A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric (33 page)

It follows from the ubiquity and increasing use of social networking sites that
digital strategy
is important, both for individuals, groups, and institutions, and that protocols of use, the management of information, security, maximum value in communication, etiquette, and other issues come into play (see Wellman 2012).

Finally—though the picture is changing fast—it is noticeable that political action (the
pritnutn mobile
of rhetoric) is often coordinated through social media. The uprisings in Egypt in 2011 and 2013), for example, were coordinated via social network sites. When used by governments to monitor the communication of individuals, the abuse of social media becomes evident — a far cry from the liberating and clarifying functions of rhetoric in democracies. Although such impact and cause-and-effect can be exaggerated, there is indubitably a degree of influence taking place through the rhetoric of digital media.

It is now a truism to say that the prevalence and ubiquity of social media, and the creation of smartphones and other small, portable devices (mini iPads and even iPads and other tablets) allow for engagement with social media
on the move
. No longer is it common to see workers carrying laptops on trains, buses, and planes; now they tend to operate on tablets and on phones. Attributes that mobile devices have, in the latest generation of such technologies, include location sensitivity, allowing location-relevant data to be accessed. For example, you are in a meeting in a city you don't know, and you want to know the nearest available Japanese restaurant, along with reviews of that restaurant; you also want to know what time it is in a city around the world so that you can make a call at an appropriate moment. Businesses use the personalization of data to develop relationships with customers through loyalty programs, which enable the creation and consolidation of markets, and through discounts, vouchers, and other inducements.

Again, enhanced digital mobility reinforces the increased emphasis on the individual and his/her information networks. We are not far off the scene in
Minority Report
where Tom Cruise enters a clothing store that recognizes, via camera, his retina “signature” and triggers messages to him to head toward clothing of his size and his preferred colors and styles. As far as rhetoric goes, mobility and individually tailored information and communication systems engender a different kind of communication world: one in which the individual sits at the center of a range of different networks, in which communication is (currently) via touch-screen application or the written word (completed forms, texts, Twitter, etc.), and which, we can speculate, might become even more isolating and silent as access to information and action becomes more mediated by such devices.

One further aspect of mobility is that time-delay or asynchronicity in the sending and receiving of messages and information can be said to reinforce individualization. While these are not necessarily linked only to mobility, they do suggest that anytime-anywhere access to television and radio programs (e.g., BBC iPlayer), email, and social media status updates.

Access to knowledge and information is changing. Looking at this changing picture from the perspective of students in higher education is illuminating, as their excursions into knowledge creation, especially at Masters and doctoral levels, are changing the way learning is taking place. Students still, in 2013, routinely use printed works—books, journal articles, reports—in libraries to access knowledge and information. The printed work may have been written, composed, edited, and produced with digital operations, but its format as text on a printed page still provides an excellent medium for investigation. Textbooks are still used widely in many countries, mainly for revision and for understanding difficult topics, and mainly at school, college, and undergraduate levels rather than at Masters or doctoral levels, where independent reading is required. Printed works still give the aura of authority (though increasingly less so), but also have the advantage of being able to be laid out on a desk in a spatial arrangement that is different from that of a digital display, which is usually limited by the screen on which it appears. In terms of getting the whole picture of information or of a problem, such expansive display is often helpful.

But the availability of online and digital resources is increasingly determining purchasing practices. Indeed, freely available resources mean that books and e-books are not necessarily purchased any more. In some cases, they may be rented. As the number of devices owned by students increases, and as the integration and transfer of information between those devices becomes more and more possible, print becomes a matter of choice rather than the preferred medium for reading. It is also the case that the preferred economy of media for individual students more closely matches
their kinesthetic disposition as learners; if they are spatially and visually driven, they are more likely to favor the screen. If they are verbally and textually driven, they are more likely to favor the printed word as their primary source of information and knowledge. Publishers are adapting to the changing nature of access patterns in relation to information by publishing across platforms. It is now common to have key works available in printed book, e-book, interactive e-books, application and website formats, video, and audio, as well as providing links via social and information networks. Learning becomes a cross-platform experience, using the preferred medium and range of modes not only according to individual learning preference, but also in relation to actual physical location (home, including kitchen or anywhere in the room, apartment, or house; college or university, including libraries; and in between the two). Some aspects of this are offered without charge; other aspects are charged. The availability of experts in the field is also becoming prevalent, with Twitter, blogs, YouTube, and Facebook presence, as well as even personal email contact, being made available to students. The communities for learning are, as expressed previously, becoming more individualized, more accessible to those who have digital access and can use it, and, in parts, more freely available.

Linked to individualization of learning is the public drive toward open access to knowledge, made possible by the internet, by financial pressure on library budgets, and by ideological commitments to making knowledge freely and openly accessible. This movement is particularly strong in the sciences, mathematics, and technology disciplines and less so in the humanities, arts, and social sciences. Nevertheless, movements like Creative Commons with their commitment to developing, supporting, and stewarding “legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation” via the provision of “licenses” (see creativecommons. org), which enable different degrees of publishing and knowledge distribution, are changing the landscape of access. Another resource that is becoming increasingly available for research is access to archive collections, not only through the major libraries, but also through smaller libraries and organizations that hold such archives. An example of such an archive is the emerging National Archive of Children's Compositions, housed at the Institute of Education Library, University of London. This embryonic archive, once it has framed the parameters of its collecting policy, will be available to researchers and to students to trace writing and compositional development in children—whether the compositions are initially in writing and drawing (and then digitized) or digitally conceived and executed.

