With the rise in literacy since the formation of universal education, more people then ever are reading and writing. This reading and writing is not always directly linked to the classroom either: emails, novels, blog, and more are written and read by individuals in their own free time and of their own accord. Yancey highlights this divide between academic and personal writing, noting how school faculty view these new media outlets as an academic skill if they recognize them at all, meanwhile students view them as a means by which to organize and create. If English departments fail to adapt to this new digital media they run the risk of dooming themselves into obsolescence.
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Visual Literacy
The ability to deconstruct and interoperate meaning from visual works such as pictures and movies much the same way one might deconstruct and interoperate literature.
George explains how understanding visual media is already an important skill through actions such as interpreting graphs and other such representations of numerical data. With digital media’s incorporation of both visual and written design elements, it becomes important to analyze both its form and it function.
Design
Much the same way grammar forms the style of written media, design forms the style and presentation of visual media.
In order to understand how visual media is utilized in the digital space, one must also have an understanding of the way design affect the viewer.
Composition
The way in which a piece of media’s design and function interact with each other to produce meaning.
George points to the importance of teaching students the fundamentals of digital design and literacy in an ever evolving digital world. With publishing power becoming more and more readily accessible by the public, students need to understand how to utilize it as a tool for success.
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Diana George’s Article “From Analysis to Design” discusses the continued development of digital rhetoric as a academic study, looking into the evolution of printed to digital media. One of George’s main areas of interest is the ease to which every day individuals have access to media design and publishing tools. Now that the spread of information is no longer in the hands of publishing houses, how do we teach the next generation to navigate a world of such high media density? What elements of design are most effective in capturing the attention of readers? How does digital media utilize its unique features to persuade its readers?
While these questions are explored throughout the article, as an education major, I am most interested in the topic of educating students in the digital age. To that end, the section “Composition in a virtual age” speaks to the increased access to publishing tools presented to both teachers and students alike, and how it becomes the teachers duty to educate students in this new form of communication so that their voices can be heard in the modern age.
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Traditionally, literacy refers to the act of reading and comprehending a piece of text, however in our ever growing digital world, literacy can refer to a structural analysis of any piece of media: books, movies, video games, advertisements, and more. While some traditional academics may scoff at the idea that a T.V. show has as much literary value as a work of Shakespeare, literary analysis can be conducted on a whole host of different works. For example, below is a video essay by the YouTube channel “Hello Future Me” that analyzes different magic systems that appear Throughout media, and is aimed at helping the viewer better understand how to potentially create a magic system for their own creative endeavors.
Another great example of using literary theory to dissect various forms of media is the YouTube Channel “Overly Sarcastic Productions”. On top of analyzing history, mythology, and writing techniques, the channel also explores the different literary tropes found across different media. Below is their “Trope Talk” on the idea of the Hero’s Journey and how both classical literature and modern media fit within it’s structure.
While some may view the idea of multilieracy as being a prevision of literature, there are plenty of arguments to be made about the effectiveness of other media formats for portraying equally complex stories that require as much if not more literary analysis to fully comprehend. An example of such a piece of media would be the videogame, Hollow Knight. This inde-developed videogame became a major success, thanks in no small part to its deep and intriguing story line. However, unlike a traditional book, or even most videogames, Hollow Knight is unique in not giving the story to its players outright. The player must go out of their way to explore the ruined kingdom of Hallow Nest for the chance to begin to understand the game’s lore. Despite drip feeding the story to the players, people, such as the YouTube channel “Mossbag”, have managed to piece together cohesive stories, creating entire hour long lore summaries through context clues alone.
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In Multiliteracies: The Beginning of an Idea, the authors note how the global interconnectivity of the internet as well as the evolution of the digital age has impacted the way in which the English language is understood. No longer is there a single definitive “English” that can be taught to a non-native speaker from which they can understand all uses of the language. Instead various regional and contextual dialects, accents, and more have developed in the different spheres English is utilized in. Additionally, English is being utilized alongside other communitive devices such as images and videos within advertisements and other media. As such, the Authors of the paper discuss the need for Students in the 21st century to be taught multiliteracies in order to piece together how these different forms of communication work together as well as separately.
