Download PDF About the Interviewee Douglas Eyman is Associate Professor of English and the Director of graduate About the InterviewerElizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. ContentsDigital Rhetoric: Expanding Definitions Digital Rhetoric In the Classroom Sustainability in the Digital Realm |
As an exclusively digital publisher, Xchanges is naturally subject to and keenly interested in the practical issues surrounding the future and preservation of digital scholarly work. In the exploration of issues surrounding digital scholarship, we’ve produced a series of three interviews with prominent academic scholars and editors whose work spans the intersections of rhetoric, pedagogy, publishing, and technology. We hope that Xchanges readers enjoy the viewpoints looking both back at what’s happened in the field of digital publishing and pedagogy in the last decade or two and forward to what lies ahead. Here, in the current installment of this series, University of New Mexico English MA student Elizabeth Barnett shares a video interview she conducted with Professor Doug Eyman of George Mason University. In addition to teaching courses in digital rhetoric, technical and scientific communication, editing, web authoring, advanced composition, and professional writing, Dr. Eyman is the senior editor of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. This issue of Xchanges focuses on graduate-student research in writing and rhetoric. Elizabeth and Doug began their discussion of issues with digital scholarship in the 21st century with a focus on the nature and definition of digital rhetoric. Digital Rhetoric: Expanding DefinitionsXchanges: In your 2015 book Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, you wrote, “the term ‘digital rhetoric’ itself has been applied to rhetorics of technology, network rhetorics, social media use, the use of rhetorical appeals in online discussion forums, website design, multimodal composition, and the study of new media (itself a contested term).” Is “new media” still new? Has Digital Rhetoric moved beyond an emerging techne into an established realm of study as well as a means of production of persuasive communication and culture? DE: I'd say the first question about new media is one that comes up quite a lot, especially for people newer in the field. "Is new media really new anymore?" is a refrain I hear often. “New Media” is a standardized phrase at this point, which indicates a kind of hybridization of media. We're looking at how image media, motion media, interactive media, and textual media all come together, and that hybrid version, that synthesis, is “new media.” We can almost call multimodal composition a form of new media as well, except that multimodal, currently, in the way it's theorized, actually bends quite a bit beyond the digital, whereas new media tends to stay rooted within the digital, in terms of the way people handle it. Multimodal composition is becoming a more expansive term in a lot of ways.
Xchanges: You talk about digital literacy being a prerequisite for understanding digital rhetoric. Let's go back. Is digital rhetoric concerned with new media, or is it concerned with all things multimodal? DE: I think it's both and more than multimodality. There's a follow-up piece to the book that ended up in the journal Enculturation (http://enculturation.net/looking-back-and-looking-forward) that came out of the Indiana Digital Rhetorics Symposium, where I talk about what's not in the book. Digital rhetoric is concerned with how rhetoric operates in any digital realm. That includes new media and multimodal work but also includes the interaction between humans and algorithms, the ways code creates and operates as infrastructures for the activities that we engage in or that are engaged in by systems as well as people. The idea of networks and the connectivity of networks is an important key for digital rhetoric, but we also don't want to lose sight of the embodied nature of people using technologies. At one point, people were saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It was a [New Yorker] cartoon. People were saying, "The body's no longer there. It no longer has this representation, so that you can move beyond your corporeal references, and then that frees you up in some ways.” It turns out, that's not actually true. Coming back to the body and how the body operates is really an important component of where digital rhetoric is going. I would make the argument that rhetoric itself is a uniquely and innately human approach to communication. I don't really hold with the idea that we have animal rhetorics or computer system software agents that are creating rhetorical action on their own. I think, at the root, there's embedded humanness in it. I think with semiotics, you can get a lot of the same kinds of information and the same kinds of approaches as you would with rhetoric but applied to non-human actors. That's fine, but I want to reserve, in some ways, rhetoric as a human activity. This will probably be argued against by the folks who are interested in the new materialist/object-oriented approaches. I think there's quite a bit of value to that kind of work, but I see it as a way of re-centering, rethinking, flattening as a useful methodological tool, but the activities of rhetoric itself are always rooted and embedded in the human.
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Those are the conversations that are happening around digital rhetoric or thinking through these issues of what constitutes rhetoric: Can a non-human actor or agency, can they operate rhetorically? Can they make rhetorical moves on their own? That's a really interesting space right now. Justin Hodgson actually has a book out. It just came out recently on post-digital rhetoric (https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814213940.html). We're moving from human to post-human, from digital to post-digital. I'm not sure what comes next. Maybe just post-rhetoric rhetoric. There are lots of spaces where digital rhetoric can learn from other rhetorical frameworks and practices, especially from cultural rhetorics and Native American rhetorics and rhetoric that come from other places. We tend to be pretty deeply rooted in Western versions of rhetoric. Digital rhetoric also allows us to start expanding and seeing how some of these other rhetorical practices, other rhetorical frameworks, operate when you apply them in digital spaces. That's also a really interesting space in terms of what digital rhetoric is currently doing research-wise. One of the things I think is really fascinating right now is a real push toward de-colonizing digital methods, opening up space that we have to different kinds of theories, different kinds of methods, and different kinds of communities, and then using some of these digital humanities methods to do social justice work. I’m thinking of work by Roopika Risam (http://roopikarisam.com/), Liz Losh (http://lizlosh.com/), and Dorothy Kim (http://brandeis.academia.edu/DorothyKim), among others, who as scholars are leading us in this direction. |