The individualization of research and learning is being accelerated through web-based applications such as ORCID, which “provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and
your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized” (see
about.orcid.org
). Such applications enable researchers and scholars to bring together various aspects of their work and manage them: version control, information management, personal research notes, publications, citations, blogs, and other aspects of scholarly work are integrated. In rhetorical terms, such a resource puts the author at the center of a potential network of interested parties who “visit” and who engage in receptive and interactive ways with the author. The personalization of work and academic interest in this way can be seen to be an exercise in vanity publishing, unrestricted as it is by peer review. Instead, what is driving interest is the presence and success (or otherwise) of such enterprise in a freer market for scholarly activity. We could say, rhetorically, that self-profiling and self-promotion like this reduces the discourses of exchange in the academy, foregrounding entrepreneurial individuals who use digital means for their own egotistical ends. But part of the impetus is to encourage exchange and to release knowledge and learning from the institutional framework of the academy. The same could be said for Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), also prevalent in the early years of the second decade of the century, but at that point unable to loosen the grip of institutions on accreditation and degree-awarding powers. Such cultural shifts in academic practice are not confined to the organization and dissemination of knowledge, but are also changing the genres as well as the media via which knowledge is shared. The academic monograph—for so long a staple form for the humanities—and academic peer-reviewed articles (playing a similar function in the social sciences) appearing in print-based journals are being replaced by web-based publication in smaller chunks. Granularization of knowledge, and the discourses that attend it, now sit alongside longer publications and extended colloquia.

One aspect of practice for students in higher education that offer challenges—rhetorical and now digital—is the dissertation. This requirement tends to dominate the last year of undergraduate education, as well as being the
sine qua non
of Masters programs (sometimes in shorter forms like the report) and being at the heart of the doctorate, especially in the humanities and social sciences. In conventional, predigital format, there was not much interest in the form rhetorically. Like many fixed genres, it provided a firm template with little variation: an introduction, literature review, context chapter, methodology, results, discussion, and conclusion. In this sense, it was like an academic article scaled up to dissertation length. It was always presented in bound and printed form, with two copies submitted—at least one of which would gather dust on a library or supervisor's shelves. We could say its function was
more of a
rite de passage
than a contribution to knowledge; its destiny more like the abandoned carapace of learning than learning itself. Much of the vestigial character remains in the genre, but the digital revolution has brought something else to the dissertation, with profound rhetorical implications.

Whereas for the conventional dissertation digitization meant the inclusion of sound or film or textual files on a CDRom or DVD appended at the back of the submitted work, social science and humanities students— borrowing practice from arts departments where installations, artworks, and other creative forms had been included as part of an overall submission—the advent of digitization has meant that the appendix could be brought into the main body of the work. If, as well as still images, a dissertation could contain film, other forms of moving image, sound, and other digitally instantiated material, then not only the nature of the dissertation itself would change, but also the linearity that characterizes word-based documents, with all the attendant notions of logic, argumentation, the linking of theory and evidence, and possibly also a driving narrative.

Instead, the dissertation could take the form of a website, software, or an artifact of some kind—sometimes with accompanying words, but in extreme cases, without. In non-linear forms like websites, the lines of argumentation are not defined by the writer. The reader has more responsibility for identifying and creating an argument, which may be partially supplied or not at all. From some points of view, such creations are not dissertations at all, and universities have taken different positions on a spectrum that embraces the conventional submission at one end, to non-linear, non-narrative presentations on the other. Often a half-way house is the submission of a “creative” element with a “critical” element attached to it, making the whole submission more assessable. Examples of such digitally innovative dissertations are described and justified in chapters by Yamada-Rice, Domingo, and Milsom in Andrews et al. (2012).

The rhetorical implications of the digital dissertation are several. At inception, researchers who wish to explore the digital nature of communication can do so, designing their research questions, literature reviews, methodologies, and methods according to the nature of their exploration. A starting point for a contemporary research student would be to devise a search strategy, including the definition of keywords, the selection of key digitally accessible sources of information, and criteria for inclusion and exclusion. Given the increasing range of research information, plus portals and packages for accessing and managing such information, research students will increasingly need to make explicit the parameters of their searches. In methodological terms, new means of investigation will be developed that are fit for purpose. Supervisors will need to be up-to-speed on the supervisee's intentions and interests, though in due course,
research students at doctoral level always exceed the knowledge of their supervisors in the specific field in which they are working. Regulations at universities will need to be adapted so that the spectrum of possibility in terms of submitting a final dissertation can be extended and can reflect contemporary demands. It is a safe prediction to say that all universities will require a digital submission, with the possibility of a printed version as optional (according to need), rather than the other way round. Examiners will need to be schooled to read such submissions, understanding that not only will the formats be different from what they are used to, but the argumentational structure of the dissertation may also be different (as suggested previously). More specifically in relation to rhetoric, the role and position of the examiner(s) changes if they are asked to construct an argument themselves from a non-linear presentation, or one in which the argument is implied rather than explicit (in, for example, artworks without commentary, or web-based submissions that allow multiple points of entry to the material). Finally, in terms of archiving, storage, and accessibility, dissertations are now more freely and readily available to other students and researchers to read, as and when they need to (and on any appropriate digital devices). In short, the relationship between the student, the supervisor, the examiners, and the university regulations is changing. One implication is that dissertations are likely to be accompanied not only by 300-word abstracts, but by summaries in distilled (say, 20 pages) and highly distilled (say 2 pages) form. Not only the interactional rhetorical demands of the relationships between students and gatekeepers (supervisor, examiner, university) are changing, then, but the actual compositional, technical, and presentational demands upon the student him- or herself.