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Оглавление2 Multimodal Public Rhetoric and the Problem of Access
Public rhetoric is increasingly dominated by centralized commercial media. Many important channels of communication—spanning across film, TV, radio, and print media—are owned and operated by a small number for-profit firms. This reality severely limits who can enter into public conversations and on what terms. Conditions dictating access, however, are not fixed, but are always shifting, always in a state of flux. Changes in cultural practices and in communication technologies open new opportunities even as they foreclose others. The nineteenth century saw the invention of the camera, for instance, potentially opening up new forms of visual expression for public rhetors. A kairotic approach demands that we see each moment as, to some degree, new—characterized by new opportunities as well as new constraints. But this is much easier to say than to do. In this chapter, we attempt to confront the complex and shifting nature of access as it relates to material, cultural, and pedagogical conditions.
The Wonder of It All: Confronting Rhetorical Options in a Moment of Crisis
In our introduction, we called attention to a new kind of printer that outputs fully-formed, three-dimensional plastic prototypes. We posed a few questions for rhetorical practitioners, theorists, and educators: Do you plan to integrate 3D printing into your rhetorical practices, models, and classrooms? Why or why not? How would you make such a decision? Why should printers that output ink on paper be privileged over printers that output 3D plastic prototypes?
We use the 3D printer as an example precisely because it combines the familiar with the strange. Printers have become a normalized technology in writing instruction, evolving seamlessly (or so it might appear) from earlier technologies like the typewriter. Yet we expect that many readers will laugh at the proposition that this new kind of printer—which produces not words on a page, but 3D plastic prototypes—is relevant to composition students, teachers, or theorists.
We are not interested, here, in advocating for the adoption of 3D printers. Rather, we aim to focus on the broader intellectual problem that scholars and practitioners face when confronted with new rhetorical options in an era of rapid cultural and technological change. Technologies (like 3D printers) that appear marginal, esoteric, and laughable one day appear mainstream, common, and important the next. Given that, how do we decide what to emphasize in our rhetorical theories, pedagogies, and actions?
This is a sobering question to us—partly because it speaks to the question of access. We can’t teach everything, especially in an era when new technologies continually make available new options. But the decision to teach certain genres, modes, media, and technologies instead of other available options constitutes an important cultural intervention. Every time we select a particular rhetorical option to teach, we intervene in two ways: we give students opportunities to practice that option and we normalize it. Conversely, when we decide not to teach an option, we withhold from students the opportunity to practice that option and we marginalize it. Whether or not rhetors see 3D rhetoric as a productive rhetorical option depends in part on whether the sum total of their educational experiences has provided them with the necessary knowledge and competencies to use 3D rhetoric effectively. But it also depends on whether rhetors view 3D rhetoric as a legitimate option to begin with, and this legitimacy derives, in part, from the way 3D rhetoric is (or is not) treated in institutionally sanctioned spaces of education (e.g., first-year writing).
In an age of rapid technological change, new rhetorical options become available daily. We can chose to ignore them, to rely on established traditions and practices that have become comfortable to us, but this runs counter to a kairotic approach. According to Eric Charles White, a commitment to kairos demands that we be willing to suspend accustomed habits of thinking and interrogate the moment to see what new possibilities it contains:
[K]airos regards the present as unprecedented, as a moment of decision, a moment of crisis, and considers it impossible, therefore, to intervene successfully in the course of events merely on the basis of past experience. How can one make sense of a world that is eternally new simply by repeating the readymade categories of tradition? Tradition must answer to the present, must be adapted to new circumstances that may modify or even disrupt received knowledge. Rather than understand the present solely in terms of the past, one should seek to remain open to an encounter with the unforeseen spontaneity we commonly describe as the “mother of invention.” (14)
Honoring kairos, then, has a destabilizing effect, forcing us to question past practices in light of new possibilities. In an age of rapid technological change, these new possibilities include things like 3D printers, wrap-around virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and other options that at first seem strange, newfangled, irrelevant.
Diana George, in “Wonder of It All: Computers, Writing Centers, and the New World,” eloquently captures the stunning effect of rapid technological change. George observes that “[c]hange is difficult, mostly because we just don’t know how to change” (331). Drawing on the work of Stephen Greenblatt, George suggests that our encounter with new technologies is analogous to Europeans’ encounter with the so-called “new world” (332). The “wonder and amazement” that accompanied this encounter induced a kind of cultural and intellectual paralysis, akin, as Greenblatt puts it, to “the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole momentarily convulsed” (qtd. in George 332). Likewise as we encounter the new world of emergent technologies “we are in danger of either recreating the old or staring at the new in wonder” (333). The only cure for this paralysis the hard intellectual work that enables us to make sense of this “new world.” We need “theory building” for without it, “we have no way of understanding the New World—the world of marvels, of wonder” (334).
