Author: Derek Mueller

Acknowledgement We thank all contributors of the 14th Blog Carnival––Jim Brown, Amber Buck, Amelia Chesley, Sergio Figueiredo, Jennifer Juszkiewicz, Kim Lacey, Megan McIntyre, Derek Mueller, Scott Sundvall, and Sara West––for their perspectives and engaging discussion on the states of digital rhetorics. Just before the end of summer, we shared a CFP calling for critical reflections that would help update our understanding of digital rhetorics. We are excited to curate ten blog posts that have made plausible attempts to revisit digital rhetorics’ pasts, examine its current influence, and speculate possible futures. DRC’S First Blog Carnival In an effort to account for…

Considering the wide horizon of digital rhetorics’ fu-fu-futures, I have settled in this entry on a speculative question about availability. Classically, availability chimes to Aristotle’s “available means,” and while this phrase, available means, is fair weather for forecasting digital rhetorics ever-expanding operations, in a closely related sense, availability refers to operations more barometrically tempestuous, lesser predictable capacities for engagement, attentional and discursive and affective. In a 2018 RSQ article, “The Digital: Rhetoric Behind and Beyond the Screen,” Casey Boyle, Steph Ceraso, and Jim Brown introduce an emerging quality for digital rhetorics in the concept of transduction: “Transduction refers to how…

Call for Contributions to DRC Blog Carnival 14 Editors: Derek Mueller, Lauren Garskie, Jason Tham A fishbowl-styled session at the 2018 RSA Conference in Minneapolis, MN, organized by Trent Kays, convened around a collective concern for what its title posed as “The States and Futures of Digital Rhetorics.” Panelists and the participation-willing among attendees offered and also troubled a range of definitions and premises, some cast onto futuristic horizons, some rooted in the consequences of wide ranging digital practices (and dependencies), some situated in specific problem-solution frameworks, local cases in which digital rhetorics present vividly a reconstituted social fabric or…

Digital rhetorics1 provide a vast suite of generating principles. These principles are difficult to collect into a simple model, much less to name, substantiate, and prioritize. Fortunately, difficulties like these are much of what motivates digital rhetorics scholarship (some of which was reviewed by others in previous entries), and they are also what I find both exciting and challenging about the field. Digital rhetorics often draw on reasonably well-traveled rhetorical theories (Aristotle’s appeals, Burke’s dramatisms, stases, etc.), but they also subject traditional concepts to renewal and reinvention. Collin Brooke’s Lingua Fracta comes to mind as a terrific example of this…