The Multimediated Rhetoric of the Internet

Digital Fusion

Carolyn Handa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136257681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Rhetoric
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This project is a critical, rhetorical study of the digital text we call the Internet, in particular the style and figurative surface of its many pages as well as the conceptual, design patterns structuring the content of those same pages. Handa argues that as our lives become increasingly digital, we must consider rhetoric applicable to more than just printed text or to images. Digital analysis demands our acknowledgement of digital fusion, a true merging of analytic skills in many media and dimensions. CDs, DVDs, and anInternet increasingly capable of streaming audio and video prove that literacy today means more than it used to, namely the ability to understand information, however presented. Handa considers pedagogy, professional writing, hypertext theory, rhetorical studies, and composition studies, moving analysis beyond merely "using" the web towards "thinking" rhetorically about its construction and its impact on culture. This book shows how analyzing the web rhetorically helps us to understand the inescapable fact that culture is reflected through all media fused within the parameters of digital technology.

1 How the Digital is Rhetorical, Cognitive, and Cultural

In the next ten years, we will probably have to confront serious challenges to our reception and conception of text.

~ Stuart Moulthrop

If our definition of text expands to include electronic communication, then we will have to give graphics a prominent place in that definition.

~ Jay Bolter

Well over a decade ago, I noted that when my youngest relatives reached college, their generation would have never known a world without the Internet, would never have lived in a household lacking access to the Web, and would never have experienced text as completely independent of images. Many of us saw the digital world forming; I was hardly alone or psychic in anticipating our current situation. Young adults, teens, and children today, collectively designated the Net Generation a.k.a. Millennialists, think differently from previous generations and rely automatically on digital technology instead of paper.¹ Preparing for a recent trip a few years back, I remarked to a niece that I would be gathering maps and guide books from the Automobile Association. I’ve always done so and done so automatically. My then 17-year-old traveling companion looked perplexed. She simply said: “I’m just going to borrow Dad’s GPS.” Hmmmm. My turn: befuddlement. No paper? No maps? Well actually, why would I or anyone, for that matter, want paper maps that never seem to fold correctly, that take another person to read them while the driver tries to follow verbal directions? Despite my being adept with technology, that is, using email, texting, managing to figure out and use photographic software, shopping online, incorporating technology into my teaching, carrying a laptop and cell phone whenever I travel, and considering myself digitally sophisticated compared to most baby-boomers my age, I still distinguish between text and the technological or the digital, and I automatically choose text. Despite the ubiquitous presence of a popularized Web that has instigated a visual and aural proliferation of digital texts embedded with graphics, sound, and often video, my mind still persists in maintaining this unfortunate division.

Reading a codex book (i.e. one with paper pages that turn and are numbered sequentially) supports a linear logic and an ordered movement from one page to the next. The codex book may possibly contain illustrations, but these illustrations are usually ancillary to the book’s main points and do not hinder the linear movement. While we can skip around in a codex book, perhaps checking the “Works Cited” page before starting the book or reading a middle chapter first, or skimming a few later pages, we understand the author’s organizational principle: to state a concept or point that is developed, elaborated on, and supported as the book progresses through its sequentially numbered pages and chapters. The fundamental ordering principle is linear and progressive.

Among some groups of scholars, designers, and artists, however, the Web has caused a growing sense that we need to reconsider the shape of text now and in the future, and develop the skills we will need in order to understand the apparently new, complex rhetoric shaping such texts. They reason that digital texts (i.e. text appearing in digitized form on a computer screen in the form of CD-ROMs or Web pages) may be, but usually are not, numbered sequentially and support a non-linear textual movement from any one link or unit to any other. In this type of text, illustrations, graphics, and colors are givens. Any simple black and white text seems odd. And while we can move linearly through a digital text, going from one screen to the next and ignoring intervening links or highlighted hot spots, we understand the author’s premise here is to encourage readers to choose links in a random, personally chosen order rather than an authorially dictated pattern.

We can take as an example one of the online articles I quote from a few pages below. When I download Doug Brent’s hypertext article “Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy” for offline reading, I get a folder full of .htm files. The files are ordered alphabetically, but reading them alphabetically may be the least coherent way to figure out the article’s point—although it is definitely one way of proceeding. A better bet is to find the one page with the article’s abstract, then its first or primary page, and to proceed in any order from there. The fundamental ordering principle for this hypertext is associative—or in rhetorical terms—asyndetic. For such multimediated digital texts, traditional notions of reading and conceiving would seem to be seriously challenged, as Stuart Moulthrop suggested in 1991 (255).

