Mary E. Hocks’ “Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments” provided an imaginative insight into an area previously neglected in terms of digital media. Hocks details three foundational components to the structure of digital media: Audience Stance, Transparency, and Hybridity. When Hocks discusses the Audience Stance process, Hocks involves that the particular process involves “the ways in which the audience is invited to participate in online documents” (pg. 632). In the digital age we live currently in in the year of 2013, I believe that to be a very notable example as today we see internet websites that structure their webpages to be more inviting for more traffic. These new structures include the ability to link out to new websites; to share a particular story’s information, RSS feeds, being able to share the webpage content on social networking sites akin to Facebook and Twitter.
Alongside these features, the ‘comment’ section provides the audience an opportunity to directly respond rhetorically to the information directly in front of them. Within the comment ability on standard webpages now commonplace, the opportunity for the discussion to continue between those who have taken in the information will provide added insights, interpretations and new viewpoints never before considered. Additionally, the authors themselves can directly respond to comments made on their work, which can lead to a student/teacher lecture scenario playing out directly in the comment section. When Hock discusses the Hybridity concept, she discusses it as “the way in which online documents combine and construct visual and verbal designs” (pg. 632). An example of this can be seen on the front page of the sports centered Bleacher Report. The links on pictures and texts send the reader to articles that directly correlate for the information requested. The top of the home page for Bleacher Report displays a wide array of sports like the NFL (representing Professional Football), NBA (representing Professional Basketball), WWE (representing Professional Wrestling) and so on. Below those links for individual sports home pages are pictures and headline links for developing sports stories. Within the world of NFL for example, clicking on the picture can link to an article within the site.
Mary Hocks states that today’s generations of students and knowledge seekers effortlessly incorporate text and visual rhetoric when sharing information. This creates the need for educators in the future to understand how to both of the mediums (text and visual) correlate with each other in an academic setting. Hocks adds that teachers for years have been accustomed to only teaching the text-based rhetoric, leaving visual rhetoric uncharted territory for a majority of educators, widening the already huge gap in the teacher/student learning relationship. Integrating the inform structure of a Bleacher Report or any online news-sharing website in the classroom, the aforementioned gap will recede. Allowing students the opportunity to provide a visual element to aid them in telling their text-based story and vice-versa provides a very valuable lesson in understanding why there is a rhetorical difference in what something may have said as opposed to what is actually being said.
The shift from solely writing to a more balanced system of design and text was covered and explained by Hock when she stated, “critiquing and producing writing in digital environments actually offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important new pedagogy of writing as design” (pg. 632). Hock goes on to state “To establish a balanced rhetorical approach, then, we must offer students experiences both in the analytic process of critique, which scrutinizes conventional expectations and power relations, and in the transformative process of design, which can change power relations by creating a new vision of knowledge” (pg. 644-645). I believe that when projects require a design presentation in an otherwise textual base, writers must take their audience into consideration, construct a fluid combination of visual and verbal arguments, which will then lead to the creation of new knowledge and information. By enabling students to become technological designers of multi-genre and multimodal texts, pictures, and video, the ability for students to voice their ideas and opinions through a new medium and become an integral part of the learning and information sharing process.
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