This combination of different literacy traditions encountered in day to day life is referred to as “lifeworlds” by the article. Much how grammar was utilized to enforce clarity and consistency in language in single literacy courses, the design of digital media has the same effect on the viewer. As schools begin to recognize the need for multilieracies in students’ lifeworlds, there has been a larger push to teach these skills through multimedia projects and courses.
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Douglas Eyman identifies serval key ways in which digital rhetoric differs from its traditional counterpart. Below are three of these aspects.
Digital
To understand what separates digital rhetoric from regular rhetoric we must first understand what it means for something to be digital. While we might consider digital to refer to the use of our modern, technological devises, Eyman is quick to point out that written language itself is an invention, a technology that we use to record language. Eyman also points to the Latin word “digit” as referring to fingers and toes. Using Angela Haas’ definition, Eyman defines digital as “of or relating to the fingers or toes” or “a coding of information.” Eyman explores how early civilizations used their hands to construct written words and there for written rhetoric long before the advent of the printing press.
Interactivity
A key feature of digital media is its greater degree of interactivity as opposed to other media. Interactivity refers to how digital media utilizes features of the platform such as images, videos, hyper-links and so on to further enrich a text. This mixing of different media forms means that digital rhetoric must also be able to analyze these different formats and how they interact with one another when forming an argument.
Intertextuality
In relation to interactivity, intertextuality relates to how digital texts influence each other and how readers “interpret and are influenced by the texts they encounter”. With the goal of rhetoric being the creation of a persuasive argument, it is important to understand how people interact with and understand digital texts. It is also important to understand the legitimacy behind claims made through digital sources and how the medium may be used to spread false information.
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Rhetoric itself is a means of persuading others through logic and reason. Because humans are fallible creatures, so too can our logic and reason be fallible. In our vastly connected digital world, the constant bombardment of information competing for peoples’ attention can make it easy for individuals to give into our own fallibility by relying on things such as bias to help form our decision making. As the world becomes more and more digitized, humanity will have to reconcile this implicate flaw as we try to move forward. This fallowing video by the YouTube channel “Vsause” highlights some of the issues with human reasoning and presents a possible solution for the future of rhetoric.
With the concerns of the rapid spread of misinformation across the digital space, it is important to understand where your information is coming from and if the source can be trusted. As such web authors can take steps to prove their reliability to their audience, such as the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt, well known for their animated infographics on a wide variety of topics from space exploration to climate change. While the creators of the channel go out of their way to provide full citations of all of their claims in a video, the fallowing video also helps to create trust between them and their viewers by reveling the research and video making processes they utilize in creating their video.
One of the biggest benefits of digital is its ability to pull in other media elements to help further strengthen its arguments. This heightened level of interactivity between both different mediums and the reader with the text creates an entirely new space in which information can be spread. This is shown in the fallowing TED Talk about the validity of memes as a source of communication, and how they can be analyzed through the lens digital rhetoric.
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“the application of rhetorical theory (as analytic method or heuristic for production) to digital texts and performances.”
– Douglas Eyman
Douglas Eyman, a researcher on digital rhetoric who complied the works of many other researchers into his book Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice, begins by initially not wanting to place a definition on digital rhetoric as he believes the act of defining something as a very limiting process. In the first chapter he questions the purpose of making a distinction between rhetoric and digital rhetoric as they both fundamentally seek to address the same topics and issues. However, he ultimately comes to the conclusion that as the field of digital rhetoric is still so early in its infancy, that perhaps it would benefit form a ridged definition to help legitimize it as a field of study. He came to the conclusion that this new definition must be broad enough so as to not limit it by the development of new technologies as well as narrow enough to distinguish it from other studies of rhetoric.
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Digital Rhetoric is the way in which one presents themselves within a digital space, be it professionally through web design, or informally thorough social media. As an Education major, I foresee digital rhetoric becoming an increasingly important skill, especially with the shift to online learning we experienced during the pandemic. I already have some degree of experience when it comes to digital writing through the uses of online/electronic word editing software and my personal usage of social media.
Christopher Elwert 