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 Volume 14 Numbers
1 and 2, 2004
CRITICISM AND
SOCIAL ACTION: THE RHETORIC AND
AESTHETICS OF ELECTRONIC TEXTS Barbara Warnick Laura Gurak Abstract. Essays included in this issue are case
studies of rhetorical expression as it occurs online. We take rhetoric broadly to mean expression
for an audience in a particular context designed to motivate audience members
to see or experience things in certain ways.
Some of these case studies are ethnographic explorations, while others
raise questions about the uniqueness of online expression. All of them use the case study or specific experience
as a starting point to discover more about how online expression takes place.
As such, they are, and are intended to be, suggestive and heuristic. In considering
the status of the printed word in this age of hypermediated,
multi-mediated texts, Lev Manovich recently reminded
his readers that print texts traditionally “encoded human knowledge and memory,
instructed, inspired, convinced, and seduced their readers to adopt new ideas,
new ways of interpreting the world, new ideologies. In short,” he said, “the printed word was linked
to the art of rhetoric” (2001, pp. 76-77). He then noted that, because the webbed structure
of hypertext purportedly disrupts the logical structure and linear development
of ideas, the rise of hypertext “exemplifies the continuing decline of rhetoric
in the modern era” (p. 77).
Manovich speculated that rhetoric per se in the future “may
have less to do with arranging information in a particular order and more
to do simply with selecting what is included and what is not included in the
total corpus presented” (p. 78).
That is, rhetoric would be reduced to the study of patterns of selection
and deflection in the construction of new media texts (Burke,
1966). We believe
that the study of Internet-based rhetorical and personal expression offers
a much richer field for research and scholarship than this might imply. If we think of rhetoric more broadly as expression
for an audience--a form of communication in which an author must think about
how what he or she says will work in a particular context--then the question
of kairos should be taken into account (Brent,
1997). In addition, rhetorical
expression is always about motivated expressions; that is, expression whereby
the speaker or writer tries to motivate an audience, no matter how subtle
this desire may be. Considering how communicators adapt to their rhetorical
context (the demands of the moment, the expectations of their audience, their own need for self expression) means that rhetorical study
of new media communication can and indeed should have a very wide scope. Contributors
to this issue on “Rhetorical Dimensions of Electronic Texts” focus on forms
of expression and communication that emerge from and speak to their communicative
context. Their work reminds us that
Internet venues are places where offline experiences and events in the material
world are re-presented, complemented, and sometimes replaced by online communication. Their work reminds us, too, that the Web and
the Internet open a new field for expression where the possibilities for rhetorical
communication are expanded and multiplied. Because of their existence in virtual space,
Internet-based texts bring isolated, geographically remote people together
in times of crisis. They provide a
site for crafting and celebrating ethnic and cultural identity. Or, they might provide a place where users can
engage in bricolage, play, and the discovery of
something new. Since a large portion
of the Internet is a human habitation, a place where the “unending conversation”
between people with competing ideas and needs to express themselves continues,
it will in the future certainly continue to be a site of rhetorical action
(Burke, 1941). The articles
included in this issue focus on communication in context. They were selected from papers presented at
a In her recent
book, Writing Machines, our conference keynote speaker, N. Katherine
Hayles, considered the workings of literary books
whose development and form departed from traditional print. These included an electronic book, an artist’s
book, and a highly designed and intertextual print
book. In the course of her criticism,
which was highly speculative and suggestive, Hayles
paused to ask, “What does it mean to ‘do’ theory?” (2002,
p. 104) She went on to note that, while the business
of doing theory in science entails distilling a few regularities from experience,
the work of theorizing in literature and the human sciences proceeds differently.
“Here theory serves as an interpretive framework through which particular
instances of literary theory can be read. . . .
The more predictive power a literary theory seems to have, in which
it yields readings that can be known in advance once the theory is specified,
the less valuable it becomes” (p. 104). Thus,
theorizing in humanistic scholarship often means working out from a text or a
case study to see what can be found; it is generative rather than
probative. This does not mean that the
research provides no evidence for the critic’s observations. The reader should be, and usually is,
positioned to make a judgment of the critic’s judgment by deciding whether the
critic’s reading of a text accords with what her audience finds there. It does mean that the critic and her reader
are joined in a discovery process in which many different readings and theories
may come into play. What sorts of new
discoveries might this lead to? By considering
a particular case or cases, we may find in a genre of artifacts patterns of
expression and sequences of behavior that turn out to be heuristic in that
they explain expressive forms occurring in other instances in a given genre
or even in other genres. Thorough study
of a particular case might also (one would hope) help us to more fully understand
and appreciate the function and features of that particular case.
Study of new media forms of expression also provides a record of how
those forms developed. As Manovich noted,
contributing to a genealogy of new media expression now is important because,
without it, “future theorists and historians of computer media will be left
with not much more than the equivalents of the newspaper reports and film
programs from cinema’s first decades” (p. 6).
