WRRH 205 - Collaborative Writing Project

Aislinn Raftis, Danielle Emmons, Ben Kapaldo

5/10/2015

Medium, Access, and the Human Body

Throughout this semester in Digital Rhetoric, we have noticed
certain themes that connected the disparate parts of the course
together. In this paper we explore and integrate the various ways in
which these themes connect. For our visual presentation, we have
chosen an image of a house to act as the vehicle to advance our
argument. We believe this symbolizes the physical lives we lead as well
as the real-world location of our digital selves. By synthesizing the
content of the course we have uncovered three main overarching
themes and many threads that run through each of the three themes.
Our themes include the importance of medium, the human body, and
access to digital space. Through a digitally informed lens, we will argue
that the sometimes transparent, sometimes ambiguous nature of
online activity make it a complicated and costly endeavor, or a
transaction that is not simply one sided in terms of its sole benefit to
the user. Membership within any cybercultural community requires us
to relinquish some small part of our true being, which we exchange for
the offsetting spoils and perils that await us after choosing to become
an internet citizen. Furthermore, with the internet being a rhetoricbased entity, we also examine the lengthy historical relationship
between rhetoric and orality; from its humble beginnings in physical

space with men like Aristotle and Socrates to its current, socially
significant, position in digital spaces such as Twitter and Second Life.
The first of our main overarching themes is best summarized at a
conceptual level as the Human Body element. This theme includes
the notion of what it means to have a body, the effects of our state of
consciousness, our real life vs digital life, and our in-person and digital
identities. The human body and condition are complex concepts when
contextualized within a dialogue of digital spaces. In this sense, we
arent just inhabiting the real world - and all that comes along with it but ultimately are given a totally separate set of rules that exist solely
on the modern internet. Within the book The Medium is the Massage,
Marshall McLuhan discusses how todays technology is an extension of
the human body, and how all tools and systems are simply extensions
of our bodies and our senses. He compares networks to an extension
of the central nervous system, "the wheel / is an extension of the
foot / the book / is an extension of the eye / clothing, an extension of
the skin, / electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous
system" (1996, pg. 31-40). He is showing that the relationship between
our physical bodies and our digital technology is much deeper and
more pervasive than what we first might think. We do not simply use a
smartphone, the smartphone is designed based on us, using our own
bodily systems. He does not limit the discussion of technology to our
electronics. Many of the systems we use to function can be classified

as a technology and can change our consciousness. McLuhan states

The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the
very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so
to speak. Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to
think and act automatically in certain ways (1996, pg. 8). Our
consciousness is affected by this automatic type of learning, which has
been brought upon by technology: we are a part or separate from our
consciousness when we enter digital space in that we do not have a
bodily presence, but that we have been morphed into not simply our
human selves, but our internet selves as well. The state of being
mentally but not physically present has changed our consciousness.
We can now perform actions and speak words, but we have less
ownership over them and over the consequences.The medium of the
internet has changed our consciousness.
The McLuhan text further correlates with our in-class discussion
of cyborgs, specifically what it means to be half human and half
machine. This sentiment requires that we ask ourselves one question:
How much, if any, of our identity do we lose when we become part
machine? Within Donna Haraways article, Cyborg Manifesto she
explains that by becoming part machine, we transcend gender, class,
race, and sexuality constraints by becoming more neutral, both in
terms of how we are viewed and how we view others. Haraway states,
There is not even such a state as being female, itself a highly

complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses

and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an
achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the
contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism
(1991, pg. 155). She is considering the potential of the cyborg to
herald a new post-gender, post-racial society, transcending our
limitations based on socially constructed norms and discriminations. If
bodies are mechanical and uniform, she argues we can lose the
socially constructed identities we form throughout our lives. Cyborgs
exist on the spectrum of human to machine and show that, as
corporeal people, we have the ability to become more than just a
human. Cyborgs, conceived as the sci-fi androids, have the potential to
create neutrality that corresponds with both online and real world
identities. But we are also on the cyborgs spectrum as we become
more reliant and interact more with digital space. As a result of
occupying digital space, we no longer possess a truly unaffected
human identity upon our return to physical space.
The human body as it exists between real and online worlds can
create consequences, both good and bad, because of how it ties into
who we are within either space. An example of this is the online
gaming world called Second Life, which allows people to create an
avatar and choose whoever they want to be. This affords individuals
the opportunity to be somebody totally different than in real life, thus

the name Second Life. For some, it is easier to show ones true self
online than in real life because of the perceived anonymity. The fear of
being rejected by the dominant culture is decreased when the
individual finds a niche online and attains a certain comfort level--safe
from judgment and real-world consequences--and a community of likeminded people. This can raise plenty of questions about ones true
identity, and whether having these multiple lives further separates us
from connecting with other human beings physically, with the physical
need for connection being replaced by the emotional one we receive
via computer screens.
No matter which medium is being employed, there is always
some form of censorship; whether it's banning the types of books we
can read, what the government does and does not allow us to know
about our country, or even parents restricting what we can access
online. We become more aware of what we do and how we act when
we are being censored in these ways, which causes us to begin selfregulating for fear that the government may be surveilling our online
activities. Regardless of whether or not the government is actually
checking in on our digital behavior, we start to become more conscious
of the things we do as a result of this heightened sense of awareness or even paranoia. We connected this to the human body--as well as to
access--because of the real-world, physical consequences of our digital
actions.

