Perspective is how Brooke denominates style. As always, Brooke’s focus is on interfaces and not “static texts” (p. 114). He quotes from Keith Moxey’s 1995 New Literary History article, “Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History,” writing that perspective could describe “either one point of view among many, or the point which organizes and arranges all the others” (p. 114). For Brooke, in keeping interfaces in mind, “it is no longer sufficient to speak simply of an at/through distinction that leaves the position of the viewer, user, or reader unexamined” (p. 140).Cellphones, for example, have changed the style of their users. What does it mean to be seen with a cellphone? What does it mean never to be seen with one? I’m reminded of a YouTube video of a woman taking selfies in front of an expensive car. When curious viewers zoomed in with their cellphones, it was discovered that what she was actually holding was just a black box or perhaps a small plank of wood painted black. It was important to her to look like she was taking selfies with her phone. Is there something about the style of those who photograph themselves/film themselves in public that she wanted, or wanted others to believe she had?

Douglas Eyman reminds us in his book, Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (2015), “For Aristotle, style was primarily a question of matching the appropriate forms of language to the discourse at hand, but he also had several suggestions for developing effective style (including an emphasis on correctness, use of appropriate metaphor, and an avoidance of excessively ornamental prose)” (p. 70). In James Jasinski’s Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (2001), “the first step in taking style seriously is to overcome the problematic disjunction between style and content” (p. 537). For Eyman, “[s]tyle takes on new importance for digital rhetoric, particularly in terms of visual style: for a digital rhetoric, style is equivalent to “design”; thus, digital rhetoric must be concerned with understanding all the available elements of document design, including color, font choice, and layout, as well as multimedia design possibilities such as motion, interactivity, and appropriate use of media” (p. 70). Here “all the available elements of document design” reads a lot like Aristotle’s “all the available means of persuasion.” Jasinski suggests we think of style as “force,” as in “”[s]tyle possesses cognitive, communicative, and persuasive force” (p. 537). It is also the case that for “[m]any scholars . . . meaning, as well as persuasive force, emerges from a complex interaction of discursive elements” (p. 537).

Brooke remarks that the field of rhetoric and composition studies, or what Derek Mueller calls RCWS, “has undergone a “turn” to the visual over the past five years or so,” adding that accompanying a fairly good amount of intellectual work on “the visual,” we have “several composition readers on the market that take the visual as their focus . . .” (p. 115). (Here I am reminded of Mueller’s chapter on “turn-spotting” in his 2017 book, Network Sense.) As Eyman (2015) has it, style in our digital age refers less to oratorical eloquence than it does to “understanding elements of design (color, motion, interactivity, font choice, appropriate use of multimedia, etc.)” (Eyman, 2015, p. 65).