Douglas Eyman, in his Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (2015), writes of Collin Gifford Brooke’s 2009 book, that “[a]lthough he doesn’t name it as such, Brooke’s project is an excellent example of digital rhetoric scholarship that takes new media as its object of critique” (Eyman, 2015, p. 55). The subtitle of Brooke’s text raises the following question: What exactly are new media? Eyman reminds us that Brooke himself never quite provides us his own definition (p. 55). Naturally, writes Eyman, “[r]egardless of which definition of new media one uses, for digital rhetoric, it is an object of study that is subject to rhetorical theory and principles” (p. 55). For Brooke, “[t]he danger of extended discussions of definition is that they ultimately distract from what are (for me) more important questions, the practices that these technologies enable and assist” (Brooke, 2009, p. xiii). Still, it may be helpful here to think about what makes new media new media, particularly for those who have arrived more in the middle of the conversation and not the beginning of it.

The key feature seems to be digital technology. Given the importance of digital technology to our thinking of new media, what might some examples of digital technology be? Weblogs (“blogs”), websites, digital music and TV, smart cellular telephones, ebooks, streaming video, social media sites (YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.), digital cameras and watches, cloud computing, and the internet of things. Brooke’s reconceptualization of the five canons “is located in between technology and rhetoric . . .” (p. xvii). In fact, Lingua Fracta (2009) “attempts to stage an encounter between rhetoric and technology; each functions as a lens through which we might consider the other, and neither is left untransformed by the encounter” (p. xvii).

Brooke also reimagines the canons using the metaphor of ecology. For Brooke, “[e]cologies are vast, hybrid systems of intertwined elements, systems where small changes can have unforeseen consequences that ripple far beyond their immediate implication” (p. 28). The title of the book is a “puncept,” Gregory Ulmer’s (2004) neologism for “a play on words that provokes us to think through a set of terms in more detail” (see p. xiv of Teletheory). According to Brooke, “the canons can help us understand new media, which adds to our understanding of the canons as they have evolved with contemporary technologies” (p. 201). Although Eyman writes that “others have focused on a specific canon (such as memory or delivery) and their application or rearticulation in the face of digital texts, thus far only Brooke has provided a comprehensive consideration of all of the canons, describing their complex inter-relationships as an ecology of practice” (p. 62), it is important to point out a germane article (or webtext) published in the online journal, Kairos. Authored by twelve scholars (Paul Prior, Janine Solberg, Patrick Berry, Hannah Bellwoar, Bill Chewning, Karen J. Lunsford, Liz Rohan, Kevin Roozen, Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau, Jody Shipka, Derek Van Ittersum, and Joyce R. Walker), “Re-situating and Re-mediating the Canons: A Cultural-Historical Remapping of Rhetorical Activity” similarly rethinks the five classical canons of rhetoric for the digital age. Incredibly, although this webtext was published two years before Brooke’s book came out, he does not mention it. More on this webtext and the canon on invention below. This is especially odd considering he begins his book with a discussion an essay published in the Kairos called “Hypertext is Dead?“.

Brooke’s view of interface reminded me a little of Jody Shipka’s thoughts on process versus product in Toward a Composition Made Whole (2011). Shipka is highly interested in the process of composing (and not just the final product). It is in the composer’s process that we discover a potentially rich variety of multimodal elements. She offers as her book’s first example a pair of pink ballet slippers covered in writing. When she was met with skepticism regarding this project (while discussing it in a workshop), she concluded that such doubt may very well be the result of misplaced focus: product versus process.  Shipka, as I mentioned in my blog and in my Analysis Paper on anthropological approaches to composition, explains that she draws upon the mediated action framework of James Wertsch to “provide us with a way of examining final products in relation to the complex processes by which these products are produced, circulated, and consumed” (p. 40) and “with ways of attending to the wide range of representational systems and technologies with which composers work and to examine the role that perceptions, purposes, motives, institutions, as well as other people and activities play in the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of that work” (p. 40). “A turn toward the interface as our unit of analysis,” Brooke writes, “would be an acknowledgement that it is not necessary that these processes culminate in products (which can then be decoupled from the contexts of their production), but rather that what we think of as products (books, articles, essays) are but special, stabilized instances of an ongoing process conducted at the level of interface” (p. 25). “Consider, for example,” Brooke tells us, “the various strategies advanced under the umbrella of invention, like freewriting, outlining, mapping, tagmemics, and so on. Although part of viewing invention ecologically must include this repertoire of pedagogical strategies, the emphasis on conscious, visible activity is necessarily a reduction of the canon” (p. 44). As Stephen Keoni Holmes writes in his review of Brooke’s book in Enculturation, “such methodologies of invention hold that the quality of the ends (the polished student essay) reflects the quality of the means (the process of invention) thereby giving little regard to the influence of an interface’s mediality” (Holmes, 2010, n.p.).

Invention, writes the twelve authors cited above (Paul Prior et al.), “is widely understood as a process that goes on throughout the entire work (not something done first, then funneled into an arrangement, then enacted in words, then stored in some memory, then delivered). Mediation and distribution are also phenomena that operate at each moment in the process, as the “text” is always being mediated and
distributed in some fashion, actually in multiple ways” (p. 8). James Jasinski has identified at least four “historically recurring conceptions” of invention: romantic, systematic, imitative, and social (Jasinski, 2001, p. 327). Of these, social may fit the digital space best. “Adopting a social approach to rhetorical invention helps to decenter or destabilize a romantic or autonomous vision of the self as the origin of action” (p. 329). Here we might think of digital rhetors as “point[s] of intersection” rather than as untethered atoms (p. 330). In his chapter on memory, Brooke writes that “persistence is a practice of bricolage” (p. 157. Jasinski (2001) writes that “[t]he image of the rhetor or advocate, from a social perspective, is a bricoleur–a person who acts by making do or improvising with the limited materials that are available in a particular situation” (p. 329). And Eyman (2015) writes that “[t]he circulation of materials occurs in the use, remix, and appropriation of digital texts, and the energy that drives this circulation comes from the rhetorical activity of digital bricoleurs, often operating within particular social networks (in ecological terms, these are communities that inhabit specific ecosystems)” (p. 86).