Rhetoric, Technology, Culture Spring 2011

Course Introduction

The ubiquity of electronic communication and the evolution of new media technologies (e.g., Facebook, Wikipedia, and online games) need no introduction. Our public and private lives are increasingly lived across electronic networks. We work, play, buy, learn, and create in digitally-mediated social networks constructed of words, sounds, and images. Wireless technologies and portable smart devices have only accelerated this migration. The move toward networks of new media, which has been scrutinized from any number of critical perspectives, has been deeply felt in the areas of rhetoric and writing. Both fields have devoted significant intellectual energy to exploring the implications and promises of technology: what is its impact on the composition and distribution of texts, on the work of persuasion and identification, and on the cultivation of ethos and identity?

Course Summary

Merging form and content, students in this course use new media technologies to theorize rhetoric, technology, and culture. For instance, students participate in different online social networks and examine them through critical reflection, exploring how identity and ethos are produced online, how distributed collaborators generate shared knowledge, and how online networks bleed into the offline world's economics and advocacy movements. Students interact with texts such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and online games, and they connect with students enrolled in a similar course at another university. They are encouraged to incorporate their own wireless and smart device technologies (e.g., laptops, iPhones, and iPads) into the classroom. Students also produce weekly reading responses as audio (or video) podcasts. Class time is devoted to traditional discussions but also to engagements with new media technologies (e.g. workshops, demonstrations, and tutorials). Students likewise develop a research project that includes a conference paper and a re-visioning of that conference paper into a multimedia text suitable for publication in an online academic journal. In addition to developing a theoretically robust response to rhetoric, technology, and culture, it is hoped that students leave the course prepared to integrate technology into their research and teaching.

Course Methodology

This course and its understanding of technology is grounded in the critical methodology of rhetoric, which students hopefully will come to value as a productive method for shaping and negotiating their personal, professional, and technological lives. Rhetoric, briefly and broadly defined by George Kennedy, is “the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including language, to others to influence their decisions or actions.” In more concrete terms, it is the use of symbols to produce an effect, be they a verbal command to “Stop,” a red traffic light, a Journey song imploring us “Don’t Stop Believing,” or a floor plan that inherently guides traffic flow. Though rhetoric has become a negative word within political circles and contemporary media, it has a rich history as one of the oldest intellectual pursuits in the western world. With a focus on audience, context, and the persuasion inherent to all human endeavors, rhetoric greatly informs the purpose of this course. New technologies provide new ways of understanding the practice and study of rhetoric, and the class's shared understanding of it likely will evolve throughout the semester.

This course envisions three distinct (though related) ways of articulating the relationship between rhetoric and technology:

technology as a function of rhetorical action
technology as a rhetorical agent
rhetoric as a technology

Course Projects

Three inter-animated projects form the backbone of this course:

1. New Media Tutorial

   To heighten the course's sense of enactment, the New Media Technology Tutorial Assignment asks students working collaborative groups to prepare and execute a tutorial on a particular new media technology.

2. Distance Enhancement

   This project asks students working collaboratively in local groups to use online technologies to make a tangible, beneficial contribution to the other university.

3. New Media Research

   The final project asks individual students to develop a research project, articulating that project first as a conference paper (and in a conference proposal) and then as a multimedia text for an online scholarly publication.

The "Projects" page of this website contains more detailed discussions of each project.

Grade Breakdown

Course Policies

Technology Expectations

• ability to interact with the course website and other websites
• access to word processing, visual design, and web design software
• a suitable email account checked regularly for course-related business
• a Flash drive or other means to backup coursework

Routine work with technology is a component of this course. Students need not be technological experts to succeed in this course, but digital technology interaction is integral and computer problems are not valid excuses for incomplete work. Practice the core principle of digital data work: redundant backup. Digital technology will fail; be prepared for that eventuality.

Personal Technology Devices in the Classroom

Students may use laptops, cell phones, and other digital devices during class, provided that they do not disrupt other students’ learning. This is not a trick. This course is situated in an increasingly connected multimedia environment. Each student is responsible for his or how own engagement with class meetings, and thus his or her resultant success or failure.

Availability of Online Material

Because of the nature of the course, some material posted to the course website may be publicly accessible through the Web. (A student’s grades and personal information will not be shared publicly.) Additionally, any material posted to the course website may be used anonymously for teaching or published research purposes. For these reasons, students are encouraged to select usernames that are different from their real names.

Collaborative Work

Because one of the most salient features of digital technology is its social aspect, teamwork and group projects are required elements of the course. Student teammates are responsible for updating each other and the instructor about project development and progress. Additionally, student teams are responsible for negotiating all aspects of their work, including planning, drafting, revising, file managing, scheduling, and leading tutorials and presentations. When a group project is assigned, students will complete activities that foster successful collaboration. After the conclusion of group projects, individuals will complete forms to assess the contributions of group members and the global performance of the team.