Even if sites, message boards, and other digital media are fully accessible
decades from now, the knowledge of how they operated in their cultural and
interpersonal contexts may be best preserved in scholarly work such as we
see here. And, looking to the future,
the descriptions and syntheses we find in much of the work to date but in
particular, in this issue’s case studies, are a move toward developing accounts
of some general trends and categories that will be useful to future researchers
in electronic literature and Internet-based interpersonal and group communication.
We will now turn to a consideration of how the contributors to this
issue worked to make these things possible. In their
essay, “Ethnicity in American Taiko Web Sites,” Nancy R. Bixler
and Reiko Nagae-Foster compare two Web sites of
American performance groups in taiko
(Japanese-American drumming). Taiko
itself is a liminal form, an outgrowth of immigration and changing cultural
practices. As an offline practice, it
energizes its space-time re-creation on the Web. In their ethnographic study of taiko sites, Bixler and Nagae-Foster consider the sites’ respective constructions
of ethnicity and how the sites address their presumed audiences. How is the material
embodiment of the performance created through the website texts? How do the sites’ texts and images bring
alive the experience of taiko, as well as the
presence of Japanese American and Asian American identity and culture? Bixler and Nagae-Foster observe
that elements such as hyperlinking patterns, events
notices, and web rings offer opportunities for growth of ethnic communities
distanced from their culture of origin (Mitra,
1999; Mitra & Cohen,
1999). Their study illustrates
how the Web, as a performative environment rich
in textual possibilities for display, can offer a space in which variegated
identities can be enacted and established. The two taiko sites
differ markedly in how they construct their audiences. The more established of the two sites views
its audience as diverse and widespread, whereas the more recently developed
site is largely local and oriented toward encouraging the growth of an offline
civic community. Their analysis reminds
us that website materials are constructed with an eye to their offline contexts,
and that historical and experiential offline conditions should be considered
when we examine symbolic constructions online. In a similar
look at ethnicity and its representations on the Web, Constance Kampf, in “The Two-Edged
Cybersword: How Speed and Reach are Affecting Indigenous
Communities around the World,” analyzes a range of Web sites and how these
are used to disseminate information
about the didjerdu. As Kampf notes,
this instrument from the Yolngu people of Kampf begins
her analysis by describing the relationship between culture, as a concept, and
the diffusion of technology across different contexts. She notes how the speed
and reach of the Internet foster new methods of diffusion and how the Internet
has become important in giving diasporic communities
a sense of connection. Her analysis of the didjeridu
Web sites, however, illustrates major differences in how the instrument is used
in online settings. In the end, she notes “that cybersword
cuts both ways” for indigenous people. On the one hand, the Internet provides
global reach, so that all cultures can learn more about each other. On the
other hand, however, since anyone can put up a Web site about a native
artifact, appropriation of this artifact for any purpose can and does occur. In their
essay, “Expression in the Post-September 11th Web Sphere,” Erica Siegl and Kirsten Foot study forms of personal expression
posted online during the World Trade Center attacks and for a three week period
thereafter. From archival impressions of
247 English-language Web sites, they selected 84 as containing expression that
could be accessed and studied. Drawing
on the grief and bereavement literature and on their own observations, Siegl and Foot identified nine types of expression
occurring on these sites during this time period. Their study charts which types were
predominate (depressive, religious/spiritual, and negative emotion or
expression). They also provide the
reader with specific examples of users’ expressed thoughts and feelings as
posted on message boards, condolence books, and Web logs. In the
course of their work, Siegl and Foot came to
recognize many aspects of the unique interactive capacity of the Internet that
separate it from traditional media. For
example, in the presence of nationwide or worldwide crisis, it offers a place
where people can come together, express mutual support, vent their anger, and
share their fear and grief. Because of
its convenience, its relative anonymity, and its accessibility, the Internet
also provides a space where individuals, alone and perhaps isolated in their
grief, can express their feelings in ways that they may not be able to express
them in face to face interactions. From
a researcher’s perspective, the data described in Siegl
and Foot’s study also reminds us that archived minute-by-minute recordings of
people’s reactions during and immediately after an event offer opportunities
for analysis and study on a scale that would not be possible without the
Internet. From a perspective
that accounts for both gender and class, Rhiannon Bury, in “
Language on (the) Line: Class, Community
and the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigades,” offers
an analysis of gender performance and online community making in an ethnographic
case study of an electronic list devoted to the discussion of David Duchovny,
the leading male character who plays FBI Agent Fox Mulder
on the television series The X-Files. Bury’s interest
is “the practices of community and performances of gender” in this online
space, which is occupied primarily by women. At the outset of her essay, Bury
notes that language use is always related to class and that in her study,
she will examine how certain members of the list employed rhetorical devices
online that gave them more “linguistic capital” than other members. With
its focused analysis
of many specific passages from the list discussion, this essay illustrates the
importance of using carefully collected and articulated artifacts—in this case,
specific passages of text—to support one’s claims. This level of analysis,
typical of linguistic research, is used by Bury to illustrate the specific
rhetorical and linguistic features of the list exchanges. What Bury finds is
that despite many of the grand claims made about the Internet as a place free
from gender or class distinctions, in fact real life (RL) features are present.
