Saturday

Interactivity and rhetoric

Post by Jim Porter

Being a rhetoric theorist in Interactive Media Studies has pushed me to think harder about “interactivity” from a rhetorical lens — and also to think harder about rhetoric from an interactivity perspective.

Of course rhetoric has always been fundamentally about interactivity: meaning the relationship between writer (or speaker) and audience. Aristotle’s Rhetoric, from 4th century BC Athens … all about promoting effective interactivity via the primary communication technology of the time: speech. But rhetoric hasn’t always been about two-way interactivity. The predominant assumption of the linear rhetorical model has been this: the writer/speaker/digital media designer produces a discourse in order to persuade (or inform or entertain or argue to) the audience, which exists more or less as a passive dumb lump to be shaped, formed, and influenced — to be persuaded to buy, to vote, to cheer, to support. But mostly to BUY. Rhetoric as sales pitch to dumb audience. To a great extent Aristotle’s version of rhetoric promotes this view.

This linear model of communication — commonly referred to as the Shannon-Weaver model of communication — has long been discredited by rhetoric theorists as a limited (and limiting) model of audience involvement. It’s a consumerist model that doesn’t acknowledge the wisdom of the crowd, the dialogic nature of communication, and the potential value added of audience input. Enter digital media and especially social network media and suddenly we have discursive mechanisms — we can call them “technologies” if you’d prefer, but think of them as writing technologies — that promote, encourage, and even in some cases depend entirely on audience involvement. The end user can be a co-author, the passive audience can be an active creator/collaborator. Can be — if we know how to deploy the technologies effectively.

A number of rhetoric theorists, myself included, have been thinking about interactivity as a key rhetorical concept in the digital age: Think first about how current applications — e.g., blogs, wikis, SNSs, in all their various forms and manifestations — promote different kinds of rhetor-audience interactions and how we might deploy those applications more productively (e.g., using social networks in the form of user forums instead of relying on engineer-produced help). And then we move to creating new designs and applications to promote new kinds of interaction that we haven’t even thought about yet.

In a recent article (Porter, 2009), I talk about “interactivity” as a key rhetorical concept, one we need to add to our instructional arsenal in writing courses, teaching students how to write to engage their audiences interactively and collaboratively. Business certainly needs to transform its thinking about interaction with customers and clients: moving from the limiting assumptions of the Shannon-Weaver model to embrace the potentially more powerful and productive two-way interaction models.

Or perhaps we should call them 2.0-way.

References
Porter, James E. (2009). Recovering delivery for digital rhetoric. Computers & Composition, 26, 207-224.

Shannon, Claude E. (1948). The mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379–423, 623–656.