Even if we accept this challenge then redefine what we mean by “text” in order to accommodate digital text, we will need to revise our concept of rhetoric, too. Jay Bolter, calling the Web a vast global hypertext with millions of readers, has noted that electronic communication, hypertext in particular with its defining form, the Web site, threatens the modern definition of verbal rhetoric, primarily because this definition has no place for visual elements. Our definition of text, he says, must expand today to allow images and alternative forms of persuasion to figure more prominently in that definition (“Hypertext and the Question of Visual Literacy,” 7). More recently (2007) Barbara Warnick argues that “the use of rhetoric in new media environments has been understudied by scholars and critics of rhetoric. The need for more research and theory in this area is great” (Rhetoric Online, 13). Warnick quotes Gunther Kress, who argues that today’s modes of oral and written communication have been destabilized by today’s multimediated texts, so much so that we urgently need tools and theories to aid in analyzing these hybrid forms (ibid.).

DIGITAL RHETORIC

The rhetorical tradition that began in Greece applied more to oral presentations than to textual artifacts. Greek citizens needed to arrange their words in a manner understandable to any listeners who might hear such words whenever the citizens spoke publicly.² Currently, rhetoric, while still associated with the spoken word, has come to be considered predominantly as a language art and a discipline classified as part of the humanities and the communications fields. While we study its effects on both the spoken and written word as an art of presentation and arrangement, we most often use printed transcripts of those words for such scrutiny, or we examine documents written without any intent to be presented orally. Traditional views of rhetoric have made little provision for visual persuasion.

Henrietta Nickels Shirk understood Bolter’s concept of broadening our understanding of “rhetoric” nearly two decades ago when she wrote that “[f]rom the composing perspective, hypertext authors must be alert to two new ways of thinking about the presentation of information.… [T]hese new ways … actually relate to broad areas of study and trends that have long been of concern to students of composition studies who have been interested in metaphorical theory and cognitive science [my emphases] as these fields relate to the creation of texts” (181, 182).

Digital rhetoric is simply (or maybe not so simply) traditional rhetoric applied visually as well as textually. It is not another form of rhetoric. We do not switch from digital to traditional rhetoric. All of the components we are accustomed to discussing in traditional rhetoric, especially having to do with style and arrangement for the purposes of conducting logical, discursive, persuasive arguments, are elements that can occur visually. Digital rhetoric—the rhetoric that covers multimediated documents—builds on, uses the same cues as, already existing forms of traditional rhetoric.

“Digital rhetoric”, as I use the term in this book, is not purely visual rhetoric and differs from verbal rhetoric, too: digital rhetoric includes visual elements—be they complete images, graphic elements, or colors—as equal to and fused with words, phrases, and sentences, in this online art of arrangement for the presentation of a “self” in civic or public discourse. Digital rhetoric differs from purely verbal rhetoric because it considers the simultaneous hybridity of digital text, that is, both the visual and verbal elements working together—fused, in other words—to convey a certain purpose. Digital rhetoric, unlike verbal rhetoric, does not ignore one of these two elements or privilege one over the other.

For those of us immersed in the study of digital rhetoric, claiming that written or spoken words and images share the same rhetoric, or using a term like “visual rhetoric”, is commonplace. For rhetoricians accustomed to studying classical argumentation and persuasion in terms of the written or spoken word, however, including images in such study or talking about “digital rhetoric” could seem questionable. For these verbally based scholars, images and sounds hardly seem to share the same rhetorical parentage as words. And if we are, furthermore, claiming that images in the hypertextual environment of the Web possess rhetorical characteristics, we run up against those who, while supporting the revolutionary possibilities of the Web for reading and writing, still feel extreme ambivalence when considering hypertext’s abilities to deliver one of the main staples of traditional rhetoric: the discursive argument. Doug Brent reflects, “[T]here are very good arguments to be made that hypertext, which privileges infinite hypotaxis [clauses in subordinate or dependent relationships] rather than parataxis [clauses in coordinate or independent relationships], can paralyse the ability of rhetoric to explore important questions of civil society through the creation and interpretation of rigorous arguments.”³

Not solely logos or argumentation, however, rhetoric is also the art of persuading and representing the self in order to make that persuasion more effectively. In other words, ethos and pathos. Digital rhetoric makes easier our ability to apply the rhetorical triangle’s three components—ethos, pathos, and logos—because we are actually able to see elements such as ethos and pathos at work, thus enhancing our critical, analytic ability to decide how effectively all three are working together in order to make an online text’s case. Scholars like David Kaufer and Brian Butler have moved beyond the verbal alone to explore the connection between rhetoric and design elements in their two different volumes. Rhetoric and the Arts of Design identifies rhetoric as a relative of the design arts such as architecture, engineering, and graphics. Designing Interactive Worlds with Words describes a representational theory of composition that “envisions texts not as words and clauses forming sentences and higher-level linguistic units but rather as words, forming into design elements stimulating imagery-rich narrative worlds and invitations for readers to interact with them.” This theory, they explain, “will become increasingly important in defining writing as the multimedia revolution follows its course” (xix).

