Losh, Liz. ” “Defining Digital Rhetoric with 20-20 Hindsight.” digital rhetoric collaborative. 25 June 2012. Web. 25 August 2015.
Misleading title alert. Losh never offers a definition. This is an un-article. An article, no, a post, following Losh’s reflections about her experiences wrestling with the definition of “digital rhetoric.” Ultimately, she suggests that “…’digital rhetoric’ means both rhetoric about the digital and rhetoric conveyed by digital platforms, interfaces, and code” (4). But she also suggests that this was her original thinking and it hasn’t changed.
She begins by posting the questions that got her thinking “over a decade ago” about a definition of “digital rhetoric” (1): “What was digital rhetoric? What did it look like? …sound like?…feel like? What ideologies did it represent?…labor practices sustained it…material culture?…infrastructure required? What disciplines controlled how it was learned and taught? etc.”
She reports a meeting with the “putative coiner” of the term, Richard Lanham, resulting in the feeling that he couldn’t define it either (2). She reports testing her (unrevealed-to-us) definition of the term with people who rejected it, like Ian Bogost, who prefers “procedural rhetoric” etc. (2). Lev Manovich, she boasts, was “won over” (by her?) to the notion that such a thing as “digital rhetoric” exists (2).
This line-up of men with whom she wrestles seems to serve as proof of the term’s essentially shifty nature. When she mentions–in a self deprecating way–the website she designed after purchasing the domain name “digitalrhetoric.org” as being “bad” and yet still used by others “desperate for definition,” I’m inclined to understand this post as somewhat of a suggestion that we all get over our need for a definition (2). Perhaps the problematic nature of the term requires us to get more specific from the get-go (such as in the “rhetoric and computation” term she’s defining with Bogost in a book).
Near the end of the post Losh offers “four areas” of focus anchoring “the subject” of defining “digital” (not “digital rhetoric”). These include “the conventions of new digital genres,” “Public rhetoric…recorded through digital technology” and “disseminated via electronic distributed networks,” “…emerging scholarly discipline concerned with the rhetorical interpretation of computer-generated media…,” and “Mathematical theories of communication from the field of information science…” (2-3). Perhaps she meant “digital rhetoric”? Without having read Virtualpolitik, her 2009 book, it’s hard for me to understand what she’s doing here in terms of a definition.
Still that last one interests me. I wonder how mathematical theories inform our understanding of rhetoric. She notes that Doug Eyman’s taken issue with this idea: “…prior attempts to synthesize communication theory (meaning the mathematical principles of information encoding and decoding via telecommunications systems) and rhetorical theory have been less than successful” (3). It seems to me that numbers–indicating, say, the attitudes of certain people indicated by their online responses to a blog post–could tell us something about the effectiveness of the rhetoric crafted in or coming through that post.
Losh and Eyman’s resistance, though, to worshiping numbers–“purely quantitative” data–reminds me very much of Berthoff’s anti-positivist warnings against the cognitive theorists of the 70s/80s.
Some questions, etc.:
- Do we need a “digital rhetoric”? Why not just “rhetoric”? Is there something special about digital realms that suggests our understanding of “rhetoric” is insufficient to account for the communication happening there? (We don’t have “written rhetoric” or “speaking rhetoric”…) (We do have “visual rhetoric”… but “visual” is “mode”–is “digital” a mode?)
- So, take a look at this (digitalrhetoric.net): What does this say about our current understanding of the term?
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