digital rhetoric – The Secret Garden

The concept of collaboration is an interesting one. We collaborate in the workplace, in academia, and in our personal lives. This post is meant to reflect on some of our reading from this week that discusses the evolution of collaborative articles and information through sites like Wikipedia as written by Tom Roston and Special Containment Procedures/Secure, Contain, Protect (SCPs) as discussed in the Daily Dot. As a student, I find Wikipedia to be an amazing source for other sources, and it’s a shame that I can’t ever use the site itself as a credible source. Sometimes I wish I could just use it instead, but it works well for finding references that I can cite. Reading Roston’s article and learning about Nupedia made me understand exactly why Wikipedia has been successful. It thrives on collaboration and ease of access, but why does this matter? What makes it bad?

The credibility goes way down which is exactly what Nupedia was working against with their format and peer review process. But on the bright side, Wikiepedia’s process has become more rigorous and reviewed. When in doubt, just using it as a base resource for finding citable articles and other links to sources makes for a great start on any project. The key is fact checking!

Regardless, Wikipedia is now a cornerstone of life online. How many wives did King Henry VIII have? Where does the word “fuck” come from? Why did people wear bearskin shoes? Wikipedia has all the answers.
Tom Roston, “An Oral History of Wikipedia, the Web’s Encyclopedia”

This brings me to think about how we collaborate with others in so many ways. Do we know how credible they are? Do we believe them? Why? Usually, we automatically believe people that we feel we can trust. If we believe strangers, they probably talk with a well-established understanding of rhetoric and feel credible and logical. There’s a sense of community in learning from each other and expanding our minds. We build cultures this way and establish the status quo. People have faith in something or someone as a result of convincing stories and emotional connections. Everything that we know, every thought that we have – each bit of information in our minds has differing origins and have been placed in our mind through the collaboration of life.

And as a result, digital rhetoric has huge importance on our trust when we read online. We as readers love it if we can see the sources, read the technical language, and comprehend the information that is being provided. It’s even better if it’s presented in a way that feels credible with multiple perspectives and the insight of others! Collaboration is a tool that we’re meant to use to help us get to where we need to be, not a crutch to rely on, and this is why things like Wikipedia and SCPs have success.

The word “rhetoric” normally has a negative connotation, as pointed out by the sections we read this week that were created by Elizabeth Losh and a few others. Understanding Rhetoric was written in comic format to showcase the use of visual elements and the way they’re interpreted. Rhetoric as a word “has connotations of duplicity, sneakiness, and even outright deception,” but why? Our society has shaped the word to be this way. It began as a form of facilitating better communication and understanding persuasive speech/language. According to Aristotle, rhetoric is about understanding one another as a result of effective communication, not undermining or demeaning a person’s thought or idea. This translates into the idea of digital rhetoric, but why is “rhetoric” further broken into different concepts? Digital, visual, verbal, where do they end? Like everything else, we have to take the pieces of something bigger and examine them individually to gain a better understanding.

I really liked reading through the excerpt we read of one of Losh’s longer works, “Hacking Aristotle: What Is Digital Rhetoric?” I laughed a bit at the part where she discusses an argument that Nancy Kaplan makes about traditional readers leaving no trace of themselves in the works they read. This means no dog-eared pages, no notes in the margins, no highlighted words or moving statements — traditional readers leave the works blank to remain “anonymous.” Now, I laughed because I’m one of those people. I wrestle with wanting to highlight and write in the margins all the time. I don’t know, maybe there’s something about the way a story tells itself without my input that I love. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve comfortably highlighted in…(maybe) 2 non-academic books, and I’d say that’s a sign of growth.

Losh goes on to say, “Unlike a reader acting appropriately and nondestructively with the pages of a traditional book, digital readers now leave many traces in their online viewing habits.” And you know what? She’s right. We no longer interact with texts in the same way, not even when we read on our Kindles or iPads. Everything is translated digitally, from how long we spend on a single page to the words we highlight, it’s all there.

“Although ‘rhetoric’ is often equated with persuasive discourse, the term can also be defined to focus on the timing of a given message and how the language of that message may be shaped by specific contexts and opportunities for social change, which are located in time and space, as well as politics and culture.”
Elizabeth Losh, “Hacking Aristotle: What Is Digital Rhetoric?”

In understanding the difference between digital and physical texts, we have to realize that the rhetoric varies, too. This is where Losh’s comic illustrations came in handy. There are so many great representations of visual rhetoric like cropped images that only reveal certain information, lines in horizontal or diagonal directions on infographics or in comics, and textbooks with educational charts or images. What has our culture taught us about interpreting photos? Does closeness equate to intimacy? Do the colors have variations in meanings from culture to culture? These are a few questions to keep in mind when examining digital rhetoric.

When we speak, whether we realize it or not, we are actively using the elements of rhetoric to better communicate with our listener(s). Ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos are pieces to the puzzle that we’re trying to fit together perfectly to be better understood — even if we choose to overlook the fancy names and history of rhetoric, we still want to sound credible, logical, and emotionally connected when we speak at the right time. It’s undeniable that we have to be even more cautious about what we say and put out digitally as the interpretations are endless. Different cultures, regions, and people will read what you put out there from their personal perspective, and that’s why it’s important to keep your audience and intention in mind.