They assert the problem of the second shift for digital scholarship. “In her work, Ilene Philipson (2002) extended Arlie Hochschild’s notion of the second shift—the idea that working women complete two shifts external and internal to the home—by suggesting that many working women now bring their second shift mindset back to the job site, thus extending the unpaid labor they expect or are expected to do. As our discipline makes the transition to digital composition, we see the increasing expectation of a ‘second shift’ of our own: We have to remediate our work to be viable…Because we have chosen to work in the field of new media, we 1) create the video composition and we create the meta-frame surrounding it, and/or 2) we first establish our reputation with our scholarly work, and once we get tenure we can dabble in new media. There are two problems created here; the first involves labor issues. We must work harder to get the same payoff that our colleagues achieve with the same amount of work. The second issue is that we lose technological ground. Ours is a fast-paced discipline changing daily based on the technologies we have to learn and use and the necessity of honing the rhetorical skills needed to create intellectually sound digital compositions.”
Finally, they emphasize the idea of choices and stories in this kind of rhetoric (and in the life of a female scholar). “As we have seen from social epistemic rhetoric, spaces do not exist without the dialogue or conversation that creates them; we create and mediate our realities, and we do so under the influence of the social networks and constraints that exist around us. We create ourselves through and by the stories we tell, and those stories are created through and by the interactions that we have with our environments and the others that exist and interact with us in those environments. Therefore, it is impossible to have an unmediated conversation.” These ideas go together too; we should be conversing – sharing stories – about our choices.