Writing In and Around Video Games

This undergraduate course uses video games as a lens through which to explore the infinitely broader topic of digital rhetoric. Students encounter games in several different ways: as texts to analyze, raw material for video compositions, systems to create and explore. Key topics include genre conventions and constraints, audience, procedural rhetoric, interface design, and convergence culture

Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice

A survey of a range of disciplines whose practitioners are venturing into the new field of digital rhetoric, examining the history of the ways digital and networked technologies inhabit and shape traditional rhetorical practices as well as considering new rhetorics made possible by current technologie

Multimedia of the Mind: Digital Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Acquisition

Multimodal digital narratives are currently in the spotlight for acquisition into the digital humanities. The narrative form is emerging with great research interest, the form having no previously established traditions. This research paper attempts to define the nature of multimodal digital narratives and their implementation into modern society. Specifically, the paper addresses the digital rhetoric appropriated by multimodal digital narratives and how it translates into modifying perceptions of society. This multimodal digital rhetoric is then explored in the context of digital activism and education, formative social discourses the augment societal perceptions. Digital rhetoric is utilized to augment a user’s reality to distort and influence societal perceptions. Audio, visuals, user interface, reading, and text all filter into digital rhetoric, compounding an author’s ideas with each added element. All aspects of a digital narrative are tended to create user immersion, creating a multi-sensory narrative. The quality of user immersion and variability in narrative navigation, provides a personalized meaning individual to every user. Digital rhetoric is a means in which the author shapes the limits of what a user retains from the narrative itself. Examining instances of multimodal digital narratives reveals the quality of societal distortion. By using my research to create the multimodal digital narrative, “Promise of Paradise,” I explored digital activism though the platform, Twine. Authors model reality through a predetermined system that allows for authorial intent. The system and elements, designed by the author, indicate motivation and display the specific intent an author has in the creation of their multimodal digital narrative. These concepts speak of immense power and capability, filtering into digital activism and modern education

Creating Space: Building Digital Games

Studies of games, rhetoric, and pedagogy are increasingly common in our field, and indeed seem to grow each year. Nonetheless, composing and designing digital games, either as a mode of scholarship or as a classroom assignment, has not seen an equal groundswell. This selection first provides a brief overview of the existing scholarship in gaming and pedagogy, much of which currently focuses either on games as texts to analyze or as pedagogical models. While these approaches are certainly valuable, I advocate for an increased focus on game design and creation as valuable act of composition. Such a focus engages students and scholars in a deeply multimodal practice that incorporates critical design and computational thinking. I close with suggestions on tools for new and intrepid designers

Teaching digital rhetoric: building an argumentative ethos for digital media

In this paper we will describe a curriculum of Rhetoric included in a Business Communication Undergraduate Program Studies at ISCAP. This curriculum includes the designing of arguments and the identification of fallacies applied to the industries of persuasion and to social media, analyzing how the success of brands depends upon the use of a strategic communication, where rhetoric plays an important role. It also emphasizes the importance of teaching and exploring the ethos, pathos and logos theory for building cogent arguments in a social media context. In addition, based on the new communication model done via various electronic formats, and considering that the internet and social media have “changed the way communicate, turning writing into conversation”, we will reflect on Paul Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement, proposing a new pyramid for ad hominem fallacies. Finally, we draw a basic collection of competencies, in order to become a more effective writer and communicator in a digitally mediated space.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Digital Rhetoric of Cosmopolitanism: A Case Study of Thai Students at Michigan Technological University