This chapter heeds George’s call for theory building. We offer a four-part heuristic aimed at supporting a kairotic approach—an approach, that is, in which we experience each moment as a moment of crisis, full of possibilities that might not be self-evident. Our heuristic derives from analysis of earlier moments in history when new rhetorical technologies, namely the still camera and the movie camera, emerged as tools potentially available to public rhetors. Before we turn to these old new technologies, however, we want to establish a more general understanding of the dynamics of access and the way recent developments in media technologies are shifting those dynamics.
Two Technological Divides
In recent years, it has become common to refer to the “digital divide”—the gap between the technological “haves” and “have nots.” Discussions of this divide often suffer from simplistic, acultural understandings of technology and from an uncritical reliance on problematic constructions of race and class. As Barbara Monroe and others demonstrate, much “digital divide” discourse relies on “bootstraps” narratives in which success is the simple result of an individual’s hard work. In this formulation, once the “have nots” are given computers they will automatically secure lucrative jobs and a high quality of life. And if they don’t, it’s their own fault (Monroe 5–30).
The issue of access is further complicated by another kind of “divide.” The rise of technologically-intensive mass media (e.g., TV, film, print media, and the Web) has meant that culturally important channels of communication have increasingly been owned by large, centralized, for-profit media firms. These firms command resources of capital, technology, and talent that far exceed what ordinary people possess. We now take it for granted that media conglomerates (e.g., Time Warner, Disney, and News Corp.) have access to vastly more resources than ordinary people, but this system is not inevitable, nor is it universal throughout human history (see, for instance, Hauser, Vernacular 14–24).
Many media scholars have explored the problems of a system that relies on centralized, conglomerated, and commercialized media institutions (see Bagdikian; Eberly, “Rhetoric”; Habermas, Structural; Hauser, Vernacular; Herman and Chomsky; Howley; Keane; Louw; McChesney; Norris). Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, for instance, argue that the post 1980 period, marked by neoliberal politics of deregulation and globalization, has resulted in a significant erosion if not wholesale annihilation of the public sphere. The centralization of the media industry from fifty companies in the early 1980s to eight transnational conglomerates in 2002 has allowed what Kevin Robins and Frank Webster refer to as “the displacement of a political public sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture” (qtd. in Herman and Chomsky xviii). Robert W. McChesney draws similar conclusions in The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century, arguing that neoliberal policies of deregulation and globalization have strengthened the cultural power of advertising and marketing, thereby allowing consumerism to overtake public interest.
As Fraser observes, the cultural marginalization of some groups is “amplified” by the reality that “the media that constitute the material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit” (64–65). Similarly, Eberly alludes to this problem when she quotes a lengthy passage from McChesney that is worth repeating here:
The market is in fact a highly flawed regulatory mechanism for a democracy. In markets, one’s income and wealth determine one’s power. It is a system of “one dollar, one vote” rather than “one person, one vote.” Viewed in this manner, the market is more a plutocratic mechanism than a democratic one. In communication this means that the emerging system is tailored to the needs of business and the affluent. . . . The market is assumed to be a neutral and value-free regulatory mechanism. In fact . . . a commercial “marketplace” of ideas has a strong bias toward rewarding ideas supportive of the status quo and marginalizing socially dissident views. Markets tend to reproduce social inequality economically, politically, and ideologically. (qtd. in “Rhetoric” 297)
As solutions to the problems of corporatized and centralized mass media, a number of theorists have proposed more effective governmental regulation and the importance of publicly owned media (see, for instance, Keane; McChesney). These are important components of a solution, but there are other possibilities to consider as well. Without buying into the myth that “[t]he Internet . . . will set us free,” we would like to summarize the ways new technologies potentially open up new forms of access to various and overlapping publics and counterpublics (McChesney 10).
Shifting Dynamics of Access: Can You Remember the Twentieth Century?
At heart, industrializing communicative processes (beginning with newspapers, but reaching its zenith with television) led to mass communication, which is inherently top-down and manipulative. Industrialization reduced the spaces for ‘ordinary’ people (non-professional communicators) to engage in meaning-making as anything other than audience.
