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On the Blunt Edge: Technology in Composition's History and Pedagogy Shane Borrowman, editor Anderson: Parlor P, 2012. 178 pp.
Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Scholars Amy C. Kimme Hea, editor Cresskill: Hampton P, 2009. 366 pp.
Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study Ben McCorkle Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2012. 207 pp.
Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network JeffRice Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2012. 247 pp.
Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World Susan H. Delagrange Logan: Utah State UP, 2011. Web.
My title reversal underscores a dynamic we all recognize: the reciprocity between technology and rhetoric. No communicative technology escapes our impulse to frame every technology in the terms of rhetoric: we ask how technologies serve certain purposes, how they fit within communicative situations, how they shape the relations between rhetor and audience, how messages are framed within generic constraints, and how all messages are shaped by delivery via a specific medium. We rhetoricize communicative technologies to understand their power to influence human affairs. Rhetoric acts upon technology, taking it as its object.
At the same time, our rhetorics become technologized. That is, we adapt rhetoric to make sense of new technologies. The influential developments in rhetoric over the past fifty years have relentlessly sought to understand emerging technologies and develop the rhetorical framework to analyze hypertext, the Web, media, computing, social networking, messaging, and other developments. And so technology acts upon rhetoric, taking it as its object, forcing it to change and accommodate.
My purpose here is to find common threads that run throughout a collection of recent books focused on technology and rhetoric, but also to distinguish each for its distinctive contributions to our field. It goes without saying that these various books all assume that rhetoric has much to say about technologies and their influences. All recognize that our rhetoric has to adapt to insistently mediated forms of communication. All recognize that methods of rhetorical analysis are accommodating, that we can profitably borrow upon the constructs and frameworks of a long scholarly tradition to make sense of current practices. This shared reliance on tradition binds these works, gives them coherence as contributions to an...