Publisher's Synopsis
This book begins from the assumption that there is an intrinsically technological dimension to rhetoric, arguing that we have become so accustomed to practicing rhetoric in the context of print technologies that we have often naturalized or ignored that dimension. New communication and information technologies do not simply provide us with new sites of rhetorical practice; instead they challenge us to reconceive rhetoric altogether. This groundbreaking volume argues that a rhetoric of new media should attend to 'ecologies of practice', treating interfaced rather than texts as our sites and units of analysis. To devise such a rhetoric, the book offers a systematic reconsideration of the canons of classical rhetoric. Rather than understanding the canons as stages in a linear composing process, this book describes the canons as repertoires of multiple practices that shift as we move among media. Drawing on examples that range from Wikipedia to World of Warcraft, the book reconstitutes the canons, restoring to them the vitality they held for ancient rhetoricians and reshaping them into a framework for understanding the technological developments facing future generations.