Late Work

Late work is not accepted.

Attendance

As a graduate-level seminar driven by student discussion, attendance and participation in all facets of the course are essential. Given the vital importance of student participation, every student is expected to attend every class. If an absence is unavoidable, students are asked to notify their instructor beforehand so that alternative arrangements can be made.

Required Texts

Collin Brooke, Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media.
Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants.
David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old.

Additional readings will be provided as .pdf files or links.

Course Reading Sequence

This list organizes the course readings into three phases. These three phases articulate related readings and organize our thinking around specific issues in rhetorical theory. These phases are not mutually exclusive; they necessarily bleed into one another. Students may find many of these readings difficult. The density of the prose, the abstractness of the concepts, and the confrontation of divergent viewpoints and values make this reading list equal parts challenging and rewarding. Nevertheless, genuine and generous engagement with these texts will see students through the semester.

Phase One: Introduction to Rhetoric and Technology

• Alexander, Jonathan. “Media Convergence.”
• Baron, Dennis. “From Pencils to Pixels.”
• Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media.
• Burke, Kenneth. “Terministic Screens.”
• Johnson, Robert. Selections from User-Centered Technology.
• Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants.
• Lanham, Richard. “The ‘Q’ Question.”
• Miller, Richard. “When the Cutting Edge of Technology is at Your Throat.”
• Ong, Walter. “Writing as a Technology that Restructures Thought.”
• Ong, Walter. “Literacy and Orality in Our Time.”
• Plato. Phaedrus.
• Rheingold, Howard. Selections from Smart Mobs.
• White, Eric Charles. Selection from Kaironomia.

Phase Two: Practice and Play in Composition Pedagogy

• Anson, Chris. “Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology.”
• Bemer et al. “Designing Collaborative Learning Spaces.”
• Bernhardt, Stephen. "The Shape of Texts to Come.”
• Blackmon, Samantha. “(Cyber)Conspiracy Theories?”
• Blue, Laura. "World of Warcraft: A Pandemic Lab?"
• Brooks, David. "Oversimulated Suburbia."
• Clark, Josh. "How can spam e-mail help fight HIV?"
• Colby, Rebekah Shultz, and Richard Colby. “A Pedagogy of Play.”
• Dibbell, Julian. "A Rape in Cyberspace."
• Dibbell, Julian. "The Unreal Estate Boom."
• Gee, James. “Games and Learning.”
• Grabill, Jeff. “On Divides and Interfaces.”
• Hawk, Byron. Selection from A Counter-History of Composition.
• Johnson, Steven. Presentation for The Long Now Foundation.
• Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, and Stuart Selber. “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage.”
• Knievel, Michael. “What is Humanistic About Computers and Writing?”
• Lessig, Lawrence. Keynote address for the "Cyberspace and Privacy" conference.
• McGonigal, Jane. "This is Not a Game."
• Miller, Claire Cain, and Brad Stone. "Virtual Goods Start Bringing Real Paydays."
• Musgrove, Mike. "Virtual Games Create A Real World Market."
• Reid, Alex. “Portable Composition.”
• Rice, Jennifer Edbauer. “Rhetoric’s Mechanics.”
• Rickert, Thomas. “In the House of Doing.”
• Rivers, Nathaniel, and Jeremy Tirrell. "Productive Strife."
• Salvo, Michael. “Critical Engagements with Technology in the Computer Classroom.”
• Sheppard, Jennifer. “The Rhetorical Work of Multimedia Production Practices.”
• Sullivan, Patricia. “Practicing Safe Visual Rhetoric on the World Wide Web.”
• Tirrell, Jeremy. "Dumb People, Smart Objects."
• van Ittersum, Derek. “Computing Attachments.”
• Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Re-designing Graduate Education in Composition and Rhetoric.”

Phase Three: Revisiting Rhetorical Technology, Ecology, and Agency

• Alexander, Jonathan. “Writing Queer Digital Youth.”
• Back et al., "Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization."
• Ballif, Michelle. “Writing the Third Sophistic.”
• Bay, Jennifer and Thomas Rickert. “New Media and the Four Fold.”
• Blythe, Stuart. “Agencies, Ecologies, and the Mundane Artifacts in Our Midst.”
• Brooke, Collin. “Forgetting to be (Post)Human.”
• Butler, Judith. "On Never Having Learned How To Live."
• Clark, Andy. Selections from Natural-Born Cyborgs.
• Covino, William. “Grammars of Transgression.”
• Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old.
• Fortunati, Leopoldina. “The Mobile Phone as Technological Artifact.”
• Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs."
• Haraway, Donna. “Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.”
• Longo, Bernadette. “Human + Machine Culture.”
• Taylor, Nicholas. “Where the Women Are.”
• Turkle, Sherry. “Introduction: The Things That Matter.”