Author: Robert Beck

Bathroom graffiti. Podcasts. Skibibi brain rot. Social media activism. Deepfakes. Collages. J.D. Vance Photoshop memes. In this blog carnival, the contributing authors used these ideas to explore the role of circulation in rhetoric and writing studies.  Some authors used the framework of circulation to explore how specific artifacts or ideas circulate through different systems. For example, Alexandra Gunnells, in “Digital Circulation and the Question of Publics,” examines how digital media circulates and constitutes collective identities. Similarly concerned with the influences of digital media on culture and identity, in “The SEO to Skibidi Pipeline,” Sophia Lyons, coins the term “digital linguistic transference”…

For much of rhetoric’s history, circulation—the cultural and spatio-temporal flow of texts, ideas, and images through various networks, platforms, and structures—has been less of an explicit area of study and more of an “assumed phenomenon” (Gries, 2018, p. 3) running through the field. However, since the digital turn, our focus on computers, algorithms, and digital platforms that allow texts to accumulate momentum and meaning across time and space has contributed to renewed interest in circulation studies as an area of inquiry and framework. In the introduction to Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie Gries and Collin Brooke, Gries argues…

Hello, I’m Robert. In addition to being a PhD candidate, I am a licensed Captain legally allowed to operateany vessel of 100 gross register tons or less on any of the Great Lakes or domesticrivers. Unfortunately, my former job driving boats doesn’t have anything to do with mycurrent work but I don’t know of many other Captains currently pursuing a PhD inrhetoric. If you are also a Captain, of any tonnage, please reach out to me so I can get acount of how many of us there are. My research is focused on digital rhetoric, rhetorical invention and rhetorical circulation.I…