“In digital rhetoric, arrangement may be a
conscious decision of the writer of the digital
text, but it may also be left up to the user, as
in the case of hypertext, where the reader
creates a new arrangement with each
reading. In this case, arrangement is more of
a boundary condition, as the possible
arrangements are limited by the number of
nodes and links between them have been
established by the author.” – pg. 68-9 (1)
“Digital rhetoric in many ways erodes the
distance between rhetor and reader, producer
and user. In terms of arrangement, we can
consider interface customization as
mechanism for allowing the user to decide
upon an ideal arrangement…” – pg. 69
(3)
“Bradley Dilger (2010) reminds us that for
rhetoric, ‘style is never optional, as the
common sense opposition of style to
substance wrongly indicates’ (16); rather, it is
an integral element of all rhetorical
communication and the question is not
whether we want style or substance. But what
kind of style we want to deploy as a
component of substance.” – pg. 70 (5)
“The first principle of immediacy is the
collapse of many of the distinctions
that provide the framework for more
traditional versions of the rhetorical
situation, such as cause, effect, rhetor,
audience, and message—“immediate
rhetorical situations are first and foremost
those which cannot trace their origins (or, in
Bitzer’s terms, ‘exigence’) to any singular
cause” (n.p.). Krause
uses examples from discussion lists and
Usenet, showing the difficulty of
tracing the thread of a discussion to its
origins; I would suggest that this effect is
even more apparent in Twitter, which
functions more as a continuous
stream than a discrete conversation.
Additionally, with the instability of the
web itself, with sites constantly vanishing and
Eyman describes that the rhetorical canon of
arrangement is a two-way street for both the
author and the reader/user. The author
makes the initial decision of available range of
information on a digital piece (website, article,
application, etc.); whereas, the reader/user
symbolically changes the piece in terms of
use by the pathways they use to discover the
information via hyperlinks and searchable
texts. (2)
Customization is as much of a rhetorical
choice as creating non-adaptable content.
Emerging digital rhetoric, including
applications and tools like widgets, allows the
producer to give the receiver the ability to
customize the digital piece to fit their needs.
Deciding arrangement is now in the receiver’s
hands, instead of the producer’s. (4)
Style is never not present in rhetorical work,
especially in a digital sense. Even the
absence of graphic or font design is a style.
Instead of considering style against
informational content, we should consider
content as a broader concept that
encapsulates both style and informational
material simultaneously. (6)
Social media (Twitter in particular”) is a new
shaper in digital rhetoric. When following
information in “News Feeds” the pathways of
re-posts (retweets – Twitter, reblogs –
Tumblr, shares – Facebook, pins –
Pinterest…) appear to be unending or
continuing on forever in such a way that the
receiver may never be able to acknowledge
the persona of the OP (original poster) aside
from the post content. In this way, we cannot
consider digital rhetoric as joining a linear
conversation. One post may journey to users
who even oppose the OP’s viewpoints;
however, there is some commonality that
links the two. This is even seen from a
bibliographical context when pieces from
seemingly irrelevant sources are used in a
manner that bolsters a work of a completely
different topic. This influences how we
moving, the lack of a discoverable origin point structure digital rhetoric work for multiple
highlights the way that “postmodern situations occasions beyond current/popular events. (8)
also problematize and fragment unifying
concepts of time, place, and identity” (n.p.).” –
pg. 76 (7)