Photo-Essay

This has been a really fun project. I feel like I have a much better grasp on blogging and digital rhetoric. It certainly has opened up my world and added a little enthusiasm to what otherwise was a pretty negative attitude toward the value of IText. I believe much of my cynicism stemmed from not fully understanding the motivations behind blogging and I thought it was just downright silly to think you could start typing and people would suddenly flock to your page every day and consume whatever it was you were selling.

What I learned is that the primary motivation behind most blogs is the sharing of information. The number one way bloggers gauge success is by the personal satisfaction they get from creating their posts. Also high on the list is the amount of interaction they have with their audience. Many report making friends on their blogs. To me, it comes down to a sense of community. Blogging is generally like a big conversation that can happen anywhere, at any time. If I look at it that way I can't help but think that it's pretty cool.

So here's the first of four pages I created on my blog (click here!). At the bottom of each page you'll find a link to the next page, or you can look at the right nav bar under "Pages." All four are there for you to peruse. Thanks for reading. In the spirit of the blogging world, I hope you learn something and comment and make this feel a little bit more like a community than a project for school.

-Matt

You're the Teacher

Anderson's Ted talk was interesting to say the least. He is counted as one of the "innovators" he was speaking of. But his desire to share, to "open up" his ideas and his medium is causing his idea to spread. I suppose this is what the utopian idea of the web has been for its innovators. Rather than stifling and hording ideas, you open them up to the world and encourage imitation.

But imitating Ted is not a passive kind of piracy. As Anderson says, it takes "huge amounts of effort." He describes those who imitate as "teachers." And each one of us has the capacity to be that teacher to the world. Very inspiring. It definitely casts a positive light on these new tools - the video/internet interface. And this idea of "crowd accelerated innovation" seems a lot like education, only you're flattening the traditional model. Here, anyone is an educator. There are no rules, no paperwork or exams. Your experience is your ethos and your work is your lesson.

I got a little "spark" from what Anderson said about video being the return to face-to-face communication. The spark came in the form of a forehead-slapping moment. This new IText form of communication is simply a proxy for face-to-face communication. Whether it's video or Twitter or mobile phone texts, the result is the same. We are simply replicating this face to face interaction that we cannot always have. We have even replicated the speech patterns, in the case of these short-hand writing styles. But video seems to be the most authentic form of this new way of communicating. Rhetoric seems to be coming full-circle by returning to the roots of delivery via sound, sight and speech.

There are the darker sides of this rhetorical revolution, such as Wallace's "Asians in the Library." The ability to respond in-kind seems to counter the evil that can be injected into the webosphere. Is this productive? A bunch of bickering back and forth? Hate being spewed in every direction? "Tatas hangin' out" and "skeezy white trash" (xmonmon) comments don't seem to meaningfully contribute to the discourse of racial tolerance. Rants tend to be self-serving, a kind of invective spewed out to like-minded individuals who take pleasure either in other people's self-loathing or those looking for a fight. I've been guilty of this. For about two weeks I was addicted to the Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno drama in the online forums at ESPN.com. Go ahead - judge me. I deserve it.

ua.edu

 This leads me to the age of rage article by Adams. This new form of cyber-bullying is in most cases aided by the use of aliases. Remaining anonymous has emboldened a new generation of bullies, able to carry out their verbal attacks without even the underlying fear of having their asses kicked by picking on the wrong person. I believe the "kick" is the same for these people as it is for the physical bully. Their reward is seeing the level of discourse descend into bickering. Whatever their agenda, their goal is to steer the agenda of everyone else off track. I've read about and experienced these types of people in group dynamics. This "deindividuation" is certainly the underbelly of chat rooms and forums. Instead of growing as individuals, these "trolls" detract from not only their own potential, but the potential of the group by drawing others into a "mob mentality." Trolls usually end up garnering much of the attention. In some cases, as Adams points out, they become more popular than the blogger or author of the piece that is being debated.

But there is that good with the bad balance that the online community must strike. Anonymity allows for freer expression. But it also leads to anarchy. The question is who polices it? A moderator? The online community? Is there a way to eliminate trolling? And what about the people who don't hide behind an alias. What about the Wallace's of the world? Do we simply place them in the category of sad human beings or do we stand up and fight back? The irony of the web is that stupidity and hate can create popularity. I suppose that is true in a lot of media. I'd love to hear some other thoughts on this. It's all so new and yet we are debating the pros and cons already. The genie is out of the bottle. But where's the palace?

