The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric

Jonathan Alexander, Jacqueline Rhodes, Jonathan Alexander, Jacqueline Rhodes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315518473
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This handbook brings together scholars from around the globe who here contribute to our understanding of how digital rhetoric is changing the landscape of writing. Increasingly, all of us must navigate networks of information, compose not just with computers but an array of
mobile devices, increase our technological literacy, and understand the changing dynamics of authoring, writing, reading, and publishing in a world of rich and complex texts. Given such changes, and given the diverse ways in which younger generations of college students are writing, communicating, and designing texts in multimediated, electronic environments, we need to consider how the very act of writing itself is undergoing potentially fundamental changes. These changes are being addressed increasingly by the emerging field of digital rhetoric, a field that
attempts to understand the rhetorical possibilities and affordances of writing, broadly defined, in a wide array of digital environments. Of interest to both researchers and students, this volume provides insights about the fields of rhetoric, writing, composition, digital media, literature, and multimodal studies.

PART I

Cultural and Historical Contexts

1
DIGITAL WRITING MATTERS

What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Digital Writing and Rhetoric?

Dànielle Nicole DeVoss

The Call to Write on the National Day of Writing website (now htt­p:/­/wh­yiw­rit­e.u­s/) reads, in part:

Whether we call it texting, IMing, jotting a note, writing a letter, posting an email, blogging, making a video, building an electronic presentation, composing a memo, keeping a diary, or just pulling together a report, Americans are writing like never before.

Recent research suggests that writing, in its many forms, has become a daily practice for millions of Americans. It may be the quintessential 21st century skill …

The National Council of Teachers of English statement on twenty-first century literacies argues for an expansive and culturally linked notion of literacy, and articulates the roles of digital technologies. The statement describes the skills necessary for twenty-first century readers and writers to cultivate, including:

•managing, analyzing, and synthesizing multiple streams of simultaneous information; and

•creating, critiquing, analyzing, and evaluating multimedia texts.

This chapter is a response to this call to write and recognition of the ways in which writing happens in today’s context, and also hearty support for the NCTE statement. The title of this chapter works two ways: first, as an argument: digital writing matters. Then, second, as a promise: matters of digital writing. My departure point for this chapter is Because Digital Writing Matters, a National Writing Project book that Troy Hicks, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and I published in 2010. In that book, we discussed the ways in which writing changes shape in and across digital spaces, and oriented toward providing teachers, K–12 administrators, and policymakers information about how we can best navigate these shifts. And, frankly, these shifts aren’t particu larly new or surprising; the ways in which we understand writing, and, indeed, literacy itself, are complex, multifaceted, rhizomatic, and organic. Writing grows. Writing shifts. Writing becomes. Writing changes shape. Although the shifts aren’t particularly new and although writing has evolved for as long as we’ve engaged it as a species, what is new are the digital spaces and places where writing happens.

In this chapter, I’ll hone in specifically on three ways in which digital writing matters, and three matters of digital writing: the networked context, collaborative composing spaces and practices, and the ways in which digital writing is policed. The technology in and of itself is hardly a revolution. As scholars including Jim Porter have noted, rather, it is the networked connectivity and its potentials that are perhaps the most revolutionary aspects of digital spaces. Further, digital spaces nurture, facilitate, and often require robust practices of collaboration. And digital writing practices are policed, specifically and especially when considering issues of copyright and multimodal composing. I’ll explore each of these matters, and then share a technopedagogical stance toward these matters in the writing classroom.

Digital Writing in/and the Networked Context

The Networked Context

In the late 1960s, engineers working primarily in governmental and university contexts connected a handful of computers and equipped them to communicate with one another. During the 1970s, the Internet grew and became multifaceted and global. In the 1980s, computers became more widespread; more and more, companies relied on computers across their systems and services. Computer access in colleges and universities spread, and more and more K–12 institutions had a computer in some of the classrooms. For instance, in the school I attended in the mid-1980s, we had one computer in just one classroom shared by sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, that sat in the back of the room, unused the majority of the time. Because we had a Commodore 64 in the home, I knew the basics of using a computer, and figured out how to boot up and play the one game that came with the school’s computer. As far as I remember, that was the only use the computer got in 1984.

