She wants us to account for the uncertainty of what happens with a text and get rid of our assumption of intentionality; she believes the metaphor of the epidemic because “[w]hat an epidemiological model reveals is that the virus itself cannot lead to an epidemic without participating in just the right set of nonlinear relationships that make up the conditions of a given ecology” (53).
Saes draws from Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. Gladwell “maps the four interrelated factors that contribute to an outbreak: the virus, hosts, environment, and time…What Gladwell reveals…is that the epidemic success of [texts] does not reside in their inherent quality, but depends entirely on how all four components together create the conditions for contagiousness and produce that vital but elusive tipping point when an idea takes off beyond all exceptional” (55). She uses these four factors, then, to explain how we can understand rhetoric and rhetorical acts.
Virus: Rhetorical Frame
Saes argues that “we must understand the characteristics of a virus that make it more infectious than others” and that “[t]he biggest leap an idea must make…is from the early adopters to the early majority, whose acceptance then makes the innovation not only suddenly popular but eventually normative…The key to overcoming this gap is communication” (57). With this claim, she emphasizes that it is how the text is framed that is ultimately important: “regardless of the content, the communicable agent is actually the message that shapes the practice for potential adopters. What spreads is the rhetoric” (57).
“The simplicity of rhetorical engineering thus depends on figuring out what those right conditions are before identifying what small design choice will tip the system in a desired direction. Such engineering, however, might require multiple revisions and attempts before the tipping point is found and set in motion. What the writer must keep in mind at all times is that those conditions are influx and so she must engage the dynamics of the rhetorical ecology in/through which she is writing” (58).
Environment: Constitutive Context
She writes that “environmental contexts help to define expectations of behavior – or at least perceived expectations – and can dramatically change the ways in which people process information and thus how they will act as a result…[W]e are not only vulnerable to environmental influence, but we are shaped by them as well…Our environments are full of information from sense perceptions and physical objects to discourses and emotions. An individual filters all of this formation, ad what emerges from that filtering is the person’s subjectivity” (59-60). This environment is important because it leads us to consider influential networks.
Hosts: Influential Networks
“To understand an epidemic,” Saes explains, “we need to identify the networks of people who make up a community suffering from an outbreak and what made them more susceptible than others. In cultural epidemics, people and their relationships to one another are even more vital because these epidemics are largely based on the dynamics of what is commonly referred to as ‘word-of-mouth’…[T]o understand social contagion we need to pay attention to two interrelated elements of rhetorical ecology: the susceptibility of an individual person to the influence of others… as well as – and here’s the critical difference – how many people that person turns to for opinions out of their total network” (60-1).
“Following from these insights, then, rhetoric – as the art of persuasion – would more likely participate in social contagion by altering an individual’s threshold to make the person more susceptible to influence…What we need to keep in mind is that our message is not in isolation and likely overlaps other messages and ideas that our auditor has already been exposed to…So, if the auditors tip is when we make our argument, we cannot say for sure if our carefully constructed rhetoric was essential to their change of heart. We may have just been the lucky one who helped them reach their tipping point – along with all of the other factors that contributed to that particular moment of social influence” (62-3).
Judging Effectiveness
Saes ends by claiming, “We need to acknowledge effectiveness as a quality that is retroactively assigned to the ecology as a whole and not to any particular actor or idea within it” (63).
*** Big question: What does this mean for assessment in composition courses? How can we evaluate the texts retroactively when we only have a semester to work with students and then evaluate their work? Is a semester enough time to let texts circulate?
Key Term
- Cultural epidemics: “transformations that come about because conditions are ripe for an idea or behavior to become contagious and gain a disproportionate foothold in a community” (54-5).