Chickens and Eggs

http://brodylevesque.blogspot.com

Does the genre dictate the format of the Text or does the format dictate the genre? For example, does the fact that you are texting dictate that your Text is a text? (hope that's not too confusing with all the "texts") I guess this gets down to how important the format is in determining its genre. Does hypertext really open up brand new genres? And if so, do other genres die? Does this mean that the way we write dictates the writing produced? Is all this technology fundamentally changing rhetoric? I'd love to hear some opinions on this. I think it's important to our conversation about hypertext and what it means for rhetoric now and in the future.

Love for Bozeman

I enjoyed everyone's short a/v projects tremendously. I think I really connected with Savannah's piece. The music, the imagery and the fact that it followed a storyline I think were the key elements that drew me into it. I think this video did a couple things really well:

1. It told a story of what I think was a homecoming of sorts, as the video fast-forwards over I-90. As I often do after being away from Bozeman for a while, she cruised down Main Street, visited her coffee shop and watched a classic Montana sunset.

2. I liked the theme of transportation running throughout. This video had the feeling of going somewhere...never being stagnant or boring. It took the time to focus on a few things, but generally was true to a 1.5 minute video - it was punchy and moved quickly, varying the imagery. The use of the (Chaco'd) feet was a great way to pull her into the video and adds to the feel of movement, almost giving the viewer that feeling of being along for the ride.

3. It focused on what I assume Savannah feels is important in life, which gives us a glimpse into the author's life. I'm one of those consumers of rhetoric who loves to speculate: is this the author speaking directly to me about what his/her life is like, or is this a creation of some sort of fiction, or a blending of both. She obviously went out with a video camera and a purpose - to make a video about Bozeman - but how much of this is true to her life and how much is "made for tv?"

4. Intentionally or not, she also brought into the video some of the elements we have been studying lately. Like I said above, we can only speculate on what part of this video was her and what was created for the camera, but I like how it tied in with the idea that McCloud put forward - that you will receive the message only if you don't know too much about the messenger (37). Indeed, there are several "actresses" in the film, but we're never sure which one is Savannah. Does she cartoonize her experience in Bozeman? I'm not sure I would go that far, but it certainly is interesting to think about it in that way.

She also integrated much of the icon/signage elements discussed in McCloud. Icons such as the Ellen, Music Villa and even the Coop building "represent a person, place, thing or idea" (27). Indeed, I believe in this film, they represented all four concepts. Notice she didn't put Costco or REI in the film. She used the icons that portray Bozeman as a local, funky, independent bastion of individualism. In fact, they seem to reflect this spirit in how Savannah sees herself, or how she would like to be seen. Again, we don't truly know.

That leads me to my last point, which is that this film is more than just a snapshot of Bozeman. It is Bozeman, seen through the lens of Savannah. And this is an important distinction. I would go so far as to say that this is about Savannah: about what she thinks is important in life. It is her identity, reflected back to us in the form of an icon that she holds dear. McCloud says "our identities and awareness are invented in many inanimate objects every day" (38). They are important to us in ways we often don't consciously think about. Our clothes, our hair, our choice of music, the places we live, the Chaco's on our feet, or the choice to forgo footwear entirely all add up to our identity, or some version of it.

The camera, prose and music all allow us to extend beyond mere words into self-expression. That's what multimodal writing is beginning to morph into for me. It is extending the concept of rhetoric beyond the keyboard. Indeed, it can be a powerful tool, as when the music swells in Savannah's piece and I get hit with a bit of nostalgia for my current hometown. The sun sets on another beautiful day and we're grateful for every second of it!

A Video About Sidewalks

This is a video about sidewalks. I know, not very sexy, but I thought it would be interesting. Indeed, it was way more interesting than I thought it would be. I could have made a miniseries out of all the information I've collected! I'll spare you that, though. Hope you enjoy the 2 1/2 minutes worth.

Changing Behavior

Design can be powerful. It influences all kinds of behaviors. I like Godin's humorous reference to all the signage. We often never think about what these signs make us do. We stop at stop signs, we park elsewhere when it says "No Parking." We generally obey blindly because, well, if someone spent the time to make a sign for it, it must be serious, right? In effect, they can change our behavior, a notion also brought up by Thomas Goetz in his TedMed talk. But as Godin pointed out, there are some signs that are silly and/or are designed poorly. The point he was trying to make, I believe, is that these signs must be well designed in order to attract the attention that you want. They have to be user-friendly and designed with the end user in mind. As Goetz pointed out, it's not the doctors that must ultimately change their behavior. It is the patient, and the average person understands their medical charts about as well as an IRS 1040 form - in other words, not at all.

