- body/identity: “online representations of the body, gestures, voices, dress, and image, and questions of identity and performance, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity” (2). These are present even without avatars or audio/video recording.
- distribution/circulation: “Digital distribution refers to rhetorical decisions about the mode of presenting discourse in online situations…Circulation is a related term that pertains to how that message might be recycled in digital space” (11). People compose texts that allow for certain amounts of circulation. “In the digital realm, online writers need to become rhetorically smart distributors as must as producers of discourse” (13).
- access/accessibility: “‘Access’ is the more general term related to whether a person has the necessary hardware, software, and network connectivity in order to use the Internet…’Accessibility’ refers to the level of connectedness of one particular group of persons – those with disabilities” (14). Porter asserts that “the reason to write/design for accessibility is not only to allow people with disabilities to consume information, but to help them produce it” (15).
- interaction: “the range and types of engagement (between people, between people and information) encouraged or allowed by digital designs” (2). The highest interaction is when the user can adapt and contribute to the design and interface. Most sites fall under usability because people can access and understand information, but they cannot affect the design.
- economics: “copyright, ownership and control of information, fair use, authorship, and the politics of information policy” (2). “Writing – all writing, I would say – resides in economic systems of value, exchange, and capital…There must be some value for the reader(s) and/or for the writer(s) in the act of producing, distributing, exchanging texts” (19). Most of the value in digital rhetoric is use value. Also, composers must “decid[e] what is usable and what isn’t, who needs to be credited and who doesn’t, and who has the right to control these decisions [which] involves both legal and ethical considerations” (23).
Key Term
- Techne: “requires both an abstract knowledge (e.g., of material and of form) and a procedural knowledge (e.g., of application and technique). In short, it requires both theoretical understanding and practical know-how working in tandem” (5)