Digital Rhetoric Sample Syllabus Graduate Level Course Instructor: Ashley Hinck

Introduction:

Rhetorical critics have begun to turn their attention to the internet and other networked technologies in large part because the digital rhetoric that emerges from these locations and technologies plays an important role in public culture, and thus, in many ways, is at the center of what we typically envision as “rhetoric.” But, at the same time, investigation into digital and networked rhetoric demands training in theories of technology and methods of digital archiving. This class will provide you with that foundational training while also exploring the central debates in internet studies and digital communication. By the end of the course, you will be prepared to engage in rhetorical criticism of digital media objects that is both situated and careful.

Course Questions:

1) What theoretical assumptions do we as critics need to bring to bear on rhetorical artifacts that are digital? 2) What methods can critics use to productively, effectively, and ethically analyze digital rhetorical artifacts? 3) What are the central questions for researchers in fields like internet studies and digital communication? 4) What makes good rhetorical criticism of digital artifacts?

Schedule:

Part One: Foundational Concepts

Week 1: Historical Contextualization of Digital Technologies Abbate, Inventing the Internet Turner Walter Ong Week 2: Theoretical Assumptions: Technological Determinism and Affordances Winner MacKenzie Baym Week 3: The Current State of Research boyd

Part Two: The Public Sphere in a Digital World

Week 4: A Radically Changed Public Sphere Benkler Week 5: An Unchanged Public Sphere Hindman Week 6: A Fragmented Public Sphere Sunstein Dahlberg Week 7: A Private and Personalized Public Sphere Papacharissi Bennett and Segerberg Week 8: Changing Civic Practices in the Public Sphere Benaji and Buckingham Castells

Part Three: Online Communities as Rhetorical Audiences

Week 9: Online Communities Howard, “The Vernacular Web” Baym, “Online Communities” Postill, “Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks” Week 10: The Practices, Boundaries, and Exclusions of Online Communities Hinck, “Ethical Frameworks and Ethical Modalities” Philips, “The House That Fox Built: Anonymous, Spectacle, and the Cycles of Amplification” **Archive Assignment is due

Part Four: Doing Rhetorical Criticism of Digital Rhetorical Artifacts

Week 11: Software Manovich Brown Week 12: Blogs Pfister McCauliff, “Blogging in Baghdad” Week 13: Memes and Memorials Hanher, “The Riot Kiss” Peck, “A Laugh Riot” Hartelius, “Leave a Message of Hope or Tribute” Phillips, “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook, Memorial Trolls, and Reactions to Grief Online” Jenkins, “Intro” to Spreadable Media Week 14: Online Video, Video Games, and Maps Hess, “Democracy through the Polarized Lens of the Camcorder” Herbig and Hess, “Convergent Critical Rhetoric at the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’” Burgess & Green, “Introduction” to YouTube Bogost, “Procedural Rhetoric” and “Digital Democracy” in Persuasive Games Davisson, “Beyond the Borders of Red and Blue States”

Assignments:

Participation: One important element of the training you receive in graduate school is becoming part of a learning community. Good colleagues will listen to your ideas, ask questions, and connect you with other scholars, research, and conference opportunities. Participating in course discussions enables you to practice being a good colleague: you will learn to listen to your colleagues’ ideas and ask questions that lead to stronger scholarship. Both you and your colleagues benefit from strong, sustained, and engaged in-class participation. Towards that end, in-class participation will be worth 50 points.

Weekly Response Papers: You will be required to write weekly response papers that are 3-4 pages in length. They are worth 10 points each. These response papers should demonstrate that you have read the course material carefully and engaged the material in a significant way. Make some kind of claim about the implications of the course readings, applications to other kinds of research, new research questions to ask, or a discussion of what the course readings mean for your own research. In addition to turning in your weekly papers (before midnight), you will read one of your colleagues’ weekly papers before class. Part of the goal of this class is to foster a collaborative learning environment. That means talking with other people about what you’re reading, showing other people your writing, and talking about other people’s writing. Exchanging one paper each week allows your colleagues to learn about what your research focuses are, allows you to learn from your colleagues, and will provide some of the groundwork for future collaborations. Your response papers will be worth a total of 125 points.