So what is it about design that makes us sit up and pay attention? Well, I believe it's the thought process behind the design process. When you really take the time to think about who will be using the sign or document or beer can (or whatever) then you are asking questions like "what would the consumer want?" Medical charts really are a great example. They show you everything, but they tell you nothing. They're full of information, just nothing that anyone without a medical degree can interpret. The designer asks questions like "what can I do to motivate someone to change their behavior?" Obviously, numbers and doctor babble doesn't do much for the average American.

It's funny, most of our lives we take for granted that designers have created the world around us: architects, engineers, advertisers, the idiot that designed this crappy office chair I'm sitting in...  For good or ill, we live in a world that is mostly guided by someone else's hand. Yet we rarely think about it. Even the computer screens we are staring at have been been touched by probably dozens of designers.

So what about the design of text? Bernhardt gives a good example of what he calls "visual syntax" (72) with the wetlands document. He says that the organization of such text "conveys information to the reader about textual organization through visible means" (73). I think what that means is that the design itself is rhetorical. By bolding or highlighting or making a word a different color, textual designers are saying "hey, this is important," or "we're deviating from block paragraphs here because this is a separate thought from this." I suppose that paragraphs themselves were some of the first textual design elements. So it's not the text itself that is manipulating the reader, but the design of the text - how white space (or whatever color background) interacts with the text to create additional meaning.

sensingarchitecture.com

I was fascinated by this gestalt theory - some of the laws which guide design.  According to Bernhardt, they are:

• how the total document impacts a reader visually
• continuation - the idea that text is lines on a background and that our eye moves across the page in a certain way
• closure - the fact that we as humans like to fill in the gaps and so how text is contrasted against its environment is important
• similarity - objects that are similar in shape, size, etc. are considered part of a cohesive group

I found this article on gestalt, which may or may not help you put it into context. Stutz adds the idea that "perceptual grouping is favored according to the nearness of parts. Closer parts form groups by visually uniting" (http://EzineArticles.com/3822562). In other words, if something is next to something else, you associate them or think they are parts of the whole.

I also found it interesting that the design goes way beyond typeface and textual styling. How text is presented is also part of the design process. Sometimes traditional paragraphs are the best way to convey an idea. Sometimes it's a question and answer format. Sometimes sentence fragments are the best way to convey your message. Especially in today's social media dominated world, even the smallest fragment can have a huge impact. The way we play with text these days might have been blasphemy 100 years ago. But today it's all part of how we communicate.

iBlog? My Proposal

"I blog, you blog. We blog. Maybe we should get together and be...a...blogging team." - Blogger Pickup Line. Sorry, that was terrible.

I’ve never blogged, except for when it’s required for school. And I’ve never followed a blog. I think blogging is silly to be honest. Though I have found some useful information on blogs, I’ve never said, “wow, this is really great stuff and I’d really like to read this kind of stuff every day (or week, or month).” I honestly don’t have time in my busy reading schedule to follow what some schmo is doing with his life. To me, the whole concept of blogging sounds like a waste of time. Besides, it’s way overdone. 

But there are some bloggers who have created fairly successful followings. And there definitely are some blogs that draw a lot of random traffic. Bloggers who tackle technical questions or those who can provide a keen insight into something fairly unknown have become part of a new kind of discourse community. It is a fickle one. There are no subscriptions, no coffee table to lay their work down on and pick it back up later. Bloggers must be at the top of their game and their content must be relevant to their audience. It must be able to hold attention and motivate the reader to scroll down the page, click through to other pages and ultimately get the reader to come back again and again. 

Most people don’t just happen onto a blog. It is usually the content that brings them there. Keywords and targeted advertising is what generates traffic and, ultimately, followers. But how does one achieve success in the world of the blog? Is there some magic formula? What blogging platform should you use? What should I write about? How often do I need to update it? How much time should I spend on each blog post? Should I advertise? What about social media? Seriously, is my grandma the only one that’s ever going to read my blog???