Bury concludes by noting that “cyber-participants, at least by today's
standards of technology, are not able to be pinpointed and identified as men or
women, as African-American or white by the power of the gaze,” but that over
time “these identities will ‘seep through’ in a variety of ways.” The way that
such “seepage” occurs that is most compelling in her analysis is language
itself. Braxton Soderman, in his study “At the Crossroads of the Trivial,”
offers an account of his quest to find the meaning of the “trivial” that began
with a class discussion of Espen Aarseth’s
observation that “in ergodic literature, nontrivial
effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 1).
Intrigued by his own inability to explain the meaning of “trivia,”
Soderman launched a search to discover the significance of
this seemingly insignificant idea. Soderman’s search turned out to be hypertextual,
since one text led to another, until he may have found what he was looking
for (or maybe not). After excursions
in the library, through online databases, and by way of televised quiz shows
such as jeopardy and The Chamber, Soderman returned
to the library once again. There he
discovered a book on trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith.
Smith’s tiny book was filled with trivial thoughts of mundane things,
and it enabled Soderman to see that “little things
erupt into significance.” What Soderman discovers in reading Smith’s book is that the
trivial cannot be had. It is everywhere
and nowhere, and by its very nature can only continue to exist when it remains
unnoticed, a chimera in the periphery of our mental vision. Thus, inquiring into the general significance
of the trivial may itself be an oxymoronic
enterprise. Nevertheless, inquiring into
the notion of the trivial as it relates to cybertext
theory may be useful. In Aarseth’s view, the straightforward navigation of
print--reading sequentially and flipping pages--functions as taken for
granted. In contrast,
traversing cybertexts, exploring worlds, and solving
puzzles such as one finds in graphic, interactive interfaces requires effort
and attention. In cybertexts, “how the reader ‘completes a text’ and how the
text ‘manipulates’ this effort becomes significant--that is, nontrivial--and
cannot be discarded or overlooked in a discussion of the text’s structure or
meaning.” These five
studies conceptualize aspects of online communication, and four of them also
capture moments in time when people come together and share their experiences
online. Taken together, they help us
to better understand how online text functions.
They show us that the Internet offers an environment where individuals
separated in time and space can find solace or social support. They may help us to better understand similar
forms of online communication in other contexts. Furthermore, they indicate that the archived
public Web offers researchers rich opportunities to investigate online communication
from an historical perspective. The two ethnographic studies examine how diasporic
communities and emigrants from a geographic site of origin can create or recreate
communal experience and identity online. And
Bury’s study of language use by articulate members
of an Internet community shows us how and why the idea of the “unmarked net
speaker” is indeed a myth. It illustrates Crawford’s (2002)
claim that “online speech is marked by a highly readable system of differences
encoded in grammar and syntax, vocabulary, allusions, regionalisms, dialect,
and all the other ways we signify our cultural and class positions via language”
(p. 98). Like Soderman’s journey to find out what it might mean to say
that the effort to traverse cybertext is nontrivial,
the essays in this issue raise as many interesting questions as they
answer. How do forms of identity,
performance, and expression online resemble and diverge from their offline
counterparts? How are the nature and
shape of expressions in digital text changing as their media contexts
change? What opportunities for
communication and communal expression are unique to the online
environment? These five studies remind
us that such questions might best be answered by recourse to the particular
case. Endnotes [1]Additional sponsors of the conference
included the Internet Studies Center at the University of Minnesota, the Departments
of Communication, Technical Communication, and English at the University of
Washington, and U. W.’s Digital Media Working Group. [2] Senior critics for the conference were
N. Katherine Hayles of UCLA; Beth Kolko, References Aarseth, E. (1997). Cybertext. Burke,
K. (1966). Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and
method. Burke,
K. (1941). The philosophy of literary form.
Crawford,
A. (2002). The myth of the unmarked net speaker. In G. Elmer (Ed.).
Critical perspectives on
the Internet (pp. 89-104). Hayles, N. K. (2002). Writing
machines. Manovich, L. (2001). The
language of new media. Mitra,
A. (1999). Characteristics of the WWW text: Tracing discursive strategies.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 5 (1). Retrieved Mitra,
A., & Cohen, E. (1999). Analyzing the web: Directions and challenges. In S. Jones
(Ed.), Doing Internet research: Critical issues and methods for examining the
net (pp. 179-202). Copyright 2004 Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, Inc. This file may not be publicly distributed or reproduced without written permission of the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship, P.O. Box 57, Rotterdam Jct., NY 12150 USA (phone: 518-887-2443). |