The second overarching theme of the course is the importance of

medium. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the
message. He managed to hit a nerve with this statement, which has
proved to entrench his legacy in the field of media studies. Basically,
his argument is that the medium with which we are presented
information through causes changes in human consciousness. Media
takes us over; it changes the way we act and the way we think.
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the things we say in digital
space are permanent.
The permanency of words began with literacy. Kathleen E. Welch,
engaging with the ideas of linguist and cultural historian Walter Ong,
presented in Electrifying Classical Rhetoric: Ancient Media, Modern
Technology, and Contemporary Composition the three stages, or eras,
of human communication.The advent of speaking sparked the first era:
primary orality. Primary orality is characterized by an emphasis on the
spoken word, which isnt surprising since it pre-dated the invention of
writing. We can apply the definition of primary orality to most illiterate
cultures, but we connect it most with the Classical Greeks, who
founded the study of rhetoric. Rhetoric is effective communication,
through language, arguments, and gestures, with a view to persuading
audiences for a certain purpose in a certain context. The fathers of
rhetoric are Socrates and Aristotle. Socrates cautioned against rhetoric
because he feared its potential to take away unspoken power.

Essentially, any good speaker had the power to persuade an audience

and take away the hereditary power of the nobility. Aristotle restored
the respect and legitimacy of the discipline though codifying the
features of rhetoric. He believed in three appeals: ethos, logos, and
pathos. These are appeals to character, logic, and emotions. From the
appeals we can deduce that Aristotle believed that to be persuasive,
the rhetor must be of good character, must be intelligent enough to
form logical arguments, and must be passionate and true to the
speech. He presented five canons he considered necessary to a good
speech: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. Invention
is the process of brainstorming, the germination of an idea.
Arrangement is the order in which you present the parts of your
argument. Style is the syntax, metaphors, analogies, and words you
choose. Memory is the device by which you remember your speech
and delivery is the way you give your speech including your pauses
and gestures. From these canons, particularly the canon of delivery, we
can conclude that Aristotle considered the act of giving speeches as
performative.
In primary orality, the main vehicle for rhetoric was the human
voice. Rhetors spoke and their words were gone once uttered, save for
in the memory of the listeners. Listening and memory were integral to
primary oral cultures as it was the way to communicate information.
But the act of storytelling is obviously more than speaking and

listening: it is performative. The performative nature of rhetoric has

been a connecting thread running throughout the entire semester of
our class. Humans have bodies, and though the digital world
complicates and nuances our conception of bodies, the act of telling a
story is also a physical one. Rhetors engage their audiences with body
language, tone, inflection and the act of speaking confers power to the
speaker.
Gradually the power shifted away from the speaker to be located
in the written word. We call this era literacy. Literacy removed the
community aspect of storytelling and information sharing and made it
a private activity. Reading and writing was typically something one did
alone. Literacy restricted access of knowledge to those with the means
to learn to read. Access, as we shall find, is another connecting thread
running through the concepts of the class. Gradually literacy evolved
into our current era - the age of secondary orality.
Secondary orality is the echo of primary orality in a literate
world. It is an electronic world in which the transferring and sharing of
information is as fast, if not faster, than primary orality. The notion of a
community, integral to primary orality, is reinforced and McLuhan
refers to it as a global village because the words are shared among
more people through networks, grids, and forums. People perform in
secondary orality as they present themselves a certain way online,
much like the performance aspect of primary orality storytelling.

Secondary orality paves the way for the growing dominance of new
media. New media is the reclamation of our old forms of media, using
words, images, and artifacts, in a digital, interactive space. It is
remediation.
Similar to the evolution of orality from primary to secondary, the
internet also evolved to become more interactive. The original internet,
Web 1.0, was a network of hyperlinks in which the consumer was
distinctly separate from the producer, the reader, or consumer, as they
passively clicked through each product. Web 2.0 is differentiated by
interactivity. Producers became consumers, and vice versa, as people
began to interact by creating words, images, and videos while also
commenting on the content produced by fellow users. Web 2.0
functions like a participatory democracy, but the internet is not the
democratic space it seems to be at first glance. This is because many
people lack access to the cybercultural world; they may not have the
necessary resources to afford the machines or energy bills said
machines accumulate. This raises the argument that access
disadvantages of this sort, could be considered the same or similar to
the disadvantages of the literacy era.
Nayar provides several important factors tied to the concept of
access; among them are the factors of race, gender, class etc. Being
able to choose an identity and how we portray ourselves online can
help us transcend barriers that we would otherwise face in the real