There is a ton of information on the web about blogs and what it takes to create a successful blog. In fact, several blogs address this issue. Imagine that!! What I’d like to do is whittle away at these resources and come up with maybe 4 or 5 key aspects of a successful blog so that I can share those with my classmates. I may never make a dime on blogging, but perhaps someone in this class might. And who knows, perhaps I might unlock some mystery within the blog that will motivate me to follow a blog or start my own. If nothing else, I think it will give me some insight into the present and future of writing and what our modern audience is looking for. 

By the way, I ripped off that pickup line in the opening. It's from Better Off Dead. I couldn't find that scene, but here's another gem:

Epistemology

I think I'm addicted to this blog. Damn! Ok, so epistemology - what is knowledge, how is it created - I think we have to look at this concept closely if we're going to make a judgment about how we should teach and learn. How does technology help create knowledge? For this I went to the Kohl article on Wikis. He describes the wiki writing process as "a specific practice of interactive and collaborative construction of knowledge" (178). But why knowledge construction? Is everything on the web "knowledge?" He clarifies by stating that "knowledge is not obtained in Wikis but designed in the tacklement with the positions of other participants during an interactive and collaborative writing process. The experiences of the participants as well as the writing processes form the basis of knowledge" (177).  Huh?  And what's a tacklement? So I draw from this that the knowledge isn't in the Text produced, but in the process of writing the Text.

Ah, I get it! And now I know why blogs are good. They stimulate conversation. They stimulate ME to think and write and construct my own knowledge. I do have to admit that when I rant on Facebook (and, yes, I do RANT!) I often find myself doing research, lest I misspeak and some guy I haven't seen in 15 years who decided to get all conservative jumps on my shit. So in the interest of not getting my shit jumped, I learn. I create. I create knowledge. With technology! <Angels are singing in my head and I just released a dozen doves> 

No animals were harmed in the posting of this picture.

So writing is how we create knowledge. It sounds so elementary now. I think I just went in a huge circle. But I suppose I also used my writing to come to this conclusion, demonstrating this idea all the while. Sorry for those who had to suffer through my technology bashing. Though I would like to point out that it's not Wikipedia that creates the knowledge. It's the authors who contribute, and once they have contributed the knowledge, it becomes only a passive (as opposed to active) example of epistemology. But like everything else, we build upon the knowledge of others. So I guess I'm coming around. Thanks Kohl, et al!

Extremist Rhetorical Hysteria

newlifeafterstrokes.com (inverted)

Sorry if this is overly political, but we often speak of the rhetoric of politics. And since we're talking about blogs and such, I thought I'd share this article from Salon.com. It brings up a lot of the issues we have been talking about. I especially liked this quote: "You cannot be identified by what you oppose, only by what you stand for" (Fumento, 2012). He talks a lot about language and how it is used by both the right and left wings, particularly by the media. So love it, hate it, I don't really care. But you should read it. It's pretty insightful.

The pic to the left is kind of my take on how people view the right and left in this country. It's all perpetuated by rhetoric. It seems to have gotten worse, as standards for truth and factual reporting have eroded with the explosion of blogs and internet news outlets. If you are beholden to no one, if you have no editors or ethical review, fact checking or otherwise, then you can spew whatever you would like onto the internet. The problem with this is that if you read this garbage, and you read it again and again and again, you eventually begin believing it's true.  I don't think we hold bloggers or even internet newspapers to the same high standards we hold opinion authors, newspaper reporters and magazine editors. And what happens when this kind of sensationalist name-calling begins generating revenue for the iJournalists? They begin taking profits away from traditional journalism. So then traditional news outlets have to begin publishing smear pieces and we spiral down into the state we are in now, where we demonize and dehumanize the other side in the ultimate playground fistfight, all so Amazon.com can sell you more crap you don't need through banner advertising.

Copyright This!

It all seems to come back to economics:  linking policies (what a ridiculous notion!), copyright, authorship, wikis, coursepacks, oh my! This does bring up an interesting question. On one hand, as someone who would like to make money on what I write, I'd like to see some sort of protection of my intellectual property, but on the other, I do think that there are certain instances in which it is both foolish and/or greedy to think that you own the order in which you put your words. Words, after all, do not belong to anyone.

Particularly on the web, it is almost understood now that if your work is posted on a blog or an online journal that it will inevitably be used by someone else. Though it seems proper to cite and provide a link to that person's work, it hardly seems like a prolific practice. But by and large, my experience with web content is that it is designed to be used by others. And the easier it is to link to, the better. In fact, that is one of Google's criteria for whether a website ends up higher on the search engine results - how many inbound links a site regularly gets. Websites have a vested interest in getting as many inbound links as possible. It's all about traffic.

