In week five here - I have come across a couple conclusions about what has been surprising, confusing, and insightful as well. I’ll speak to the interesting factors and the noteworthy ideas in a little bit.
I feel that the first week with Rodrigue et al. “Navigating the Soundscape, Composing With Audio” and the Sturken piece “The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial” captured my attention to the layers of rhetoric in a digital and physical sphere - these two articles I believe set up the context of the course to me, especially as it is described in the syllabus. The questions posed below reflect on the rhetorical auditory space in the Rodrigue article as well as the multimodel capacity of a memorial in Sturken:
How do rhetoric and literacy shift in a digital age? How are the digital and the multimodal intertwined? How are they different?
Each piece that we’ve glanced at so far has actually attempted to chip away at these questions - which gives me a lense and a framework to view this course more clearly with. For confusion, I do have a couple notes on that.
The Kress text, Literacy in the New Media Age -was challenging and asked quite a bit for the audience to chew on. Through that understanding of questioning ideas on what literacy means - visually and through print/the written word - allowed me to digest the theory being presented, but the text itself seems difficult to come back to as a reference point. While it does seem like an important component (since scholars continue to reference Kress), I am curious as to how an application of this text will inform our future readings.
While I am not a gamer or partaker in video games, I would like to think that I have a grasp on video game culture and insights. That being said, the Davis article - “‘Leeroy Jenkins!’ What Computer Gamers Can Teach Us about Visual Arguments” - gave me a curve ball to work with. I found it challenging in terminology and fragmented in articulation. This is also me admitting that I may have not been the particular audience that the text was being written for.
What I have found noteworthy is the variety of scholars and scholarship that access the rhetorical sphere. Just looking at what has been studied thus far in the course, there is a plethora of research and interpretation for digital rhetoric - which is exciting and also cumbersome. With the advancement of technology and access to it, one only has to look across the study hall floor at the library to see students immersed in either their phones or computers - participating in the visual culture of the internet.
I am reminded of Gillian’s article and one of my recent posts from my blog with this notion: “visual culture...the plethora of ways in which the visual is part of social life” (4). I think this definition captivates a majority of how the student body interacts with the rhetorical sphere on a daily basis - for us as students of rhetoric, it is for us to continue asking the questions the arise from the varied rhetorical situations posed from online habits/behaviors.
Some food for thought for the rest of the semester - these questions may be unanswerable or even inaccessible.
-When does digital rhetoric leave the sphere of the screen and transfer into the physical?
-What are the side/after effects of not taking “visual culture” in a serious manner?
-To what extent do signs and symbols (as Serafin, McCloud, and other illustrators utilize them) have power and influence over a culture?
These are not extensive, but I hope to do my final project in association with some of these ideas here.
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