Granny! What a Big Blog You Have! The Logos of Ethos in a Mass-Pathological Century,
and Other "Truthinesses" in Web Communication*
by Cynthia Jeney
Computers & Writing Conference
Texas Tech University, Lubbock Texas May 27, 2006
Type “blog” into your Google search engine, and it kicks up 2,450,000,000—that’s
Billion-with-a-“B”—entries. It’s a capital “B” and that rhymes with “G” and that stands
for info-Glut.
While trying to help my students pick their way through the ‘info-lingo gridlock’ that
happens when we’re overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the internet and its possibilities, I’ve
found that they—and frankly, I, too—are sometimes all but silenced by its mass, by its existent
and ever-increasing volume of written and multimedia content.
Therefore, the exploration I’ve embarked upon is a way to help writers in my tech comm
classes jar loose their intimidation, to break open their fear of the “economy of attention,” and
crack apart the ways they get “stuck” in what they believe to be a kind of limited, humdrum
catalog of tactics and strategies they use as online technical communicators. The way I usually
begin—believe it or not—is by reviewing a concept I wrestled with when writing my
dissertation.
SLIDE—INTERNETWORKED SYMBOLIC ACTION
Six years ago in my dissertation, I Introduced a term that I thought sufficiently ugly to
elude adoption by anyone with the least bit of musical aesthetic sense. I used the immense and
brilliant body of Kenneth Burke’s work to study the online textual interactions of what bloggers,
chatters, emailers, and other internetizens do to coin the phrase “Internetworked Symbolic
Action”
And because of a talk I heard at 4C’s this year, given by Keith Miller, the wonderful
Martin Luther King scholar who incidentally chaired my dissertation, I’ve decided to revisit and
promote –if not the usage of this term—at least an argument for placing it among the foundations
of the rhetorical frameworks of teaching web writing. Keith’s talk was about spiritual songs and
how the music and lyrics were adopted and treasured by negro slaves. He traced the role of
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music that came to be called the “Negro Spiritual” through its history, and one point he made
struck a deep chord with me (pun intended) as a teacher of technical writing. He said that the
reason the spiritual song was treasured, sung, and passed along through generations, why it was
so lovingly preserved and is known and held in esteem today, is in part the narrative that the
song embraces. Songs about Jesus and the sweet chariot, the one that is coming to take us home,
songs about the afterlife and our reward in heaven are not about some past story, not about some
past event, not about things gone, but about the present—the spiritual hymn or song is about
where we are NOW. The spiritual song is not about Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago, but
about Jesus in the world today, and the desire for devine rewards and everlasting peace
that WILL come. Spirituals are not sung about things gone by, but about our lives, our
needs, our hopes and dreams, NOW.
So. What is a technical communications professor doing getting all teary-eyed and
inspired by a paper about Negro Spirituals? My brothers and sisters, I will tell you.
The Spiritual is in the present, and the present is SACRED. That’s what Keith Miller
said, and that’s why my brain almost exploded. My students had been doing two web sites in
their Web Authoring course, and Two Robohelp projects in their Electronic communication
course. The first project is always a “fun project,” on any topic, using any media, and written just
for their own amusement or desire.
The first project (with few exceptions) is always stinky. It satisfies the minimum
requirements and specifications, but that’s all. It’s derivative, dull, silly, imitative, and crass. My
favorite band. My favorite Karaoke bar. My favorite movies. And so on.
The SECOND project, however, is MUCH better. It’s not just that it’s called
“The Professional Project,” or that it gets more points toward their grade. It’s got to be real. It’s
applied learning, and they—not I—make it great. They clean up the grammar, check the spelling
10 times, they create extra information, off-links I would never have thought of, incorporate
media in ways that they have to work to learn—sometimes picking the brains of more advanced
students in other classes. They do it because the main requirement of the assignment is that it be
REAL. For a local organization, business, institution, or group. It has to satisfy the assignment
requirements, but it also must satisfy the client. The assignmnet, I would argue, is sacred, not
because of its subject matter, specific requirements or its content, but because it is NOW. It is an
ACT that they are performing on the world, one that will have tangible results. Which may seem
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obvious, but goes back to my approach to the whole two-and-a-half BILLION blogs. With all
that noise and “content” pinging around the web, I keep coming back to it, because it helps me to
describe the notion of action – of conceiving our tech writing not as “content” or “design,” but as
something our texts DO for readers, rather than something they ARE.