So this idea of postmodernism mixing with economics seems like a head-on collision waiting to happen. Perhaps what we'll see is a segregation of the vehicles for different genres of writing some day. Or we'll see increased security on sites that will foil the copy/pasters out there. Ultimately, the more "they," whoever they are, control how text is printed, the more control they will have over how we ready, what we can do with it, etc.

Generation "D"

They called my generation "Gen X," which basically meant that we grew up during the 70's and 80's. Color TV was kinda new and MJ was not yet a child molester. We were "lost." Our parents were truly horrified at our prospects. We lacked motivation, we did nothing but rot our brains in front of the TV and play video games. We ate TV dinners and snorted cocaine. We were bored, shiftless layabouts. Sound familiar?

So I'm going to make a sweeping generalization about the teens and twenty-somethings out there that grew up with the internet and iPods and cell phones. I'm calling them Generation D, for Distracted. While we were bored, flipping back and forth between the three channels we got on the rabbit ears, today's youth have 300 channels, YouTube, Hulu, Apple TV, Netflix, a whole host of things that will play these for them and about a millions apps that will tell them anything they want to know. To consume this much media in a lifetime is impossible. It's also distracting as hell.

Watching the videos that Wesch put together on today's "hyper-thinkers" was eye-opening to me. Sure, I've sat in the back of the lecture halls at MSU and watched while students played video games on their laptops. I watched as a professor snatched an iPhone from the hands of a student who was compulsively texting two feet away from her and I know from my own experience in marketing that trying to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pintrest and all the other crap out there that it IS distracting. Gen D is not alone. We are all "wired differently" than we were 10 years ago.

Wesch talks about the walls of academia and draws a contrast with the real world, and he tells us that "

the solution is simple. We don’t have to tear the walls down. We just have to stop pretending that the walls separate us from the world, and begin working with students in the pursuit of answers to real and relevant questions." The solution? Embrace technology in teaching. But at what cost? 

I see Mr. Wesch's point, but there is also something to be said for a tried and tested model of teaching. Certainly there is room for technology in the classroom, but it should not be the focus, it should be merely an aid. And where it becomes distracting as opposed to helpful, then it should be eliminated. Time and again, we refer back to the classics and the humanities in education. I don't think the reason is that it is merely the status quo. There is value in these ideas and they are worth the time we spend on them. If all we did was live in the present we would be doomed to repeat the past. Like sitting at the piano and practicing your scales, learning the fundamentals of education is important to mastery of anything. 

I concede that we must come to terms with an evolving philosophy on teaching, learning and the world in general. Technology does have its place. But we must also keep in mind what it is to be happy and that technology alone cannot bring us happiness. In the same way that the baby boomers worried about the Gen X-ers becoming addicted to television, I worry that all of us will eventually grow fearful of being unplugged. But what I worry about the most is regret. I regret all the time I wasted as a kid watching HBO and Simpsons episodes. I regret that I didn't read more books and spend more time with friends. I regret that I consumed media instead of fresh air. I worry that my own kid will spend 52,000 hours consuming media by the time he is 18 and that he will know more about his favorite celebrity than he does about himself. 

I think that within institutions of higher education, we owe the students more than just a lesson in technology that will be outdated by the time they graduate. We owe them knowledge that will endure beyond this decade. We need to teach them how to think (on their own, without the help of Wikipedia) and we need to teach them that personal fulfillment doesn't come with lithium ion batteries and 4G connections. 

I watched a very honest student get berated by a professor for skipping class once. He went climbing instead of attending lecture. He admitted to it in class and the prof was very critical of his choice to say the least. While this was going on, another student in front of me was on Facebook. Then she was on her cell phone texting under the desk. In fact, she never stopped...all class long. But she was left alone. It seems to me that the balance in life has been thrown out of whack. I understand that there is a time for class and a time for climbing, but there is also a time and place for technology, entertainment and being wired. I think there should be more research done on how technology truly affects learning, our brains and ultimately our happiness before we throw ourselves headlong into this revolution. 

I'll leave you with a clip and commentary on one of my favorite movies, "Idiocracy." Is it possible?

Geisler

I came across this quote in Geisler and it inspired me:

My Intro Video

Sorry about the sound in the beginning. I couldn't figure out how to adjust one part of the video without adjusting the whole thing.  If you can't here it all I'm saying is "Hi, I'm Matt Parsons, I'm 35 years old and I'm from Bozeman, Montana."  Nothing profound...

