My review of Post-Digital Rhetoric and the New Aesthetic by Justin Hodgson is now available. You can access it through the menu or here. My intended journal is Kairos. The password to enter is the same that we use to access our class schedule. If you have questions let me know. ~Brian
*Additional note. You should be able to access this without signing up for anything. If you are not able to let me know an I’ll fix the link. Ideally I would have published and embedded the map so it was interactive on the blog…but I didn’t want to jeopardize the opportunity to publish on Kairos or potentially elsewhere.
Hi everyone. I wanted to post a quick note of appreciation to everyone for the thoughtful engagement with both the Hodgson piece and with the writer/designer text. Everyone found/created such great examples, stepping into the conducer roles with text and analysis shared with with class. I encourage you to take the time to explore the examples shared, they are well worth the experience for helping the shape our understanding of remix and digital rhetoric as a cultural shift from the binary of producer and consumer to the hybrid…continuum between those poles.
I did want to share one more find that I think adds to the writer/designer material. For me it helped to articulate the process of composing visuals that have impact. He touches on the idea of audience and our need to step out of our ‘writer’ perspective and into the ‘reader’ perspective as we are engaging in the process.
Again, thank you for your thoughtful posts this week. I look forward to the discussions during the rest of the week.
Here is an experiment with animated doodle software. I’ve wanted to try this form of presentation and thought this was a good opportunity. Hope you enjoy.
[re] ⪫ once more media ⪪ medium [tion] ⪫ noun in action
medium defined
means and material for communicating
substance an organism lives in or is cultured in
person communicating between living and dead
balance between extremes
SO…
medium is the “how” of communication. New means and materials are compared with the previous versions. And this is the idea expressed with remediation. We make comparisons in part because the old is familiar. We have collective memories of these ex-mediations. If something is too new, if forces us to examine the medium and we can miss the message. It makes the communication opaque rather than transparent.
a nod to writer/designerby Ball, Sheppard, and Arola
and…
medium implies environments. While certainly we now speak of digital spaces and environments that we interact in. If we appropriate the word cultured in a different use, we see that media and communication are the vehicles for culturing (teaching) our children about who they are within the collective of humanity. We live within mediums, now and since we first made attempts to transplant an idea from one person to another. Since we first made attempts to communicate.
and…
mediums connect past and present. We honor our ancestry, our legacy, our memory. Remediation is seen as some as replacement of the past, but if extreme, it is evolution from what we were to what we will be. More though we try to revivify what is dying or dead. We breath life into our cultural heritage, bring relevancy to our experiences and lives.
and…
medium is desirable as we oscillate between extremes, navigating the rivers of social interaction and relationships. We learn through trial and error, by compare and contrast, by categorizing things as similar and different. We learn by exploring both sides of a thing. Progress, though is more often gained by cooperation and collaboration. We move forward by finding a middle way.
[re]mediation then is the use available means and materials to communicate what is valuable to our lives, and connect who we are now with who we were, all while balancing the extremes so that we can be clear in what we are trying to express.
another lens…
remediation can also mean cure…heal…reform…improve
remediation restores something and makes it better. While we could take a view that it is simply to improve the means and materials we use in communication, I don’t think so.
We have a need to connect with others and enhance our sense of belonging. We also need to find meaning in our lives. Our greatest endeavors as humans have been to meet these needs. Remediation then is our continued and collective work to connect in a meaningful way. It is an intervention to the process of division and disconnection, something that seems timely.
The interplay of immediacy and hypermediacy as examined by Bolter and Grusin’s in the initial part of Remediation provides a call for mediation as a balance between the extremes of what can become deceptive immediacy or an unconscious suspension of disbelief, and the overwhelming deluge of stimuli that can drown us. The call though is really for [re]mediation, meaning that it must recur. It is an act of centering each time we catch ourselves (individually or collectively) toward extremes.
so…
The ideal goal is not to be perfectly balanced if we think of balance as a static point, as we often do. Think more of the idea of balanced in motion.
The ideal is to become experts in intentionally shifting the balance of extremes to create a particular effect. Balancing immediacy and hypermediacy.
We must become the practitioners of Mediated Rhetoric. To persuade yes, but also to teach. To highlight and obscure as needed to emphasize and enhance our connection. To foster a meaningful life. To reunite us with our memory. To connect us to our humanity.
Narrative is our path through experience. Paths of all kinds are naturalized but not natural. Nature, like experience, is temporary. Our paths, our stories, our language – so necessary to make sense of our lives – are also temporary.
Rhetoric practices, from original oral traditions to the inscriptive interlude to the current digital discourse, have continued to be the basis of the way we transfer ideas from person to person. Collin Brooke posited an update to the classic canons of rhetoric to align better with the advances in technology and the way this influences our interactions.
Brooke has exchanged invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery for proairesis {preference would have worked and remained consistent with his alliteration, but maybe he was giving a respectful nod to the Ancients} pattern, perspective, persistence, and performance.
Rhetoric practice, while it does create, also serves to manage and contain. This is an important point regarding our digital communication. In many ways, rhetoric has become a content management system, and a movement away from the Cartesian and mechanization of human experience that coincided with the rise of written communication and the obsession with objectivity seen in scientific inquiry.
So dominating have the ideas of the past 500 years been that any dissent or dissoi logoi put into practice are summarily squashed. It has left us wandering around blind, or if not blind then seeing only what we want to see, in a confirmation bias overdosed state with our head lolling to the side and drool pooling at our feet.
My eyes are open…and I see exactly what I expect to see.
The return to more oral and classic ideas allows for a resurgence of Romanticism and Gestalt visions where the whole is greater than the parts or at least we shouldn’t ignore the forest because we are focused on a tree. It allows for a remixing of ideas and parts to provide novel perspectives. This though is resisted by those clinging to the comfort provided by the Cartesian compartmentalizing of our human experiences. There is a fear in loss of ownership and authorship proposed by the combining of components from different sources. But the movement toward collective and crowdsourced forms of communication seems akin to the amphitheaters of old, or speeches looked upon with reverence from suffragist and civil rights movements that made the streets, memorials, and public squares the venues for change.
Change is a collective practice and rhetoric is a vehicle. I wonder if we will bear witness to the intersection of the three principle kinds of public speech in the digital realm: Speech that makes judgment about the past, speech that strengthens our beliefs or enhances our collective memories, and speech that moves us toward future action. The flexibility of rhetoric, especially digital rhetoric, would seem poised to shoulder such devoirs. Giambattista Vico hinted at such when he discussed how rhetoric embraces probability and argument, which can lead to responsible civic action.
For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best…
I. A. Richards identifies how we derive meaning by relating the present to the past. Memory then, as a classic canon is not to be easily dismissed, though it seems to often occur. Mnemosyne’s gift should not be discarded or seen as a binary of either present or absent. Brooke in his idea of memory as persistence honors Mnemosyne and how memory is interactive and gives shape and meaning to rhetoric practice because it allows us to [re]collect and [re]link our experiences.
Rhetoric is the means by which we narrate our lives and make sense of our lives. Rhetoric is the means for connecting with others. Rhetoric is the means for revealing meaning.
Creating Dissonance 
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