In the early 1990s, when the Internet was still text-only and exclusively hierarchical-menu-based, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would eventually become HTML and create an expansion to the Internet; this expansion was the Web (Hafner; Isaacson). By the mid-1990s, Web writers could hyperlink across pages and spaces, and embed images onto the pages they created. URLs became more commonplace than Internet protocols, and Web traffic sped past the activity of the Internet. In the early 2000s, “Web 2.0” emerged, anchored by more social, collaborative, networked approaches to content development and sharing.

To hone in on the networked aspects of digital writing and one particular Web 2.0 space, in July 2009, “Tom” had 264,987,947 friends on MySpace. In October, he had 268,880,678 friends. Tom made almost 4 million friends in less than three months. On MySpace, millions of people embraced the networked capabilities of the Web—posting updates, sharing experiences, adding photos, showing identity affiliations (by connecting with bands, actors, etc.), and more. By January 2012, however, Tom had 11,806,655 friends on MySpace. Tom had lost more than 257 million friends in just over three years; three years of Internet time happens at light speed. During this time, new spaces emerged and invited participation. New digital places were developed and allowed for different kinds of networked experiences. Facebook, during this time, transitioned from a school-specific (Harvard) site, to a national student-oriented site, to an open and public space. In late 2017, Facebook is home to more than 2 billion active users.

Another digital networked space is WordPress, which hosts more than 1.5 million new posts daily. Writers use this space to read, write, post, comment, upload, search, embed video, connect to other media spaces (such as Flickr, Twitter, and Instagram) and more. The first tweet was sent on March 21, 2006. In late 2016, more than 10,000 tweets were sent every second. In an interesting moment of digital–analog convergence, the Library of Congress (LoC) began archiving all public tweets in April 2010. In a white paper released almost three years into the project, the LoC eloquently noted:

As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing and in some cases supplanting letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries … Archiving and preserving outlets such as Twitter will enable future researchers’ access to a fuller picture of today’s cultural norms, dialogue, trends and events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes. (Allen; Library of Congress)

As of late 2016, however, the project was still stalled. Andrew McGill, in an August 2016 article in The Atlantic, asked, “Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress?” The issue isn’t with storing what’s happening across networked, digital spaces. The issue relates to making the cultural ephemera—expressed in more than 500 million public tweets per day—usable, accessible, and understandable. McGill further pointed out that when the LoC began archiving public tweets, only 5 million or so were sent per day, and those were text-only. Twitter today supports the embedding of images and video, and hashtags themselves have emerged as a unique language. Preservation becomes a bigger issue than storing tweets on a server; making this big data accessible requires anchors to cultural norms, historic trends, and complex ways of parsing the data tweets contain.

Another networked space that has truly transformed the media landscape is YouTube, which launched in 2005. Traditionally, with conventional media, users are viewers. The majority of people who watch movies, watch television, and listen to radio do so in a fairly passive, consumerist role. With networked, digital media, however, users engage their roles in broad ways— consuming, producing, remixing, sharing, revising, and more (Dubisar and Palmeri; Fulwiler and Middleton; Halbritter; Morain and Swarts; Verzosa Hurley and Kimme Hea). On YouTube, users upload 24 hours of video every minute.

Digital is networked, and this network connectivity can, potentially, have a big impact on our classrooms. Jeff Grabill—a rhetoric and writing studies scholar, business owner, digital writing innovator, and software developer—has argued: “I just happen to be a writing teacher interested in the digital at the greatest moment in human history to be interested in both writing and the digital.” Grabill notes that the “dramatic and revolutionary transformation in our lives is the network. It’s the combination of computing and networking that allow us to write in radically new ways.”