world. Questions of access, class and techno-elitism shift the focus on

to more material matters such as cyberpower. Cyberpower includes
discussions about the freedom to access information (and therefore the
politics of access), control over the Internet and the digital domain
(hence the question of governance, domain name control, and the
infrastructure that produces cyberspace), rights to privacy, and
elitism (2010, pg. 17). Similar to the main possessors of power in the
real world, power in the digital world is typically given to those who are
- or at least make themselves appear to be - white and male. Our
ability to change our identity on the Internet gives us the means to
become white and male; we grant ourselves more digital access and
power for things that we may not experience if we were black,
disabled, female, etc. However, the malleable nature of an online
identity does not change the real world challenges one might face in
terms of being disadvantaged as a result of any of the aforementioned
factors. Online identity can give us more power and voice within the
digital world, which can transcend into the real world in certain
situations, but it can also discourage an individual who is restricted to
experiencing that lifestyle solely in digital space.
Yet it should be noted that not everybody agrees on who owns
the internet: as such an incomprehensibly large entity, the internet and
control of the internet is a collective endeavor. But again, not everyone
agrees on ownership, and some parties seek to commandeer the

comings and goings of fellow users. One example of this is internet

trolls; cyber-bullies who disrupt the normal flow of internet interactions
for a plethora of mean-spirited humor points they quantify as lulz.
From our examinations of the various texts on the subject, its
abundantly clear that these individuals think the internet - and
everyone who uses it - is at their mercy. In this sense, trolls maintain a
certain hubris about their ability to wreak havoc on the lives of those
who cross them, and more often than not their attacks can transfer
from digital space into physical, real world life.
The documentary on the hacker group Anonymous featured a
former member who attacked the Church of Scientology because the
church had invaded their internet. These individuals represent a
separate control-mongering group called Hacktivists. Hacktivists, a
mash of hacker and activists, are individuals who use their talents as
means to a certain political end; constantly vying to make the internet
a personal possession which they can antagonize as much as they
please. The United States National Security Agency, more commonly
known as the NSA, has already taken implicit ownership of the internet
through their undiscriminating surveillance. However some internet
citizens, such as the infamous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, are
attempting to fight back as they seek transparent access to
government-related information. Once more, the consequences of
Snowdens decision show us that ones digital behavior can have a

considerable impact or resonance within their real life. The man who
famously published incriminating documents online is now in exile,
finding refuge in various countries around the world: he must quite
literally fear for his life due to his actions within digital space. While
certainly an outlier compared to the typical user experience,
Snowdens situation shows that when you affect change that impacts
real world life for millions of people, it can, and in his case has, created
a very dangerous situation. To a somewhat lesser extent, there are a
multitude of examples where ordinary citizens have been affected by
the results of their online words and actions. We have first-hand
experience with this: the possibility of physical consequences for ones
online actions is yet another common thread which has run throughout
the entire course.
More than anything else, this course has shown us that the human
condition bears a strikingly influential presence in the digital space of
internet activity. Once thought of as an escape route, it seems that the
time has arrived for us to begin considering the internet and its
unlimited powers for global interconnectivity as a major factor in our
real lives. The old adage if its too good to be true, it probably is
applies in many situations, and applies to this situation. The internet
has always held tremendous connective and informative powers, and
more so lately as we begin to see the 24-hour news cycle become a
15-minute news cycle via social media platforms, specifically Twitter or

Tumblr. However as weve just discussed, the most constructive and

yet volatile aspect of the internet is when we use it to reinvent our
physical selves in a digital space. Such a capability has undoubtedly
brought happiness to millions of people struggling with social anxiety
by affording them a means to become what they always thought they
couldnt, but we must return to the theory that with something
appearing to be so easy, there has to be a catch. This catch, as weve
discovered, can be twofold. First, we inherently lose a small part of our
true selves when we become enchanted by the spoils of internet
ambiguity, as much fun as it may be to parade around a virtual
landscape as a botanist. Secondly, when we choose to immerse
ourselves within a space where any and all of our personal information
is inherently subject to review, we open our real lives up to digital
scrutiny. Sometimes, this digital scrutiny can have severe real life
consequences. No matter the means in which we engage with others in
digital space, whether it be on Twitter or through a Second Life account
or anything of the like, we are required to supply easily traceable or
hackable personal information which cannot be 100% protected by
stringent internet firewalls. We entrust our most personal selves to an
entity which we can neither see nor grasp, and unfortunately there are
many individuals ready and able to exploit the trust we have placed in
administrators to safeguard our information. With that said, as users of
the internet we must decide if utilizing the internet is worth a little slice

of our true selves, because the nature of todays internet makes it so

there is no in between. Once we put ourselves out there, even if it
seems to be only a slight extent, there is no possibility of getting it
back from or keeping it out of the virtual hands of wrongdoers.