[Insert clever quote by Habermas or someone equally smart]
[The following is something that I do—and I think we all do—when approaching different
courses we teach. I usually need to get my own thinking grounded in some philosophy or
theory that seems not just to make sense, but to HELP me in some way form a foundation
for students’ ways of digesting the materials and then developing their own methods and
strategies for inventing, drafting, and revising their web or help texts]
SLIDE----virtuality, cybertext, ergodic literature, and internetworked writing
I think I can support an argument, for purposes both rhetorical and critical, that the term
"internetworked symbolic action" is more sturdy and reliable for forming conceptual frameworks
that move our students with greater agility into the realm of writing in these online spaces than
other proposed and used terms. such as "virtuality," "cybertext," "ergodic literature," and
"internetworked writing."
SLIDE--Virtuality
"Virtuality" is an especially problematic term, particularly because it is arhetorical and illdefined. In The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard
Rheingold (1993) makes a less than comprehensive attempt to define "virtuality." To Rheingold,
"virtual" means "on the screen" – messages, narratives, thousands of lines of data, a future in
which information can be downloaded at unimaginable speeds – these things make geographical
location irrelevant. Rheingold illustrates that a downloaded amalgam of images and text that
converge on our desktops is an important key to virtuality. But I wish here to go further, to
uncover a deeper and broader understanding of virtuality.
Sherry Turkle (Life on the Screen, 1995) makes a case for equating virtuality with "a
culture of simulation in which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting
representations of reality for the real." Turkle is concerned largely with role play and identity,
centering the bulk of her writing on the culture of online real-time Multi-User Dimensions
(MOO/MUD), electronic gathering-places programmed with various textual objects, spaces,
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places, corridors, settings, and background narratives that users nevertheless insist upon calling
"virtual" rather than "textual” (233).
While Turkle does not make a conscious effort to conflate text and imagery, her
treatment of what has become an increasingly vague term, "virtuality" comes to mean all that
appears on the screen (and any accompanying sounds), all that is computer generated and
interpreted by human eye, ear, and brain. It is not so much a lack of precision as a feature of the
main focus of her work – social psychology – that renders the "virtual" merely an opposition to
the "real," or the "physical" objects and events in the everyday lives of people who are compelled
to spend significant amounts of time in front of their computers. Her project is the investigation
of their sense of being "in the computer," interacting through internetworked programming, or
immersed in sophisticated animated games that visually and aurally approximate the real – or
surreal – physical world.
In Burkean terms we could say that, as a psychologist, Turkle’s first obligation in her
study is to focus on man as the "psychological" animal (LSA 23), or in her capacity as a social
psychologist, to focus on the psycho-social content of the "virtual" experiences she details,
whereas a rhetorician’s study of these online phenomena requires what amounts to a greater
precision in terminology about language, in order to come to a "more general starting point," a
way into a discussion of symbolicity, that is, of human language.
In a sense, I am arguing about crocodiles, virtual crocodiles…and…well….even more
virtual crocodiles. I sometimes ask my students to differentiate the real from the virtual, by
setting up the discussion Turkle suggests: can we separate the biological species crocodile – the
real crocodile – from the Disneyland robotic crocodile, which could in some sense be considered
a "virtual" crocodile? And then do we further separate the animal and robot from the Peter Pan
film-animation crocodile – once again, another candidate for "virtuality." And finally, all of
those must be separated terministically once again from the textual crocodile in story-books. Just
as computerized robotic crocodiles or animated crocodiles appearing on a computer screen
present many crocodilian elements, their "crocodileness" does not share the particular kind of
symbolicity present in a textual crocodile.
When trying to nudge tech writers toward the idea of technical communication as
symbolic action, I sneak in some of Pierre Lévy’s thoughts. In Becoming Virtual (1998), Pierre
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Lévy concentrates recursively on the textual nature of "virtuality," and seems to be reaching for a
concept that equates with, or at least approximates, the “symbolicity” of language as action:
Language virtualizes a "real time" that holds the living captive in the here and now. In
doing so it opens up the past, the future, and time in general as a realm unto itself, a
dimension with a consistency of its own. Through the creation of language, we now
inhabit a virtual space – temporal flux taken as a whole – that the immediate present only
partially and fleetingly actualizes. (91)
Lévy’s ideas about virtuality and textuality, like Burke’s ideas about symbolic action, both
complicate and deepen our understanding of human symbolicity. Yet Lévy’s project is
philosophical, not rhetorical. "Virtuality" spills loosely into too many possible perlocutionary
directions, and thus will appear only sparingly in reference to online textual interactions,
primarily because "internetworked symbolic action" invokes the stasis and kairos of action,
while "virtuality" is an umbrella too large and too vague to be useful when we’re engaging in
rhetorical invention for our online technical writing assignments. If I were to say “Make it
virtual!”—I think my students would be justified in organizing a revolt.
