Embodied Digital Rhetoric

A new embodied digital rhetoric emerges when using nonfiction narratives built in fully immersive virtual reality systems that take advantage of the plasticity of our sensations of presence. The feeling of “being-in-the-world” as described by phenomenologists, including philosophy of mind, film, and virtual reality theorists, is part of the adaptability that humans show in their relationship to technological tools. Andy Clark's “soft selves” and our “plastic presence” merge as the high resolution graphics of the latest virtual reality goggles and robust audio captured at real events tricks our minds into having an embodied connection with the stories portrayed in these new spaces. By putting people into news or documentary pieces on scene as themselves, opportunities for persuasive and effective rhetoric arise. This chapter cites theory, psychology and virtual reality research as well as the author's specific case studies to detail the potential for this new embodied digital rhetoric that allows us to pass through the screen and become present as witnesses to a nonfiction story.

Digital and Global Literacies in Networked Communities

This chapter explores how the concept of literacy, digital literacy, and global literacy is shifting; how technologies (YouTube, Facebook, Skype, blogs, vlogs, and Google Hangouts) and digital literacies facilitate cross-cultural and intercultural communication and global cultural understandings; how technologies engage global citizens to share, collaborate, cooperate, and create their narratives; and how people become able to address local and global socio-cultural and political issues through various global digital engagements. Finally, this chapter investigates how knowledge is produced, disseminated, and consumed across global cultures in digital contexts.

On the Condition of Anonymity

The ambiguity of identity in disembodied communities poses unique challenges in the flow of digital rhetoric. Online anonymity can lead to disinhibition, enabling the practice of trolling: the effort to derail discussion for attention, mischief, and abuse. This chapter examines this phenomenon in various social media contexts, exploring effective practices in recognizing and harnessing trolling.

A Match Made in “Outer Heaven:”

The stealth-action videogame Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots features the tired heroics of Solid Snake (also known as Old Snake), a retired, legendary soldier whose services are demanded one last time by a world in perpetual war. This epic game, containing almost ten hours of cutscenes alone, delineates the consequences not only of nuclear proliferation, but of mass (re)production in a digital age. In this fourth and final entry in the Solid Snake saga the two go hand-in-hand: a nuclear age exacerbated by advanced technology, advanced technology proliferated under the banner of a post-Cold War war economy. In this chapter, Kenneth Burke's rhetoric of rebirth and Slavoj Žižek's ideological criticism, along with several ludological frameworks, are adopted to show how various multiliteracies can be unearthed from this artifact of digital rhetoric. The chapter closes with implications for digital rhetoric studies.

Toward an Algorithmic Rhetoric

Insofar as algorithms are digital problem-solving operations that follow a set of rules or processes to arrive at a result, they are constrained by the rules that determine their parameters for operating. While an algorithm can only operate according to its instructions, however, the potential rules that might govern an algorithm are inexhaustible. An algorithm's design thus makes rhetorical choices that privilege the importance of some information or desired outcomes over others. This chapter argues for a way of thinking about algorithmic rhetoric as macro-, meso-, and micro-rhetorical. Along these lines, it would be beneficial to think more about algorithms as digital rhetorics with terrific power to sway what counts as knowledge, truth, and material reality in the everyday lives of people across an astonishing range of global communities in the twenty-first century.

“A Genuine Moment of Liberation for Me:”

This chapter argues that participation in a digital self-presentation has the potential to challenge inscribed approaches to learning and teaching. It draws from a study of preservice teachers at an Australian university, who were invited to create a digital introduction as part of their English teaching method course. Such a task offered students opportunities to experiment with shifting semiotic forms in ways unavailable to written introductions. Students were asked to critically reflect after the presentation on aspects of technology, representation and learning that were brought into focus in and through their presentations. A semiotic analysis offers insights into the potential of multimodality, as the digital introduction pushed the participants out of familiar territory, often producing creative and stimulating texts. Using Kress's concept of synaesthesia, the chapter explores innovations possible in the creation of new possibilities in a multimodal space.

Considering Chronos and Kairos in Digital Media Rhetorics

Any account of the rhetoric of digital spaces should begin not with the provocation that rhetoric is impoverished and requires fresh import to account for new media technologies, but instead with a careful analysis of what is different about how digital technologies afford or constrain certain utterances, interactions, and actions. Only then might one begin to articulate prospects of a digital rhetoric. This chapter examines the importance of time to an understanding the rhetoric of digital spaces. It suggests that rhetorical notions of kairos and chronos provide an important reminder that it is the rhetorical situation, along with rhetorical actors at individual to institutional levels, that construct the discursive spaces within which people participate, even in digitally-mediated environments.

Digital Literacy Instruction in Afghanistan

This chapter uses the American military's purchase of a $5.6 million contract to supply the National Military Academy of Afghanistan with laptop computers as the occasion to investigate the complex and overdetermined intersections of digital, administrative, and literacy technologies. These intersections and the challenges they produced for the author as a Western mentor working with Afghan postsecondary instructors in ESL and digital literacies reveal the problematic homogenizing Western economic and cultural assumptions and the intense naturalization of administrative technologies that accompany the denaturalized use of digital and textual technologies in global contexts. The connections of those challenges to recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition highlight the limitations of that scholarship's conception of political economy in a global digital context and also offers new possibilities for imagining hybrid multilingual digital literacies on a global scale.

Developing Intercultural Competence through Glocal Activity Theory Using the Connect-Exchange Study Abroad App

This chapter lays a theoretical foundation for the development of an emerging model of studying intercultural communication through problem-based study abroad pedagogy. At the center of this model is a new computer tool called the Connect-Exchange App, which is meant to facilitate transactional learning between users with varying cultural backgrounds. To research how different audiences might use the app, the authors draw upon activity theory to guide their iterative design process to facilitate users' deepening glocal, intercultural competence. Developing intercultural competence is a process of iterative experiences connecting, exchanging, and filtering information.

Digital Rhetoric and Globalization

Digital rhetoric has been discussed by many theorists as comprising a marked shift from ancient rhetoric's focus on persuasion. For some of the earlier theorists, digital rhetoric defined a novel relationship between literacy and the mechanics of text as computer-mediated communication and changed relationships between consuming, producing and engaging with discourse as information on a screen. Later digital rhetoricians argue different approaches and definitions that are more inclusive of the different types of discourse facilitated by multimodal, interactive, immersive, and computer-mediated communication as semantic discourse at the interface level and encoded through computer programming language, servers, and networks. This chapter focuses on the different modes of digital rhetoric in the context of globalization through a convergence-continuum model approach. The model presented approaches rhetoric and discourse from various levels as loosely based on the models of activity theory, multimodality intercultural theories of globalization and integrates them into a continuum model ranging from global, public modes to individual, personal digital rhetorical modes and practices. Instead of being prescriptive, this model is descriptive in recognizing the fluid natures of digital rhetorical interactions whereby global and local, public and private, group and individual, production and consumption, human and technological, physical and virtual and other discourse contexts merge.