Techno-pedagogy for the Networked Context

Networks and certainly social networks span analog and digital spaces, the seemingly ephemeral and the material, the personal and the professional, and other boundaries. Networks are contextual, and “local” in whatever ways we might identify and orient toward locality across spaces. In an upper-level writing course offered in our Professional Writing program at Michigan State University, we invite students to deeply engage and robustly analyze networks. Recently, for instance, one student pursued a project framed by her research question: How are nonprofits in the Lansing area networked? And what do those networks mean? She engaged in mapping activities, starting by mapping organizational websites and then interviewing organizational leaders, focusing on twelve area nonprofits. Her maps of both the digital and physical networks revealed a common thread: the organizations most linked to others and in the middle of the network maps were those that seemed to have the most reach in the area, and the most impact on their communities. Although her results aren’t necessarily solid quantitatively, the project itself was a fascinating one, and models for us approaches through which we might invite students to analyze how networks function, and, more importantly, what networks do.

Digital Writing and Collaboration

The Collaborative Context

These three matters of digital writing are certainly not discrete; rather, they are entwined in complex ways. Part of the networked nature of digital writing discussed above is certainly the ways in which digital writing fosters—and often demands—collaboration. For instance, on the cheezburger network, thousands of users, on a daily basis, share, caption, tag, and comment on photos of cats. To maintain a feline focus, hundreds of users collaboratively drafted, crafted, edited, and published a complete translation of the King James Bible in “lolcat,” or Kitty Pidgin English. Genesis 1, verses 1 through 3 read:

1Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.

2Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.

3At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz. An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin. An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1 (“LOLCat Bible Translation Project”)

Apparently few things can leverage and mobilize the networked, collaborative aspects of digital space like cats can.

To turn toward a topic closer to home for rhetoric and writing studies scholars, on fan­cti­on.­net­, just one of thousands of fan fiction communities, writers remix, revise, reread, reinterpret, and collaboratively create, edit, and generate fan fiction—work that takes characters, themes, and chunks from existing literature and reshapes it. Pride and Prejudice, for instance, has more than 4,000 available riffs on fan­fic­tio­n.n­et. However, the most popular body of literature to rethink and revise is that of Harry Potter. More than 763,000 original fanfiction works have been shared on fan­fic­tio­n.n­et as of April 2017, which is an increase of more than 11,000 writings since October 2016. This community of writers is inspired by the site’s tagline: “unleash your imagination,” and collaboration is a key composing convention in this particular community. Pieces are commented on in-process; drafts are shared online—under and across the site; editorial feedback gives shape to revisions; pieces are co-created by multiple writers.

An argument that colleagues and I made awhile back is that collaboration—in the many different ways of sharing—is perhaps the most significant impact of computer technologies on the contexts and practices of writing (WIDE Research Center Collective). Computers themselves are just machines. They’re just tools. When we connect them, and when we create and use the interfaces to make meaning together and share ideas across distances—that’s the computer revolution.

Techno-pedagogy for the Collaborative Context

Shared content creation in collaborative, synchronous spaces is a context in which our students will create, share, revise, and produce text. In 2013, I polled students in an introductory Professional Writing course regarding their familiarity with Google Docs. Many of the students hadn’t used Google Docs, or hadn’t used it extensively. I created a Google Doc before class and connected students to it, and in class we filled in a grid with three columns together. The columns were: your name, a reason to use Google Docs, a reason not to use Google Docs. There were a handful of surprised murmurs as we each watched and contributed to the development of the doc. Together, we generated a smart set of approaches for when to leverage the networked, collaborative power of Google Docs, but also when such a tool may not be an appropriate composing route.

More recently, I observed a colleague...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Digital Writing and Rhetoric?
• Part I Cultural and Historical Contexts
• Part II Beyond Writing
• Part III Being Rhetorical and Digital
• Part IV Selves and Subjectivities
• Part V Regulation and Control
• Part VI Multimodality, Transmediation, and Participatory Cultures
• Part VII The Politics and Economics of Digital Writing and Rhetoric
• Index