In this theory-driven course students will explore the new and rapidly evolving responses of rhetoricians to New Media technologies. With the expanding notion of what constitutes a “text,” we must also account for and engage in the production of expanding notions of writing, authorship, literacy, collaboration, copyright, and audience. With the mutation/hybridization/evolution of traditional rhetorical principles enabled by technologies both human and material, new opportunities and dynamics and liabilities percolate through rhetorical utterances and engagements. The study of these percolations will be our focus. Students will develop a background in readings foundational to our understanding of visual and digital rhetorics, as well as more current texts, and even texts in-progress and yet to be written. This course also assumes that “study” includes production, and in our studies we will produce New Media texts of our own that are relevant (perhaps maybe sometimes only barely so) to the course material.
Students in this course will also participate in the founding of the Rural Image Cooperative [the URL has been purchased, but the site has not been built yet], a website that will be committed to exploring the rhetoric of historic and contemporary images of rural America. The first website of its kind, the site will be loosely modeled on the more general visual rhetoric website viz., which was co-founded by the instructor and recently honored with an award from Kairosnews. Students will produce a variety of web-texts for publication on the site, as well as building the site itself, and connecting the site to a network of readers through the collegial exchanges that constitute the currency of academic and intellectual exchange. The course is taught in a networked classroom. No prior technical experience or expertise is necessary or expected for meaningful participation in this course.
Required Texts — All texts listed are required. (These will be available through the WCU Bookstore, but can also be bought at competitive prices through outlets such as Amazon.com.)
- Lingua Fracta, by Collin Gifford Brooke
- Virtualpolitik, by Elizabeth Losh
- Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Hill and Helmers
- Mechanisms, by Matthew Kirschenbaum
- Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig (also available for FREE download)
- Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker
Text Excerpts and Student Text-Experts
“I can work 25 hours a day if necessary, live on any reasonable salary, and don’t give a black damn for job security, office politics, or adverse public relations.”
–Hunter S. Thompson, in a job application
