fellows in English and then as the director of the university’s writing in the disciplines program. As with all WPA positions, it has been a tremendous amount of work, but also an excellent opportunity to engage with many of the concerns of my research in terms of supporting graduate teaching assistants and contingent faculty and addressing the needs of students across the campus. This work was only made possible through their many efforts, though I would especially acknowledge my colleagues Douglas Basford and Rick Feero with whom I worked for years on the management of the composition program. Inasmuch as any administrator must find a balance between that work and the demands of teaching and scholarship, this book literally could not have been written without their support.

For more than fifteen years I have maintained a blog, which has extended over time into Facebook and Twitter. That work has given me an opportunity to engage with many people and those conversations have been the foundation of an invaluable community for me. To that group, I would have to add those who have been generous with their time over the years to discuss their work and mine. While there are far too many people to list, I would especially like to acknowledge Levi Bryant, Byron Hawk, Collin Brooke, Cheryl Ball, Doug Eyman, Sarah Arroyo, Steven Krause, Derek Mueller, Michael Flower, Matt Gold, Thomas Rickert, Elizabeth Losh, Kathi Yancey, Bill Hart-Davidson, and David Blakesley. In particular I should note Gregory Ulmer and Victor Vitanza, whose work, as I mentioned at the outset, started me down this path. Though I did not have the opportunity to study with either of them, time has given me the opportunity to know them both and continue to be inspired by their work.

Most importantly though I must thank my family: Rhonda, Mirabel, and Jameson. They are well aware of the challenges of writing a book, at least for me. I wish I could say that the practice of writing made me a better person and a joy to live with. Unfortunately, I cannot say that was always the case, so I thank them deeply for their patience and their efforts to support me.

Table of Contents

Preface   
 

Introduction  

1. Rhetorical Capacities 

2. Distributed Deliberation in Digital Media Ecologies 

3. Synthetic Attention by Close, Hyper Machines 

4. Integrative Composition for Digital Assemblages 

5. The Glitchy Mediations of Electrate Collective Experiments 

Three Epilogues
 

Notes 
Works Cited 
Index 

Editorial Reviews

Digital rhetoric, both as practice and inquiry, is at a crossroads. Beset on all sides by social, cultural, political, and economic forces, we have struggled to keep pace with, much less intervene in, our media ecologies. Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities is an indispensable contribution to our efforts in dealing productively and ethically with the digital.”—Collin Gifford Brooke, author of Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media 
 
“Alex Reid remakes the digital humanities as a rhetorical enterprise. Updating takes on electracy through new materialist theories and actor network methodologies, this book works through a series of rhetorical topoi for contemporary digitality. Essential reading for digital rhetorics, new material rhetorics, and postprocess composition.”—Byron Hawk, author of Resounding the Rhetorical: Composition as a Quasi-Object

From the Publisher