Digital Archive: An important part of being a rhetorical critic who studies rhetoric online is learning how to archive digital rhetorical artifacts. This involves two primary tasks: 1) downloading or saving artifacts and 2) organizing your artifacts into an archive using metadata labels. Toward this end, you will create an archive for your Final Seminar paper. To complete this assignment, turn in a flash drive holding your entire archive and a 3-page explanation of your archive, explaining how you downloaded the digital artifacts, how you chose which artifacts to archive, and the organizational method of your archive. This assignment is worth 125 points and is due during Week 10.

Final Paper: Compose a seminar paper that is between 25-35 pages long. Your paper should consider some set of digital rhetorical artifacts. The paper should be suitable for submission to a conference and should serve as the groundwork for a later publication. Begin thinking now about which conference or which journal your paper would fit, and write with those audiences in mind. Your final paper will be worth 200 points.

During graduate school, think of seminar papers as the first step in the publication process. After receiving my feedback, revise your paper and send it to a conference. After receiving feedback from your panel respondent, revise your paper again and share it with a graduate student writing group. After revising your paper based on their feedback, you should be ready to submit your paper to journal. Remember that a seminar paper will not likely be a manuscript ready for publication (especially your first year in graduate school), but it is the first step in that writing process.

Points for this Class: Participation: 50 points Weekly Response Papers: 125 Digital Archive: 125 Final Seminar Paper: 200 Total Points: 500 points

Bibliography of Course Readings:

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999. Banaji, Shakuntala, and David Buckingham. The Civic Web: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013. Baym, Nancy. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2006. Bennett, Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics. Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. boyd, danah. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Brown, Jim. Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, forthcoming. Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Greene. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Malden, MA: Polity, 2009. Castells, Manuel. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012. Dahlberg, Lincoln. “Rethinking the Fragmentation of the Cyberpublic: From Consensus to Contestation.” New Media & Society 9, no. 5 (October 1, 2007): 827–47. doi:10.1177/1461444807081228. Davisson, Amber. “Beyond the Borders of Red and Blue States: Google Maps as a Site of Rhetorical Invention in the 2008 Presidential Election.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 1 (2011): 101–24. Greene, Joshua, and Henry Jenkins. “Spreadable Media: How Audiences Create Value and Meaning in a Networked Economy.” In The Handbook of Media Audiences, edited by Virginia Nightingale, 109–26. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Hahner, Leslie. “The Riot Kiss: Framing Memes as Visual Argument.” Argumentation & Advocacy 49, no. 3 (2013): 151–66. Hartelius, E. Johanna. “‘Leave a Message of Hope or Tribute’: Digital Memorializing as Public Deliberation.” Argumentation & Advocacy 47 (2010): 67–85. Herbig, Art, and Aaron Hess. “Convergent Critical Rhetoric at the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’: Exploring the Intersection of Rhetoric, Ethnography, and Documentary Production.” Communication Studies 63, no. 3 (2012): 269–89. doi:10.1080/10510974.2012.674617. Hess, Aaron. “Democracy Through the Polarized Lens of the Camcorder: Argumentation and Vernacular Spectacle on YouTube in the 2008 Election.” Argumentation & Advocacy 47 (2010): 106–22. Hindman, Matthew. The Myth of Digital Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Howard, Robert Glenn. “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (2008): 490–513. Lange, Patricia G. Kids on Youtube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies. Walnut Creek,CA: Left Coast Press, 2014. MacKenzie, Donald A, and Judy Wajcman. “Introduction.” In The Social Shaping of Technology, 3–27. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command: Extending the Language of New Media. International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics. New York ; London: Bloomsbury, 2013. McCauliff, Kristen. “Blogging in Baghdad: The Practice of Collective Citizenship on the Blog Baghdad Burning.” Communication Studies 62, no. 1 (2011): 58–73. Ong, Walter Jackson. Orality and Literacy the Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1982. Papacharissi, Zizi. A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity, 2010. Peck, Andrew. “A Laugh Riot: Photoshopping as Vernacular Discursive Practice.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014). Pfister, Damien. Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere. State College, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming. Phillips, Whitney. “The House That Fox Built: Anonymous, Spectacle, Adn Cycles of Amplification.” Television & New Media 14, no. 6 (2013): 494–509. Postill, John. “Localizing the Internet beyond Communities and Networks.” New Media & Society 10, no. 3 (June 1, 2008): 413–31. doi:10.1177/1461444808089416. Sunstein, Cass. Republic.com 2.0. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, Ill.; London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Winner, Langdon. “Technologies as Forms of Life, and Do Artifacts Have Politics?” In The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology, 3–18 and 19– 39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.