SLIDE-----Cybertext and Ergodic Literature
"Internetworked Symbolic Action" is also much more useful for me as a framework in teaching
online technical writing than terms such as Espen Aarseth’s (1997) "Cybertext" and "Ergodic
Literature." While these terms have provided foundations for fruitful discussion of hypertext
fiction and other belletristic online texts, the terms are better applied in relation to literary
analysis than in rhetorical invention. Aarseth appropriates the term "ergodic" from physics,
stating that "In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the
text" (1). Although the study of online hypertext fictions, gaming scenarios, and other “ergodic”
works is worthwhile and valuable, I’m trying to teach my technical writers to lessen the amount
of effort required by readers to understand and respond to their texts. Internetworked Symbolic
Action, then, serves me as a tool for thinking about UN-complicating their texts.
SLIDE----Internetworked Writing
I do not, however, completely ever leave behind the concept of "internetworked writing,"
the terminology James Porter finds more appropriate and comfortable for rhetoricians who
analyze textual exchanges and interactions on the web. Instead of relying on terms such as
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"virtual interaction" or "CMC," Porter argues that "computer-networked activity is a type of
writing," and that is an important designation, especially when I am trying to create some kind of
balance in my technical communications classes. Students spend a huge portion of their lab time
learning and working with powerful software applications such as RoboHelp and Dreamweaver,
and it can sometimes require Herculean efforts to focus their attention on the issues of writing.
Part of what I’ve been attempting in my teaching and research is the importance of
realizing that the internet itself, even in its largest scope, is primarily a site of action, of
internetworked symbolic action. As internet commentator David Hudson (1997) has observed,
we are not always along the way careful to keep in mind what part of this textual interchange is
human, and which part is machine:
Granted, computers are changing our lives, but are they changing us? Our ability to
crunch bigger numbers faster means we can now walk around with our offices tucked
under our arms, but aren’t we still writing the same dumb memos to each other? Whether
we fear or embrace any new technological development, the extremity of our reaction is
directly proportionate to the inability to recognize that it is merely an extension of what
was already there. (121-122)
[aside—one reason the $100 computer idea bugs me….what do we DO when we distribute
these machines? Leave them in an ethical, technical, philosophical, and political void? Or
do they come with HUMAN guidance and interaction as well?]
Thus Porter’s conceptualization of "internetworked writing" folds into what I mean by
"internetworked symbolic action" (not motion). Language carried via the internet, and language
about the internet, is encased in various terministic screens both valorized and vilified in 20th
Century narratives about the computer sciences and the development of the internet. At the same
time we seek definitions, it is still not a bad idea to keep in mind the vision of hypertext inventor,
programmer and pioneer Tim Berners-Lee (1999): "[The internet] should be like clay to mold,
not sculpture to look at from a distance."
Which brings me back to my students and their RoboHelp/Dreamweaver projects. They
work so much harder, so much more diligently, with so much more HEART when the project is
what they deem “real” and for some PURPOSE than when it’s just the “Do a neat web site” kind
of assignment. There is something sacred, something more than just “internal” or “external”
motivation going on when student use of technology is fired by PURPOSE.
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In the “global scene” of pervasive technology Burke has also suggested a world in which
we see ourselves, our work, our values, connected strongly with ethics and values of “service”
and “use.” In a discussion of technical, professional writing, we might ask “What do people want
to do for one another?” If work is the valued term, and we’re all working to transmit ideas and
messages, we can concentrate finally upon a further question, “What kinds of motives help or
hinder such (ideally) ‘fraternal’ services?” (ATH, pp. 358-359).