YouTube Rhetoric

TED talks always give me the chills. So what was the point of Doug giving us this particular piece of digital rhetoric to examine? I think it pushes the boundaries of what we think of as rhetoric. Is music rhetoric? I suppose it is. As Whitacre said in the first video: "singing together and making music together - it's a fundamental human experience." What is it that makes us human? One of them is the ability to tell stories. Another is the ability to make and enjoy music - to turn emotion into music and music into emotion.

How is this rhetoric? Well, Covino and Jolliffe give one definition of rhetoric as "the study and practice of shaping content" (4). Music is content and it is obvious that Whitaker is shaping that content. I go back to what I was saying about defining authorship. Sure, Whitacre wrote the music, but he alone cannot sing the parts of hundreds of singers, nor is he the one who actually mixed all these people together on a sound board. Nor did he create the idea of a choir or music or singing, nor is he in control of his audience. Have you ever read the comments posted under YouTube videos? Brutal!

Anyway, this is a great example of rhetoric because it pushes the boundaries of what a rhetorical situation is. It's demonstrative of the principles surrounding authorship, constraints and audience. And it shows us how the author of such an idea really is impacted by all these factors.

Lastly, it shows us the power of technology as a medium for producing rhetoric. Well, maybe not producing, perhaps influencing is the correct term. It's just one of the tools used to assemble all the different traces out there.

But now let's let the cynical Matt out of the bag (yes, I just used 3rd person to refer to myself). I'm sure that Whitacre had to have some sort of permission to use the likenesses, videos, voices, etc. and I'm assuming he got that permission. He also put some of this on a compilation of his music that he sells. This isn't some kind of fundraiser for charity here (I didn't dig too deep, so correct me if I'm wrong). He topped the iTunes classical charts when his last album was released. Now he's a (classical) rock star. He does lectures. He has ads on his website. I understand the guy has to make a living somehow. But I wonder if his "choir" is benefiting from this at all. One in one thousand might get a little greedy and try to cash in on his success. Now he's Whitacre the defendant in a civil suit.

I guess my point is like Shakespeare, plagiarism and all the issues surrounding authorship, copyright laws, Digital Millenium Act, etc. discourse communities are not only wonderful places to share ideas, but potentially dangerous places in which the retention of a digital lawyer might need to be part of your rhetorical situation.

Whitacre says "people from all over the world can come together and take part in this transcendent experience." How cool is that? But are we more or less free? Do we retain more or less control over the content we are shaping? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Oceans of Stories

I just finished the Porter article. And, fair warning, I also just finished a Topics class that focused on intertextuality and also a class in Shakespeare, the master of all rip-off artists. So I'm feelin' pretty confident about my ability to wax eloquent on this topic. Ok, maybe eloquent is taking it a bit far.

One thing that I took away from last semester is that being naive - taking a naive approach to literature is not necessarily a bad thing. We all get caught up in this notion of eloquence and fancy ourselves as a Frost or Shakespeare or maybe even a Sedaris (David). But what I liked about the Porter article is that he reminds us that it isn't really all about us, the writers. So much of it has to do with who came before us or who our audience is now. Like most artists, some of our favorite authors weren't even popular in their own time. It's funny to me that some of our greatest literature, or what we think of as the high-brow works of the past, were not written for us. They were written for the discourse community of that time. The Bronte sisters didn't write Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights for us; they wrote their now famous novels for each other. How could they know that we would one day be analyzing their texts in Lit 201?

In any event, this idea that all the texts of the world become this world Text (with a capital "T") is one that may be difficult to swallow in our day and age. Particularly in a time when "plagiarism" is such a dirty word and our professors coach us into creating our "own thoughts" and only using sourced material when it is explicitly cited. Like I said above, in my topics class we explored the idea that there is this "Ocean of Stories" and that every story that could be told already has been. What happens in this Ocean (or Text) is that we borrow "streams" from the greater body of stories and craft our own stories from them. Porter expands on this idea that there are no new texts, saying that everything is "intertext." In fact, he goes so far as to say that we should "shift our attention away from the writer as individual and focus more on the sources of social contexts from which the writers' discourse arises" (34-5). Imagine that - in this day when we treat authors like rock stars and suppose that there is some sort of genius in their prose - that really all they are doing is reassembling something that was built a long time ago. Porter would say that they aren't creating anything new. They're just using the traces that already exist.

