What is Digital
Rhetoric?
New Genres in New Media
How are conventions for comparatively
well-established
genres like Webpages, PowerPoint Presentations, and
E-mail(1,
2,
3) articulated? How do newer genres relate to
older ones?
How do Vividness and Interactivity correlate
in new media?
A decade of participation in
public and private Virtual
Communities like The
Poetics Listserv (since 1994)
My interest in Political Theater and subversive
discourses of parody and protest
My administrative role in
finding Pedagogical
Applications for blogs and
wikis in the classroom (see the UC
TLtC for more)
THE NEW HETEROGLOSSIA OF BLOGS AND WIKIS
Looking back to the last Information Revolution: Diarists and
Encyclopedists
Revelatory, Chronological,
First-Person Discourse
Collective, Taxonomic,
Omniscient Discourse
Let's assume -- as many theorists of the novel do -- that print
culture facilitated a convergence that resulted in novelistic
discourse.
I would argue that
digital culture is still characterized by a pattern of divergent
evolution with two relatively discrete paths in which the rhetorical
rules are very different.
How is ephemera captured? Is
the Library of Congress keeping up?
Are all cultural artifacts worth preserving? (Consider this typical weblog from another Liz Losh)
Political Blogs: Some Ways to Think about Blogs in Relation to
Traditional
Journalism
1) Scooping: The page with no memory: The
Drudge Report (since 1994 via
eNewsletter) and its breakthrough with the Monica Lewinsky story in
January 1998 (although some
would say that Drudge's 1996 story on Jack Kemp as the Dole running
mate was the defining moment)
Parody imitators like The
Borowitz Report (since 2001)
2) Data Checking:
Conservative blogs and "fact checking" reaches the spotlight on September 2004:
the CBS Documents are interrogated by Buckhead on Free Republic (since
1996) --> then Power Line
(since 2002)
--> then Little
Green Footballs (since 2001)
Analogies could be made to how the open source community debugs code 3) Personalizing:
Is the personal political? Andrew
Sullivan's The Daily Dish (since 2000) Bear flag bloggers and American Digest (since 2003)
-- virtual communities for those homesteading in hostile territory Gender and blogging: Ana Marie
Cox's Wonkette
(since 2003) -- weighing in on subjects like Maureen
Dowd or Craigslist 4) Hyperlinking:
Pointing to Primary Sources: The
Memory
Blog of The
Memory Hole Changing practices in traditional
media as well