—Eric Louw
Many new developments in rhetorical practices that have been enabled by emergent technologies—despite their newness—have already become so naturalized that it’s easy to overlook their significance. Think, for instance, of how routine the posting and sharing of videos has become in the era of YouTube. It requires serious effort to recall the pre-Web, pre-home computer era. In this context, it is interesting to revisit works like Richard A. Lanham’s The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, which attempt to record important shifts in access brought about by digital technologies. Lanham’s work is suffused with a kind of wonder that emerges from the way new digital technologies make available forms of visual, musical, and multimodal expression that had previously been reserved for highly trained specialists. “Digitization,” Lanham writes, “has rendered the world of music-making infinitely more accessible to people who before had not the talent or the resources to make music and hear how it sounds” (107). More generally, the personal computer can be seen as a “way to open levels of symbolic transformation . . . to people hitherto shut out from this world” (108).
A full understanding of access needs to include attention to the full cycle of rhetorical circulation, including production, reproduction, and distribution. In the case of mass media, each stage of the process is associated with a unique set of barriers. Successful TV and film production, for instance, has historically required expensive cameras, lights, microphones, editing equipment and so on; these technologies, in turn, required sound technicians, lighting technicians, camera operators, editors, and other specialists. Likewise, producing sophisticated print artifacts (e.g., magazines, brochures, books) required access to cameras, printing presses, inks, papers, die cutters, and more; a sophisticated print artifact might require the contributions of copywriters, graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, typesetters, and press operators.
Shifting attention to the way mass media compositions were reproduced and distributed reveals yet another set of variables that limit access. Once a film (for instance) was created, it was expensive and difficult to get it to audiences. Professional production companies had elaborate, resource-intensive systems for copying reels of film and distributing them to theaters, which themselves were increasingly owned by regional and national chains, and which contained expensive, highly specialized equipment (e.g., projectors, screens, sound systems).
The question of access is further complicated by problems related to the specific nature of certain media technologies themselves. Many mass media platforms were designed to facilitate few-to-many rather than many-to-many communication. As Bertolt Brecht observed eighty years ago:
The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. (2)
Echoing Brecht, Hans Magnus Enzensberger contends that “[i]n its present form, equipment like television or film does not serve communication but prevents it. It allows no reciprocal action between transmitter and receiver” (97).
As many have noted, however, emergent technologies are fundamentally altering the dynamics of access by providing nonspecialists the resources necessary to produce, reproduce, and distribute rhetorically effective multimodal compositions (see, for instance, Anderson; Gershenfeld; Lanham, Electronic; Poster; Shirky). The personal computer allows lay actors to manipulate visual and aural semiotic elements in ways historically reserved for highly-trained specialists. Communicators who hope to make use of photographs, for instance, can turn to a host of free or inexpensive applications that provide access to a palette of options previously reserved for darkroom specialists: enlarging, cropping, adjusting color and contrast, and more. Likewise, many of the editing operations crucial to rhetorically effective uses of film—the ability to sequence footage, to cut between shots, to add music and voiceovers—are now easy to perform using a standard computer and free or inexpensive software. In unprecedented numbers, nonspecialists have access to applications that allow us to draw, paint, compose music, create animations, and even design and manufacture three-dimensional objects.
Problems related to reproduction and distribution are also increasingly addressed by the Internet and other digital technologies. Communicators can distribute a wide range of multimodal content via the Internet for a tiny fraction of what it would have cost in the past. Colors, images, and other semiotic elements do not add to the cost of reproducing digital compositions. A standard personal computer, configured as a Web server, can distribute millions of copies of a webpage without incurring additional cost. In contrast to TV, film, or radio, content on the Internet can be made available twenty-four hours a day without adding significant costs and without displacing other content. Even print documents are cheaper to produce, reproduce, and distribute than they were only a few years ago. A full-color brochure can be distributed to a wide audience as a PDF document. End users can output the composition on their own inkjet printers, which are now capable of producing sophisticated documents that include color, font, layout, photographs, charts, and more. Moreover, the concerns articulated by Brecht and Enzensberger are partially addressed by the Internet, which, in contrast to traditional radio and television, is a many-to-many, rather than a one-to-many technology. The predominant metaphor for new media is not a pipeline distributing content from a central location, but a web or network that connects multiple users to each other.