Porter uses Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence as an example of intertexuality. But I like Shakespeare - mostly because it makes me sound smart to be able to dis the world's most famous poet/playwright. Shakespeare borrowed liberally from the classics, his contemporary poets, even his fellow playwrights. Back then it was acceptable to "borrow" plots and even to directly lift lines from the writing of others. Romeo and Juliet was an Italian poem before it was a play. And it was a novella before that. Yet Shakespeare's genius is unmistakable. The way he assembled verse and prose continues to inspire and shape numerous discourse communities. Shakespeare's talent lay not in creating great stories, but in making mediocre stories great. In this context, he was the Master of Intertextuality.

The crossover from the Davie article came when Porter said "the audience of each of these texts is as responsible for its production as the writer" and that "readers, not writers, create discourse" (38). Again, this notion seems so foreign to us, in our discourse community of copyrighting and intellectual property rights, that it hardly seems plausible. But the more I learn about texts the more I am coming around to the idea that no one really owns their work, because their work isn't really theirs.

It's funny that Shakespeare borrowed his plot lines, but created hundreds of new words. He put words together in orders that had never been imagined. But his ideas of story and many of his characters were hardly novel. This is why we study literature and this is why I say that being naive is a good thing. Revisiting some of the stories from our childhood or looking at a story we've heard so many times before with a fresh naivete is good for our writing skills.

If you're interested in exploring this idea of intertextuality further, I'd suggest Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. It's a quick and easy read and a pretty enjoyable story. I've got it so I'm happy to loan it to you. It's also a great book to read with your kids (for all those non-trad students out there):

The Situation Room

NSA: "Sir, we have a situation."
President Obama: "Is it serious?"
NSA: "It's rhetorical, sir."
Obama: "Oh... Dear God!"

Of course, what I see in this picture is Hillary checking her breath and the guy at the computer is checking his Facebook status. Seriously, though, how rhetorical is this situation? I could go on for days. But even the fact that this was published is rhetorical. Think about it.


But on to the fun stuff...

What struck me about this article was the idea that rhetoric is influenced by a bunch of different factors, which are, in turn, influenced by the rhetoric that is being influenced by the influencers.  Dizzy yet?  I am.  But it makes sense.  It really is the chicken or the egg argument.  So you can sit back and ponder it or you can jump in at some point and become a participant.

In his article, Davie attempts to slice and dice rhetoric into digestible portions for us.  I think he largely succeeds in clearing up a few things in my own understanding of rhetoric.  I have never thought of rhetoric as a "response" unless it was, for example, a letter to the editor.  Obviously a letter to the editor is responding either to something written in the paper or to a reaction to something experienced by the writer.  But what rhetorical response brings about a Facebook post like this:  "Happy Mother's Day everyone!" ?  Of course, now I see that even this post is a response to something.  Perhaps this person was prompted by her compulsion to post something every hour on Facebook (she does).  Or perhaps it was a response to the genuine need to tell every mother that she knew that she is thinking of them on their special day.  Perhaps she did it out of some sort of duty.  Who cares?  The point is that there were stimuli that prompted her to enter that particular rhetorical situation.  And there were some that chose to jump in and engage her in her tiny discourse community.  Therefore, her rhetoric became part of some other person's stimuli.  Even my cynical "aw jeez, not another Mother's Day Facebook post" that bounced around between my ears for a few seconds became part of the rhetorical situation.

The other fascinating notion was that the audience is always part of the exigence.  In fact, Davie says Bitzer "defines the audience as those who can help resolve the exigence" (266).  If this is true, it is as much up to the audience as the rhetor to define the problem rhetorically.  This blows my mind, since I've always thought of the audience as the passive player in a rhetorical situation.  Sure, I've been taught that the audience is important and that you must consider your audience when crafting speech of any kind.  But I suppose I've never given the audience that much weight. 

