SEPTEMBER 24, 2018 (Dennis Baron and Anne Wysocki)

September 24, 2018 BLOG POST
"From Pencils to Pixels" By Dennis Baron
"Blinded by the Letter" By Anne Wysocki and Johndon Johnson-Eilola

Baron opens his essay by sharing a personal anecdote about the transition of writing to typing and typing back to writing. He explained that he found the process of hand-writing a memo difficult in light of the fact that it was clunky and somewhat less "flexible" than digitized text. This has several alarming implications for me as a reader because I can relate with that to some extent.

He continues by writing about how literacy technology "...creat[es] new forms and new possibilities for communication" (16). I'm inclined to agree with him that literacy is always changing, as it's a dynamic process. However, I want to examine what dangers lurk behind us when we begin depending on technologies that are impossibly fraudulent at times. The potential for fraud, differentiating it from the truth, and generally the ill-will of people who have reigns on this technology are terrifying to consider, especially when the globe is exposed to this information, our children mainly, and its influence is all to powerful.

Perhaps that's dramatic, but my concern must seem reasonable. Consider what Jay said in his comment on my last post. He wrote, "Is it still writing if I use my computer?" Fair question, and one that warrants the logic of semantics when it comes to the composition process. How have we come to think about writing? Is it fair to call it "writing" anymore? Perhaps "typing" is a term we could better substitute in for it's ancestor, "writing."

But back to what I was discussing before, the potential for fraud. Baron's essay seems to suggest that with each development, the potential is greater and greater. And it slowly becomes a philosophical question: what is the bloody truth? Baron writes, "Not only must the new technology be accessible and useful, it must demonstrate its trustworthiness as well. So procedures for authentication and reliability must be developed before the new technology becomes fully accepted” (17). A new technology must demonstrate its trustworthiness because people are right to fear fraudulence through technologies they don't understand. Additionally, I run to a metaphor. Consider this digital literacy business, and think of it as a pond, a pond filled with alligators. The alligators represent fraud, and let me just say, the pond grows in size every time a new digital techology is available to the massive population of the globe. And with the growth of the pond comes more alligators, until we have a situation that sounds familiar, hackers, image fraud, the dark web, etc. And I want to take a moment to acknowledge the limitations of what I understand about this, but the web is a dangerous place, and literacy, by Wysocki's terms, is "...a cloud of sometimes contradictory nexus points among different positions. Literacy can be seen as not a skill, but a process of situating and resituating representations in social spaces” (367). It seems to me that literacy is somewhat unstable by Wysocki's terms, perhaps it's the word "contradictory" that makes me skeptical.

This brings me to the influence of these technologies on language and communication. Plate protested writing because he deemed it "unnatural" and "untrustworthy." Even he was afraid of the potential for distrust and fraudulence. It opens a world of communication and truly alters everything about the way we view ourselves, others, and the world. But I'm wondering about how I could relate Kenneth Burke back into the conversation. He suggested that meaning became symbols, and symbols became language, and language is impressionable in the face of ever-changing literacy technology. It trails all the way back, when we change the medium for language or communication we step back to the meaning-making and change it. We put it on the line by making meaning less concrete. This seems dangerous to me, especially when meaning-making for the masses of the world fall into the hands of some heinous individuals. Food for thought, and maybe I'm losing the feel for this post now.

I was reminded of Claude Lévi-Strauss while reading Baron's essay. He wrote Tristes Tropiques, which if anyone remembers from Literary Criticism was about how writing can be used to dominate and suppress populations. Writing is a powerful tool to have, and, of course, it's been used for evil. It makes this technology untrustworthy, which is why each new literacy technology must prove a certain level of validity before it's accepted by a population.

Plenty to consider, and Baron paints an alarming series of images about what technology could have in store for communication and every aspect of our lives beyond that. Communication is just the beginning.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2018 (Stephen Bernhardt and Anne Wysocki)

SEPTEMBER 16, 2018 BLOG POST
"Seeing the Text" By Stephen Bernhardt
"The Multimedia of Texts" By Anne Wysocki

Stephen Bernhardt speaks my language. I feel the premise of his essay surrounds breaking the convention of feeding students one form of writing and expecting purely non-visually informative compositions. Unfortunately for the educations systems there are many different types of persuasion and "rhetorical organization," as Bernhardt identifies it.

