“Ecologies are vast, hybrid systems of intertwined elements, systems where small changes can have unforeseen consequences that ripple far beyond their immediate implications. This means that we much begin to rethink notions of rhetorical effectiveness – whether defined in terms of persuasion, identification, or some other activity – because what is ‘effective’ at one scale or location within an ecology may fail utterly in another context” (28). Ecologies also help us break out of tendencies to view the canons are distinct, stable categories.
Brooke recommends looking at three levels of ecologies: ecologies of code, ecologies of practice, and ecologies of culture. Ecologies of code are “the varied communicative and expressive resources we draw on when we produce discourse, regardless of the medium” (48). The ecology of practice “implies conscious, direct activity, the explicit combination of elements from the ecology of code to produce a particular discursive effect” (49). Ecologies of culture “operates at the broadest range of scales, from interpersonal relationships and local discourse communities to regional, national, and even global cultures. Any act of discourse is going to be consumed in various ways by cultural assumptions” (49). Brooke argues that “the most important changes wrought with and by new media are changes in our ecologies of practice” (47). Focusing on practice encourages us not to name specific practices, but instead to think about how practices changes as technology does (196).
He renames the canons, and states that “each of the canons can be described as an ecology, a complex system of people, sties, practices, and objects; taken together, the canons form what I am describing as an ecology of practice” (52).
- Invention -> proairesis: Brooke argues that we tend to view invention hermeneutically, “rel[ying] on the relative sturdiness of a final object and the negotiation of meanings within it” (68). This view sees invention as many contained in the prewriting and as not extending beyond the final product. Invention as proairesis resists closure and looks for associational connections and exploration; it is “a focus on the generation of possibilities, rather than their elimination until all but one are gone and closure is achieved” (86).
- Arrangement -> pattern: We tend to view arrangement as sequence. Instead, Brooke recommends seeing arrangement as pattern, which can include patterns that are more structured like the funnel of an introduction. It allows that “different patterns…emerge depending on one’s perspective” (109).
- Style -> perspective: We tend to view style as decontextualized and from the perspective of only one reader who is external to the static text. Perspective allows “multiple and partial perspectives necessary for many forms of new media” (114). He also extends Lanham’s at/though distinction, arguing that we also need to recognize that we view from a certain perspective. “In new media, one place that style is practiced in the creation of perspective, an emergent quality of a specific interaction among user, interface, and object(s), drawing on each without being reducible to any of those factors” (140).
- Memory -> persistence: We think of memory as storage, suggesting that the memory is either present or absent. To this, Brooke adds persistence, “a practice of retaining particular ideas, keywords, or concepts across multiple texts…Persistence as a memory practice is the ability to build and maintain patterns, although those patterns may be tentative and ultimately fade into the background” (157).
- Delivery -> performance: “Delivery, in everyday parlance, is a transitive process; it is rare to speak of delivery without an object that is being delivered…In each of these cases, however, the practice of delivery has little appreciable impact on what is being delivered” (170). Brooke states that delivery is a performance, and gives credibility as an example of something that must be performed. (“Circulation captures the importance of movement in the way that information spreads, but it is too easy to fall back into traditional characterizations of physical transfer. The equation of delivery with medium acknowledges the shaping role that information and communication technologies play, but it too quickly become a static set of features that decontextualizes delivery” (176).)
Key Terms
- Interface: “A turn toward interface as our unit of analysis would be an acknowledgement that it is not necessary that these processes culminate in products (which can be decoupled from the contexts of their production), but rather that what we think of as products (books, articles, essays) are but special, stabilized instances of an ongoing process conducted at the level of interface” (25).
- New media texts: “those that have been made by composers who are area of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality” (3).