To sum up, recent technological changes mean that across a wide range of media, from videos to posters, production is cheaper and easier, reproduction is cheaper and easier, and distribution is cheaper and easier. Public rhetors potentially(!) have access to powers of production, reproduction, and distribution that only a few years ago were not readily available outside of commercial media. As Mark Poster writes, the Internet “radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film-making, radio and television broadcasting” (211). It is now possible to talk about the “demassification” and “mass amateurization” of media—to borrow terms from Bruce McComiskey (“Visual” 199) and Clay Shirky respectively.
As the preceding discussion should make clear, we are very interested in new media and the way new technologies open up new possibilities for rhetorical action, but we use the lens of new media generatively (to make visible more options) rather than as a filter (to reduce options). While new media may have distinct affordances, we are not suggesting that any category of media is preferable for all rhetorical situations. The term new media is typically reserved for practices that are “purely” digital, such as digital video, digital animation, webpages, virtual reality, etc.; however, focusing too narrowly on digitality is problematic. Sometimes “old media” options are better, and many compelling options are hybrid forms. Desktop publishing, for instance, ultimately leads to hardcopy ink-on-paper compositions, but the production of hardcopies is made much easier by the fact that the design process takes place within the digital environments provided by graphic design software. In chapter 4, we examine a case in which a message is communicated through a complex rhetorical chain that includes electronic and faxed (i.e., hard copy-to-digital-to-hard copy) press advisories, live performances, and alphabetic-photographic accounts published in both print and online newspapers. The approach we advocate is not characterized by a single-minded allegiance to new media, but by a commitment to a deep process of rhetorical invention that takes into account all available options.
Invisible Tools: A Short History of Cameras
In the previous section, we focused narrowly on technologies themselves. Our goal was to review the way recent technological shifts alter the dynamics of access, partially upsetting asymmetries between the power of large, conglomerated, for-profit media firms and ordinary people. As Barbara Jean Monroe observes, however, technologies do not exist in a vacuum. Reminding us that class inequality “is at once economic, racial, discursive, and epistemological in character,” Monroe suggests that “[r]esituating the [digital] divide within the landscape of larger social and political formations should allow for a richer, more complicated discussion of a host of issues that attach themselves to Internet access per se but are actually constituted by these larger formations” (5). To better understand the way technologies are inextricably linked to the cultural, the social, and the discursive, it is useful to examine the adoption of earlier media tools: the analog still camera and the motion picture camera. An examination of how these older tools were and were not assimilated reveals important insights into how both cultural and material logics circumscribe the adoption of emergent technologies and rhetorics.
In his 1909 talk “Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift,” reform photographer Lewis Hine implores his audience to use photography as a political tool. Visual rhetoric, Hine claims, “brings one immediately into close touch with reality” and the photograph in particular “has an added realism of its own,” an “inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration” (111). Hine remarks that although his own era belongs to the “specialist,” there is much to be gained “by the popularizing of camera work” (112).
Contemporary theorists like John Tagg and Don Slater agree with Hine’s earlier assessment that the camera, in the hands of ordinary citizens, can be a powerful political tool. In Slater’s words,
the camera as an active mass tool of representation is a vehicle for documenting one’s conditions (of living, working and sociality); for creating alternative representations of oneself and one’s sex, class, age-group, race, etc.; of gaining power . . . over one’s image; of presenting arguments and demands; of stimulating action. (290)
Slater and Tagg, however, both argue that the political potential of the camera has not been fully realized. To be clear, Slater and Tagg are not arguing that ordinary citizens have never used cameras for political or activist purposes. Instead, they are making a more general claim about the way a number of material and cultural pressures circumscribe political uses of the camera.
Tagg explains that technologies relevant to the photographic process “only passed into popular hands in the crudest sense of the term” and important “technical and cultural knowledge” remained unavailable to ordinary camera-users (17, 18). Anyone could snap a photograph, but in the age of film-based photography, most camera-users did not (for instance) own a darkroom equipped with the chemicals, enlargers, papers, and filters necessary to take advantage of the full range of photographic expression. Instead, most amateur photographers had their prints developed at local photomarts, thereby relinquishing the ability to make the rhetorical decisions that professional photographers routinely made in the darkroom: the ability to adjust contrast and tonality, to make precise determinations about how an image is cropped, to select an appropriate size and shape for the print, and more. Moreover, photography has been situated within a cultural hierarchy that privileged professionals and artists while it relegated amateurs to the domain of “kitsch” (19).