This terminology, "rhetorical organization," makes me want to analyze how Bernhardt defined it. Based on what I understand about rhetoric, I find this term linked with the persuasive elements of how we interpret text. Bernhardt writes, "

He seems to have a problem with the "conventional essay format," which rarely sees visual components. He writes, "A preoccupation with conventional essay format allows little attention to visual features. Instead of helping students learn to analyze a situation and determine an appropriate form, given a certain audience and purpose, many writing assignments merely exercise the same sort of writing week after week, introducing only topical variation” (77). He appears to be suggesting that rhetoric has foundations in determining the appropriate form for a persuasive composition, and depriving students of the opportunity to decide what form best suits the need of the composition, we're fundamentally teaching them nothing about what options they have for employing rhetoric to their advantage. I also find it somewhat perturbing that most educators exclusively assign non-visually informative compositions from students.

However, it's worth addressing the problem of non-visually informative texts being consistent, which is the aim of many educational systems, consistency. Consider in simple terms a high school English classroom, a place most familiar to me from being there as a student and a substitute teacher more recently. A high school English teacher assigns students an "project" rather than an "essay," and students can make a video, a poster, or some other form of presentation to demonstrate their knowledge about whatever book they've been reading. Let's say students are relatively creative and make some posters, a short film, one writes a song, another does a re-enactment from a scene in the text. Now, the problem of grading. At a high school level, where standards are rigorously enforced, the grading scheme can't always be based on effort, but on content. There are no standards for grading content. It's all up to the discretion of the teacher to assign grades to each of these nonlinear projects that students have worked on and composed. Consider the other teacher who assigns his/her students "essays" and not "projects." He/she takes away a bit of creative demonstration from the students, but the exchange is that they receive a pile of papers that A) use a consistent grading scale, B) all likely possess similar points, and C) can be graded based on a standard that has been applied to years and years of high school educators. Which is easier? Which is more expressive and entertaining? Which will stimulate students' interest most effectively?

Bernhardt writes, “…view the rhetoric of visual design as an evolving art” (75). So our understanding of subversive and alternative forms of rhetorical organization, at least in academia, is somewhat undeveloped at this point. Although, it is "evolving" as he says, that is, expressive modes are being explored everywhere and by rhetoricians across the globe. Even "animal rhetorical expression" is being explored as an avenue.

The main point to take away from this essay, in my opinion, is that it's unconventional to use visual features for conventional student compositions. The conventional essay is the preferred method, but this prevents students from learning how to experiment with form, purpose, and audience. It limits their expressive abilities and fits them into a margin. Persuasive elements come in a variety of forms and it doesn't end with Bernhardt's exploration of visual components.

Now, to address Wysocki. Her essay seemed to be like a form of style-guide for visual rhetoric, how "...visual elements and arrangements of a text perform persuasive work” (124). She outlines all the possibilities of using text, shapes, organization of pages, how they all play off of one another. Her detail is astounding, but the punchline from all that appears to be quite similar to what Bernhardt is suggesting, that visual aspects of text can be understood as being just as rhetorically effective for an audience as "conventional text." This rarely-explored avenue for persuasion features a composition process with just as much, if not more, specificity as to how the rhetorical effect is employed in relation to conventional forms of rhetorical persuasion, in modes ranging from organization to purpose to audience considerations. It all matters when employing rhetoric.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2018 (Walter Fisher)

SEPTEMBER 10, 2018 BLOG POST
"Narration as Human Communication" By Walter R. Fisher

Fisher's essay was interesting on many different levels, and I believe it was operating with pretenses in sociology and philosophy as he spent quite a bit of time discussing the human narrative experience and also what this experience means for the public. In one of many definitions aimed to help readers understand the significance of the narrative structure, Fisher writes, " The meaning and significance of life in all its social dimensions require the recognition of its narrative structure" (377). He suggests here that employing a narrative mode of consciousness, as the human rational human experience, holds a great deal of weight, that is, in order to derive meaning or significance from life we must recognize the narrative structure of life.

The idea of deriving meaning and significance from life makes me think of Kenneth Burke, who postulated that man is a "symbol-using" being. Burke, a rhetorical theorist, argued that humans use symbols to communicate and create them for meaning-making. Symbols like words, for example, hold meaning for us and allow us a somewhat flexible medium for the development of language, communication, and in many ways, the narrative social experience.

Human communication  and decision-making must be in argumentative form, Fisher's paradigm, follows the tradition of Aristotle's theory, what he calls The Rational World Paradigm, which surmises that humans are rational beings, that communication and decision-making are forms of argument, and that the world is filled with puzzles that can be solved through logic. But the specification that being rational is being learned is perhaps, in my opinion, the most important aspect of this ancient paradigm. Rationality comes from knowledge.