So putting this into my own (non-rhetorical) terms, I believe that rhetoric is like a big stew.  As the cook (the rhetor), what you're trying to do is make a stew (a rhetorical situation).  I suppose the exigence is that you're hungry and sushi is out of the question for tonight.  So you add vegetables to water, maybe your favorite stock, stir and wait.  But there's all these constraints you have to consider...like time, how long food takes to cook, how the flavors of the different vegetables affect the flavor of the stock, how the vegetables affect the flavor of the other vegetables and do on.  These constraints affect when you may add different vegetables, how long you must wait until it's done, how much of each to put in, how big the pot must be, what temperature to make your burner, etc.  Then there's the audience to consider.  If I'm making the stew myself, I'm making it with lots of black pepper.  If my wife will be partaking, well let's just say black pepper stays in the spice rack.  Like Davie says, there are constraints on "what a rhetor can add to it" (273).  My "context" is the palate of my wife, which has been defined by the cultural factors that have influenced her life. 

Ultimately what you get, both in stew and in rhetoric, is something that looks nothing like what you put in.  In my case, it probably didn't turn out the way I envisioned it.  I'm not much for following recipes.  But the point is that you do follow something, whether you think about it or not.  All these things influence our rhetoric and our rhetoric, in turn, influences other things.

Rhetoric is a difficult concept to get your arms around, perhaps because of how complex it is.  It really doesn't fit into a neat little box, but seems to expand to the very edges of our understanding of the universe.  Pretty cool stuff.  As I was reading the Davie article last night I stopped periodically to watch the sun go down.  The soft blues, reds and oranges seemed to hang on forever.  I realize that the sun going down isn't rhetorical.  I can't change the fact that it happens by talking about it.  And the sun certainly isn't going to engage me in a rhetorical situation.  But it can influence my rhetoric by filling me with questions, with admiration for nature and beauty, with appreciation for another day in paradise, as it leads me to craft the words you're reading right now.  So I'm going to challenge myself to think about things like the sun, the rotation of the earth and how they all affect my rhetoric as we move through the material in this class.  It's easy to lose sight of it.  But at least for this semester I am going to try to hang on to the who, what, where, when and why questions as long as I can.

Who I Am

I believe I'm still searching for the answer to the question of who I am.  But I suppose I fit into a few neat little categories, the most defining of which lately has been "Dadda."  I have a 15 month-old son named Sawyer, a lovely wife named Sierra and a cat that I can't stand named Samantha.  I live in a condo that I paid way too much for in 2007 in the "new" part of town that most people, including myself, despise.  But it's close to work, at least for now.  I work at Northern Lights as the marketing and web retail guy.  The irony of this is that I don't particularly like the internet, marketing, calendars or cell phones.  But torturing ad reps is pretty fun.  And even though I'm not very good at it, I like designing all the ads and web graphics.

Outside of work I enjoy reading (of course), hiking, running, boating, skiing, blah blah blah.  I know most of you do this too so let's just say I love the outdoors.  I love the smell of pine.  I love being cold and uncomfortable.  I love the feeling of sun burning my skin and the utter exhaustion of pushing my body to its limits.  Of course, nowadays I spend more time with the baby jogger on pavement than on the trails, but Sawyer is getting old enough that I'm looking forward to a summer full of family boating on lakes and long hikes in the mountains with the baby backpack.

My reading lately has mostly been guided by coursework, but in my spare time I'm reading a Shakespeare biography by Bill Bryson and a book of short stories by one of my former writing professors.  I enjoy reading and writing poetry (don't laugh Doug) and write best when I'm describing my experiences.

I still don't know what I'm going to do with an English degree, but the coursework so far has been worth every moment.  I realize that a lot of writing is now being done online instead of in print and I think that's a bit sad.  But I suppose I have to come to terms with it.  I titled my blog "Digitus Rhetoricus" because in the last class I had with Doug we read an article titled "Homo Rhetoricus" and that article stuck with me.  Digitus Rhetoricus kind of reminds me of being at the Museum of the Rockies and staring at one of those name plates and then gazing up at a creature from times past.  At 35 years old I sometimes feel like that creature, as if the world is leaving me behind.  Dinosaurs were unable to adapt, for whatever reason, to the world around them.  Even though I work on computers all day I guess my heart isn't really in it most of the time.  For that reason, I feel like I'm falling behind the blistering pace of technology.  Maybe in this class I can find my motivation, my passion, to plug back in.  Or maybe it will just confirm what I've thought all along - that I'd rather be in a dusty library reading than sitting in front of a computer screen clicking a mouse.

Anyway, here's a picture of my son, who has become the center of my life.  By the way, he doesn't have a cell phone, a computer or an iPad and he seems perfectly happy...

I "went to" a webinar in which they said the three most popular things in social media are:  babies, kittens and puppies.  There you go.  Puppies are next.  Not cats though.  I hate cats.