[DIGRESSION]
As even the most hardened FBI hostage negotiator might tell us, it is impossible to go
into a hostile negotiation situation carrying the assumption that “hostage-takers are crazy, they
are criminals, and all we can do is kill them.” Since most hostages who are killed lose their lives
within the first 15 minutes, negotiators have learned to work from the outset with the assumption
that, even though the kidnappers may appear insane, and their acts may seem senseless to us, to
themselves they are making perfect sense. There is a logic operating somewhere, and it usually is
in line, albeit a warped and twisted line (from “our” perspective), with some ideal or justifiable
human goal. The job of the negotiator and her rhetorical strategies is not to force conventional
logic upon the assailants, but to quickly learn their point of view, to work through various
“clusters” of terms as they are voiced, so as to somehow find a common ground for negotiation
and resolution (Shell, 2000).
The reason this strategy has served in tense criminal situations is that human beings are,
as Burke so often reminds us, “rotten with perfection.” We internally align ourselves with “the
good” – even if that alignment does not match up with what “we” would consider to be logical,
right, or the cultural norm. To have any dialogue at all, to buy enough time to calm the urge to
act, one might say the negotiator is helping the hostage-taker to impose structures of logic that
lead him to delay and then to kill the urge to act upon the internal force of his attitudes.
That is to say, if writing is performing work or even service, then we can ask ourselves
whether or not the job is getting done in excellent, fine, or just mediocre ways. We can jump into
the contentious, professional, “public sphere” with our rhetorical tools and devices, to complete
the work, perform the services entrusted to us…except that students often are left with a limited
repertoire of strategies for doing so in the small, cramped, pixellated spaces of the computer
screen.
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SLIDE----SO WHAT????
I’m getting to that!
So with all of this theorizing about the sacred present, purpose, motive, and Burkean
Symbolic Action…what did I decide to do?
First of all, it seems ethical and necessary to remind students of the implications of
textual and rhetorical power. As Chaim Perelman puts it:
The form is not separable from the content; language is not a veil which one need only
discard or render transparent in order to perceive the real as such; it is inextricably bound
up with a point of view, with the taking of a position. (53)
Especially when we discuss online writing, my students often engage in animated talk about the
many bizarre ways online texts can be misconstrued, decontextualized and passed along (via
email, etc), and just plain botched. We try to remind each other about the difference between
being misunderstood by three people who read a rhetorically inappropriate memorandum, and
being misunderstood by millions of people in the public sphere, online.
The next thing I’ve been working on just as a teacher, coach, and facilitator, is making
adjustments in my own conceptualization of what I understand to be the “public sphere.” My
previous, tacit working definition of the public sphere had been something benign and nebulous,
like: “information and ideas made available to all people in free, uncensored societies.” But that
seemed, even to me, to be both inadequate and naïve. Instead, now, in class I toss out the notion
that writing for the web, as a public endeavor, is actually writing for public consumption, and
that the public sphere is no picnic in the park. Citing Sue Thomas’ good (Sept 2004) essay (in the
British Journal of Educational Studies) on Reconfiguring the public sphere in analysis of
education, I ask students to consider that the “public sphere” as we know it on the internet, is
perhaps not so much a meadow, as it is a mosh pit:
…the structured setting where cultural or ideological contest or negotiation among a
variety of publics takes place’ (Eley, 1992, p. 306). It is conceived as a fluid structure,
changing over time in response to many influences including politics and public policy,
and always constituted by conflict, which in turn shapes social relations. (Thomas 231)
Or in the words of John T. Gage: “knowledge can be considered as something that people do
together, rather than as something which any one person, outside of any discourse, has. (207)
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And so I have begun to put together a modest project, one based on the idea that
language, ideas, and knowledge are not something we have but something we do. My premise
when asking them to put together their final projects, is not to tell them “what I want,” or “what
they need” to do to their web or help projects. Rather, the recurring theme, the continual
interrogation (and sometimes the running joke) in the lab where my classes meet, is that when
students have questions or want feedback on their work, my first inquiry will likely be:
What are you trying to do? What does this section have to accomplish?
Initially taken aback, the technical communicators quickly rally and find themselves shifting
perspective, and tossing aside their “student” personae. They become the DOERS and
innovators, rather than reactionaries, or worse, drones hoisting the bales and toting the barges of
bedrudged discourse.
And now I’ve wistfully begun a new project, and I would welcome feedback, questions,
and comments. I noticed when talking to my students about invention and revision for their
online texts, they frequently can see that their writing needs work, and they request stylistic help.