Fisher proposes another metaphor to represent human beings, what he calls homo narrans. He argues that narration is the master metaphor and follows Burke's definition of man as "symbol-employing." If I understand this master metaphor correctly, Fisher is suggesting that because every element of the human experience is subjective in the narrative, this metaphor becomes a type of lens we can look through to understand our own conceptions on a spectrum of logic and truth. This is a philosophical dilemma that Fisher proposes, but it seems sensical enough in terms of what implications follow the narrative experience through the social, political, theological, or other forms of the human experience that would engage decision-making or communication.

He writes, "The materials of the narrative paradigm are symbols, signs of consubstantiation, and good reasons, the communicative expressions of social reality" (383). Fisher indicates here that the narrative paradigm, his alternative view that human communication is in argumentative form, depends on human use of symbols to generate meaning, a similarity in substance or essence, and logical reasoning. This is Fisher's equation for understanding the narrative paradigm.

It seems important to note that the narrative experience is rooted in perspective, which has limitations for communication and the social world we occupy.

Towards that later part of the essay, he addresses public moral argument, which he argues has an underlying persuasive element. He discusses attributes of the most effective argumentative public moralist by suggesting that this individual acts as a counselor, and shares his/her narrative experience with the public using rationality and logic. In response, the public uses a specific set of criteria to determine what belief they choose to accept based on what these counselors argue. This can either inspire the public to action or inspire them to inaction. Fisher writes, "... public-social knowledge is to be found in the stories that we tell one another... to observe not only our differences, but also our commonalities, and in such observation we might be able to reform the notion of 'public'" (393).

SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 (Stanley Fish)

SEPTEMBER 3, 2018 BLOG POST
"Rhetoric" By Stanley Fish

I had a little bit of background information coming into this essay. I recall discussing Stanley Fish in one of my introductory writing classes with Professor Scott Parker. During class he mentioned a recent book by Fish titled "How to Write a Sentence," which was actually just a book of sentence workshop methods for the common writing student.

With the background information applied, I suppose I should probably begin to comment on Fish's essay about rhetoric. When I began reading, I found the epigraph interesting. The epigraph from John Milton's Paradise Lost seemed somewhat out of place, but once Fish went about explaining his selection I couldn't help but nod in appreciation. Milton was defining rhetoricians in the classical sense, that is, intelligent and manipulative conversationalists, or orators, perhaps. This tradition began with the Greeks, with the people before Socrates who did ask for payment to educate young people and to speak to crowds. Socrates didn't ask for payment for his speaking or his conversations with the young aristocracy. The difference here is that Socrates was interested in simply sharing his wisdom and the truths that he believed arrived from achieving that intellect. Although he himself was a brilliant rhetorician, it is believed, based on the dialogues of Plato, that he was not maliciously manipulative, i.e. he had no interest in stealing or cheating people. Socrates was even proven to be morally sound in his decision not to flee his execution in the second to last dialogue, Crito.

I suspect the assumption here was that manipulating others, in any way, was immoral, even if this was done with words, and not for any particular reason besides an intellectual challenge. Plato's Euthyphro demonstrates the Socratic Method, which I understand to be an cooperative, but argumentative educational dialogue between two people attempting to find a question's answer.

A few thinkers later and we arrive at Aristotle, who proposed that rhetoric is "the art of persuasion," which many people cling to for the sake of understanding rhetoric. I am tempted to take this quote at surface level, but I'm also tempted to ask what a person's definition of "persuasion" is, and how it may affect the way we view or think about rhetoric. Also, how do we define "art," and what does it mean to think of rhetoric as an "art"? Anyway, Aristotle, in Fish's essay, defines a difference between the Homo seriosus and the Homo rhetoricus. 

Aristotle defines Homo Seriosus, the Serious Man, as possessing "... a central self, an irreducible identity," while he defines Homo rhetoricus, the Rhetorical Man, as "... an actor" (127). What kinds of implications or misguided notions is Aristotle under when he defines a difference between these two types of men? Are all people not "serious" and "rhetorical" at the same time? Is being authentic and being an actor not something everyone does depending on the situation?

Continuing on in the reading, I'm tempted to explore the dilemma of manipulation when it comes to rhetoric. Is this a misunderstanding, or a fear from society? Rhetoric, in my terms, is a form of expression. All communication is a form of expression with some intended purpose. The purpose of rhetoric is too broad to refine, but I still view it as an expression. Now, rhetoricians are no necessarily manipulative, that is, verbally manipulative. It boils down to intention and presentation, like Aristotle's steps of rhetoric, invention, arrangement, and style. With persuasive ability comes a certain amount of desire, which rhetoric promises delivery from. Rhetoric is built on persuasion, but it also deals widely in influence, and we see full circle that influence creates persuasion and rhetoric can construct its own tower, giving the rhetorician a place on top.