Slater examines other forces that have limited the ability of nonspecialists to deploy in photographic rhetoric, pointing to the effects of “high pressure mass marketing of photographic equipment” that relegates the use of cameras to nonpolitical purposes (290). Slater concludes that the “enormous productive power” of the camera “is effectively contained as a conventionalized, passive, privatized and harmless leisure activity. The mass of photography—snapshooting—is hardly a conscious activity at all: it is an undeliberated moment spliced into the flow of certain ritual events: watching the baby, being at a tourist site, spending Sunday with the grandparents” (289; see also, Tagg 18).
The case of the motion picture camera is strikingly parallel to the case of the still camera. Early on, observers were aware that the movie camera could potentially be appropriated by ordinary citizens to effect social change (Winston 67). As Brian Winston and others have demonstrated, however, a complex set of cultural and material pressures severely curtailed radical use of the movie camera and related technologies. Winston argues against the “technological determinist view” that sees technologies as having self-evident and self-realizing potentials. In this view, “[w]hat the technology can deliver is what the technology will deliver” (86). “On the contrary,” Winston argues, “technology is always responsive to forces outside itself” (86). The practice of using 35mm film is a case in point. Winston shows that the 35mm standard was perpetuated not because of “utility” but because of “unexamined cultural prejudice” including technology developers’ tendency “to work with film strips in culturally familiar widths” (59). Initially the result of a one-inch wide image plus sprocket holes, the 35mm standard was “naturalized” and continued to be enforced throughout subsequent decades. Amateurs paid the price for this naturalization. Using 35mm film, “required cameras (and, of course, projectors) somewhat too large to be sold to the public, inhibiting the growth of amateur cinematography” (60).
Eventually alternate standards more conducive to amateur cinematography were developed—16mm and 8mm films that were less expensive and more portable—but these formats were seen as substandard and nonserious. Echoing Slater’s analysis of the still camera, Patricia Rodden Zimmermann shows that the “definition” of nonprofessional use of film “narrowed . . . to a nonserious, leisure-time activity bolstering family solidarity and consumption” (145). Amateur film was “marginalized . . . as a hobby to fill up leisure time and as a retreat from social and political participation” (145–46). This marginalization was not inevitable, but was accomplished through the complex set of cultural and material forces, including “[t]echnical standards, aesthetic norms, socialization pressures, and political goals derailed its cultural construction into a privatized, almost silly, hobby” (157). Despite these pressures, Zimmermann ends with the hope that future constructions of amateur film “may liberate it as a more accessible and meaningful form of personal expression and social and political intervention” (157).
The same cultural pressures that limited the political use of cameras remain operational in the digital age. Apple, for instance, has developed a remarkable suite of applications packaged as iLife. These applications include tools for archiving and manipulating still images, making videos, composing music, and burning DVDs, but they are marketed via images of leisure-time consumption that recall the Kodak marketing Slater discusses. A recent advertisement asks, for instance, “What if you could command an entire world of music, photos, movies and DVDs—all from your sofa? Now you can share the good life with friends and family on a . . . new iMac G5” (“Mac Expo”). Like the camera, iLife is positioned within a discourse that tends to render it politically innocuous rather than one that underscores its radical possibilities. GarageBand, an iLife application for composing music, seems to locate itself, by its very name, in the domain of trivial recreation rather than serious social action.
The evolution of digital technologies themselves also strikingly echoes the evolution of the camera. Slater notes that in its pursuit of the widest possible market share, Kodak’s goal was to make the camera as easy to use as possible. This imperative simultaneously resulted in cameras that were more restrictive (lacking features and settings available to professionals) and in consumption practices characterized by unthinking, unreflective use. “Point-and-shoot” became both a technical achievement and a (passive, depoliticized) mode of use. Likewise, newer versions of iMovie lack useful features available in older versions, rendering it easier to use, but more restrictive. That is, certain rhetorical options that were available in earlier versions were lacking or more difficult to access in later versions.
To sum up: the cases of the still and movie cameras reveal that a complex web of forces interact to shape the way a technology is developed and adopted. Technologies never have a completely independent “life of their own”; they do not inevitably yield their full potential to society (Winston 86). Instead, a constellation of cultural and material factors influence how they are used and by whom. To operationalize the full potential of technologies on behalf of social justice, we need to better understand the material-cultural dynamics that govern the development and uses of technologies. Slater, following Raymond Williams, observes, “any medium must be analysed not only in terms of its present use (a restriction which encourages technologism) but also in terms of its potential forms” (289-90, emphasis added).