Having found my link to the Silva Rhetorica web site, a few will occasionally surf the site—
especially the endless catalog of tropes and schemes—in awe and fascination. However, if I
suggest that they might use these patterns and strategies in their own writing, they become
intimidated, primarily, I have found, because the list is so dauntingly huge, and not only that, it’s
in GREEK. Where to begin? I finally decided that perhaps I could help them not only learn a bit
about tropes and schemes as analytical tools, but also as tools for communicating in attentiongrabbing ways in the small spaces on the computer screen.
But…well….there’s just all this darn GREEK.
Before I had any idea what I was actually doing, I simply started to gather tropes and
schemes into my own bank of textfiles—except that they are organized not by the Greek
alphabet, their literary qualities. Primarily, I gathered them and filed them by the acts they
commit or facilitate. Again…thinking of discourse as symbolic action, I was merely filing them
as “repetition—kinds of,” “substitute repugnant word,” or “concede then assert” and so on.
I’ve stolen from several web sites and sources, stolen the catalogs of classical tropes and
schemes. I did so, because I was looking for some real patterns and strategies for students to find,
discuss, and then perhaps try out in their own online texts. I was looking for ways they could
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somehow “push” their information and ideas into the public sphere without resorting only to the
most familiar strategies of television advertisers and broadcast journalists:
Mythos and logos, story and essay—all texts use tropes. In composition studies, however,
we seem to have embraced the plain style and the logical organization of ideas as ideals.
But writers who advocate a plain style or a logical organization of ideas depend as much
on tropes and topoi as do writers who advocate other styles and modes of organizing
texts. In so-called non fictional or logical discourse, the figures are displaced into the
interior of the text. On the surface of the text, the patterns appear to be literal and
abstract. In fictional discourse, however, the figures are foregrounded on the surface of
the text where their figurality seems to call attention to itself. But as Paul de Man and
other critics have pointed out, nonfictional discourse is no less tropological or allegorical
than literary discourse. [D’Angelo, Frank “Tropics of Arrangement: A Theory of
Dispositio.” (JAC 10.0) (1990)]
I realize they are already online, and in books from Aristotle, Cicero, the ad Herennium, and
Quintillian—not to mention Ed P.J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student.
SLIDE---SILVA RHETORICA
Not to mention the wonderful online resources, the most popular of which is probably BYU’s
Silva Rhetorica.
The project I propose, is to have students work on some stylistic resources, a knowledge-bank of
tropes, schemes, and other STYLISTIC STRATEGIES they can use, based not upon their usual
alphabetization by their Greek names:
SLIDE---GREEK TERMS
The wonderful categories of E.W. Bullinger are more helpful (at least for undergraduates), than
the Greek alphabetization. The Bullinger list on Silva Rhetorica has 98 terms listed
alphabetically, in English.
SLIDE---ENGLISH TERMS
Even with this catalog, my undergraduate writers are often daunted by the Silva Rhetorica site.
They know there’s great stuff there—wonderful ideas about how to pack intense amounts of
meaning into those little frames-on-screens—even this resource can be daunting and difficult for
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them to use when they’re writing. It’s not that they are apathetic—they have the fire of purpose
under their seats—it’s that the terminologies are not always helpful.
So my project, simple as it may seem, is for this coming school year to have my students
help me assemble a flash-help web site that categorizes stylistic constructions, tools, strategies—
yes, tropes, schemes, and other figures—into indexed, searchable categories and headings that
privilege PURPOSE rather than the endless, impossible catalogs of Greek and Latin
nomenclature. While working on another project, I put together—for my own purposes—a huge
bank of 236 text files, categorizing revision strategies, sentence types, tropes, and schemes by
how they function rather than by greek names. In essence, I’ve simply extended Bullinger’s
project into the 21st Century. What I’d like now, is some feedback.
[Describe my plans for the following semesters]
HAIL MARY AND SHOW THE ROBOHELP PROJECT!
THE PLAN:
1. Introduce it as a class exercise or low-stakes assignment for Advanced Comp and Intro to
Web writing
2. Each student will get ONE trope, scheme, sentence type, or strategy
3. Each student will work with codex texts, online research, and other media to develop a
useful 1) explanation and 2) examples for using their topic as an invention tool.
4. The goal is not to be “precise” in their definition of “antanaclassis” or “paranomasia,” but
to help a writer USE the topic for invention and/or revision.