To reiterate: before the Web and online documents became commonplace, most academic texts were only, and thus automatically, considered primarily as verbal constructs. Some rare exceptions, however, have always been technical, scientific, and fine arts texts. The nature of these disciplines dictates that their texts could not and still cannot exclude images as they convey their meanings. Jay Lemke says about the discipline of science: “Science is not done, is not communicated, through verbal language alone. It cannot be. The ‘concepts’ of science are not solely verbal concepts, though they have verbal components. They are semiotic hybrids, simultaneously and essentially verbal, mathematical, visual-graphical, and actional-operational” (“Multiplying,” 87). Kathryn Northcut’s recent work in technical writing studies the ways images work in popular scientific texts to draw a lay audience into a scientific argument. If, as Northcut argues, scientific illustrations help a lay audience better understand scientific arguments, then the images are working along with the texts to persuade and convince because without these illustrations, the texts would be far less likely to make their cases.

So much for the lay audience and popular scientific texts. What about scientists and the texts they write specifically for their fellow researchers? As Lemke argues above, scientific texts cannot rely on words alone because scientific texts are semiotic hybrids. Scientific research depends on illustrations—charts, schematic representations, tables, graphs, and photographic images of the subject—to make a point and prove that the research is both valid and replicable. We can use, as an example, a piece by Michael J. Weiser, Chad D. Foradori, and Robert J. Handa discussing estrogen receptor systems in the brain. The article distinguishes between two systems, Estrogen Receptor alpha and Estrogen Receptor beta, in order to make the case that the less researched beta system, unlike the alpha system, helps modulate some non-reproductive neurobiological systems. The figures and tables in this piece offer visual proof for the authors’ claims, and since this piece partly discusses differences between two systems, it presents visual evidence in comparative schematic representations and tables as well as specific visual explanations in numeric form via tables to back up textual statements about differences. The images here are not “mere” illustrations but are necessary visual evidence crucial to the essay’s argument.

Few other non-technical, non-scientific texts, however, especially in the language arts, have relied to any considerable degree on images, charts, or other graphics to make their arguments. In fact, the commonplace privileging of text over image prompted a number of scholars to argue for the legitimacy of the image as a cognitive tool.⁴ And even if open to the possibility of visual argumentation, scholars generally seem to consider either text or image as a viable mode of argumentation, but not both together, much less both combined in the hypertextual format that has erupted in the shape of the World Wide Web. J. Anthony Blair, for instance, allows that philosophically “[t]here seems to be no reason in principle for thinking there cannot be visual arguments” (26). Blair ultimately concludes, however, that “the great advantages of visual argument, namely its power and its suggestiveness, are gained at the loss of clarity and precision, which may not always be a price worth paying” (39). While I might consider Blair’s argument applicable to hypertext and strictly visual arguments, I think we can make a case for fused texts—those containing both text and images—as containing symbiotic elements that are all necessary for establishing and supporting a strong, persuasive, rhetorically sophisticated claim.

If we are to study the rhetoric of the World Wide Web seriously, we must expand our notion of text to include images and to concede that images and graphic elements are fundamentally rhetorical. For those texts such as Web pages, we must realize the degree to which the more effective texts rely on a rhetorical fusion of verbal and visual elements. Such an expanded definition of rhetoric will not only draw on our knowledge and practices as textual scholars. It will also clarify and identify how that knowledge and those practices have been refashioned. Reconceiving our notions of text cannot mean in any way that we discard traditional notions of print literacy. It means, rather, that we attempt to recognize in other forms those traditional textual modes of organizing information and reapply them—in this case, visually. We must come to understand that images speak rhetorically.

COGNITION, CULTURE, AND THE DIGITAL

We need to disestablish the view of cognition as dominantly and aggressively linguistic.

~ Barbara Stafford

[T]he ways we have of doing things, the ways that seem to us to be natural and inevitable or simply the consequences of the interaction of human nature with the demands of a given task, are in fact historically contingent.

~ Edwin Hutchins

In fact, because our cognitive acts—thinking, acting, writing—are historically contingent, escaping centuries of culturally honed cognitive skills seems unlikely: “[H]uman cognition is always situated in a complex socio-cultural world and cannot be unaffected by it” (Hutchins, xiii). Rhetoric’s modes and figures, whether we consciously identify them as such or not, permeate our culture, influencing the ways we come to shape, understand, and convey information. We may possess different levels of skills when calling on rhetoric as a composing tool, but rhetorical elements surround us because we are bombarded by a plethora of media and people attempting to persuade us and to convey information. Even basic writers, often erroneously presumed to lack any knowledge of rhetorical skills, are not clueless—just by virtue of being alert, functioning, intelligent members of a culture and society. They listen to their iPods and music CDs, they watch television and YouTube, they read newspapers either online or offline, they attend churches where they hear rhetorically crafted sermons. They have heard, then—and have subconsciously been affected by—anaphora, or extended repetition; they understand how to classify; they have seen and heard chiasmus whether they recognize its pattern as a rhetorical figure or not. They are part of a rhetorical culture, part of the number of its members who have attempted to communicate throughout history. “A good part of what any perso...