Understanding(?) Visual Rhetoric

Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. « "Everything changes, and we change with it."

Mary Hock’s intentions with her essay, and the intentions of our course as a whole, can be summarized in a similar (but more technically stated) sentence: "As writing technologies change, they require changes in our understanding of writing and rhetoric and, ultimately, in our writing pedagogy."

Hocks believes that the "approach to pedagogy suggests that students can work from within their diverse cultures and multiple identities using their own languages as well as their everyday lived experiences to design new kinds of knowledge." Students have learned to adapt to this new language, have learned to speak it, and are conveying ideas through this digital rhetoric to their peers and the world.

In her essay, “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments,” Hocks states that because modern tech presents information as being simultaneously verbal, visual, and interactive, digital rhetoric is simply assumed. We have developed an understanding of the way information is fed to us because we understand that the method has evolved and we have evolved our understanding of it accordingly.

And apparently our posture has suffered for it

The art of communicating a set of ideas digitally, (digital rhetoric) is broken down by Hocks into three elements:

The Audience Stance, or How the Content Reaches the Audience and the Different Ways the Audience Is or Is Not Allowed to Interact With It

The purpose of the Audience Stance is to give the reader a purpose. By making the reader feel important, the reader is more likely to stay and engage with the information being presented. By giving options of charts and visuals and chapters and scroll bars, the reader is giving multiple avenues to pursue their consumption of the information. The control over how the content is read is given to the reader, not the writer. It gives the reader a sort of "choose your own adventure" sense of how they wish to go on in their pursuit of knowledge.

Written when Wikipedia was in its infancy, this article couldn't possible predict the degree of audience participation such a sprawling project would come to promote. The audience is given total creative freedom of the website’s content. User generated and user uploaded hyperlinks, visuals, and charts are abound. Many a night has been spent just perusing through Wiki’s expansive database of information as one article links to another which links to another and so on and so forth.  Wikipedia is the prodigal son of audience participation in digital rhetoric.

"I have come back after seeing the world, father. And it is full of trolls"

And let’s not forget YouTube! Thought this article was published a full two years before YouTube went live, the audience factor of letting viewers tell stories in a purely visual design with little to no written/verbal design to carry a point was revolutionary. Nowhere else was it so easy and user friendly to spread images and video throughout cyberspace at little to no complex effort on behalf of the audience.

Like, NO effort. At all.

Transparency, or The Similarities Between the Physical Thing and the Digital Approximation of the Thing

To allow an easier interface with the audience, digital presentation of information closely resembles a physical presentation of a similar type of information. Why do arrows work to convey the message of moving from one place to another? Why does the notepad on an iPhone look like a physical legal pad? Why do pages in an e-book still flip like real pages?

Consumers have trapped themselves in Catch-22s where they want the digital approximation of the functionality to be easier and more accessible than the physical functionality itself, while still being recognizable - despite the fact that being recognizable may make it less efficient and the elements making it recognizable are completely superfluous.

If Apple was to change designs of certain apps for functionality, it would lose the nostalgic connection people feel to the physical things the digital item is replicating. The goal of transparency seems to be to erase the boundary in the consumer’s mind that differentiates a digital approximation of the functionality with the real world item used to carry out that particular functionality nondigitally.

Yesterday…All my troubles seemed so far away…

Hybridity, or The Multifaceted Marriage Between Visual and Verbal Design

By offering more than one method of providing the audience information, digital rhetoric gives way to a sensory overload of ways to enjoy the information. Tying into the Audience Stance, multiple venues of interaction and presentation convey a single message to the audience who then choose their method of digesting the information.

"Writers now engage in what Porter calls “internetworked writing”—writing that involves the intertwining of production, interaction, and publication in the online classroom or professional workplace as well as advocating for one’s online audiences." Everything is interconnected to convey one solid batch of information to the audience seeking it.

Uh, whatever that information might actually be...

In conclusion, in teaching students digital rhetoric and all its elements (Audience Stance, Transperancy, and Hybridity), students must also be taught both critique and design. They must learn to critically analyze a subject in terms of its past (critique) and its future potential (design) in order to best speak the language of this digital rhetoric.