Course Website: Digital Rhetorics

“Machines are an extension of their inventor-creators…” ~Amiri Baraka In this class, we will be moving away from “writing a paper” TO “designing pages.” For many of you, this move away from “the paper” is work that you regularly do anyway: you maintain a tumblr page, you are on facebook, you tweet, you post to instagram or pinterest, you post to your blog. You are already a digital writer with an audience; you are already a designer. The focus on digital rhetorics in this class means that we will interrogate that kind of writing and designing and ask how it works to persuade in 21st century public spheres. We will continually ask ourselves: How do digital technologies affect the ways we write, conceptualize, and disseminate ideas? How are audiences impacted and to what ends? What are the identities, practices, and strategies of persuasive techniques in digital contexts? These are questions that you will answer based on the writing/designing that you do in this class, not abstract feelings and opinions about the internet and technology. It’s like Janie tells her best friend in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “you got tuh go there tuh know there.” In December 2013, J. Elizabeth Clark, a fellow CUNYite, gave a wonderful presentation called “Digital Todays, Digital Tomorrows” at John Jay College. She shared her avid pursuit of scuba diving and then made a bold comparison to schooling, particularly criticizing the ways that writing is currently taught. Clark began by showing images of scuba diving equipment from previous decades, highlighting the ways that new technologies have transformed the experiences of and possibilities for diving. By the 1970s, the buoyancy control devices, pressure gauges, and single hose regulators performed very differently and became the norm, alongside dive computers in the 1980s. While, of course, diving gear from the early 1900s would certainly still work, Clark insisted, rightly so, that she is not inclined to use that gear for diving. In fact, scuba diving has a fascinating history and with each technological advancement, its training has also changed This is not to say that diving is a totally altered experiences from its centuries-old beginnings. However, its contemporary technological changes and new iterations have changed what divers do today. It’s unthinkable to imagine otherwise. Clark asked us why so many writing teachers and writing classrooms insist on discarding new technologies in ways that divers, for instance, never would. It would be like diving into a reef in 2014 with 1914 equipment. It’s a compelling argument, one that we will take seriously in this class.