This dissertation lies at the intersection of social sciences and humanities. It aims to examine digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism of people from a marginalized culture as situated in the context of a transnational experience. I view that this rhetoric encompasses digital practices of cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitan repertoire, a set of skills or strategies used in communication via social media in everyday life. I also argue that this rhetoric is connected to other elements in its broader social and cultural networks. To illustrate these ideas, a case study of Thai students at Michigan Technological University in the United States is conducted to investigate their digital practices as they engage with the Other on social media. The final goal of the study is to identify the strategies of digital practices that might be used to negotiate or resist power embedded in the digital environment. To reach this goal, this study proposes using the interdisciplinary approach as the methodology. The methodological framework of this project is designed by consolidating various perspectives from new cosmopolitanism and digital rhetoric with a postmodernist lens as a background. The highlight of this framework is an application of the cosmopolitan ontological framework and the ecological perspective to study digital practices on social media in the context of participants. Within this framework, several qualitative methods are employed for data collection and analysis, namely interviews, participant observations, online observations, and rhetorical analysis. Overall, digital technologies like social media play an important role in establishing and maintaining relationships with people from other cultures. In this context, participants perform their cosmopolitanism in various types of cosmopolitan relationships by relying on a number of digital practices. These practices can be synthesized to form a cosmopolitan repertoire comprising digital literacy skills, multimodal communication skills, language skills, critical thinking skills, rhetoric, and ethics. The rhetorical analysis reveals that participants’ digital practices of cosmopolitanism are influenced by power embedded in some perceived factors in their ecological boundaries. Participants also rest on cosmopolitan repertoire in their negotiation of power. In its contributions, apart from some theoretical and pedagogical implications, this project also helps to shape the idea of digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism by proposing a definition and a model to explain its ontological dimension. These contributions can lead to more understanding of digital rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and call for further study in this scholarship in the future

Narrative Form and Agency in #MeToo

As the hashtag #MeToo spread from Alyssa Milano to her multitude of followers and beyond in October of 2017, it became not just a hashtag, but a movement fueled by hashtag activism. Through retweets and the sharing of stories of sexual assault and harassment, appearing one after another on feeds and timelines in a tragic litany of cultural failure, each individual participant contributed to a larger narrative. This paper argues that those stories, taken collectively, have narrative agency and form as defined by Campbell (2005) as “the capacity to act . . . in a way that will be recognized” (p. 3). Her work was adapted for digital activism by Yang (2016), who treats hashtag movements as a form of digital rhetoric. Campbell (2005) has five criteria: that agency is “communal and participatory,” its authors are “points of articulation” rather than the origins of ideas, it “emerges in artistry,” has specific “form,” and is “perverse,” in that agency can be reversed or malicious (p. 1). The Me Too movement was analyzed using these criteria for narrative agency, and like Yang’s (2016) analysis of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, identified the narrative form of the overall movement. This analysis further establishes the use and adaptation of traditional rhetorical methods of analysis to study digital rhetoric. Keywords: Narrative agency, hashtag activis

“Software agents and haunted media : the twitter bot as political actor"

This report examines the rhetorical construction of Twitter bots as nonhuman political agents in press coverage of the 2016 U.S. election. It takes the rhetorical framing of “the Twitter bot” as a case study to argue that Twitter bots are a contemporary example of what media historian Jeffrey Sconce calls “haunted media” -- a communication technology that has been culturally ascribed an “uncanny” “agency.” First, this report provides a comparative close reading of two pieces from The Atlantic and The New York Times as examples of mainstream press coverage of bots shortly before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Second, drawing on Sconce’s analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century media ecologies, it argues that “the Twitter bot” has been rhetorically constructed as haunted media through discourses that are inseparable from larger political narratives. The third and final section speculates on possible theoretical frameworks to expand this project in further inquiries. This report aims to demonstrate that haunted media narratives predate and persist beyond a specific election cycle or medium, and to argue that the construction of “haunted media” occurs alongside constructed concepts of democracy in our technologically mediated society. In doing so, this report contributes to the field of rhetoric of digital technology by bringing it further into conversation with political rhetoric.Englis

The Rhetoric of Video Games

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning Bogost's chapter offers an introduction to rhetoric in games. First he looks at the way games and their rules embody cultural values, following the work of Brian Sutton-Smith and looking in particular at a few examples from international sports. Then he discusses the relationship between games and ideology, showing how game play can unpack and expose deeply engrained social, cultural, and political assumptions. Finally he discusses the ways videogames make arguments. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, Bogost introduces a notion he calls "procedural rhetoric," the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions