Both Handa and Killingsworth address the use of rhetoric today. Handa’s book The Multimediated Rhetoric of the Internet focuses on a critical textual analysis of the successful use of rhetoric in today’s digital world. Killingsworth’s chapter “Appeals to Time” focuses on how rhetoric functions in the modern world and in reference to the past, present, and future to send the appropriate message to the audience. The use of rhetoric that both of these authors are discussing are relevant to current issues of public policy. Issues of public policy are always immediately addressed by news media and quickly bring attention and lots of followers attempting to enact immediate change in public policy to prevent future situations. However, these stories are often quickly forgotten as new stories pop up and steal the attention. This creates a re-mediation of news stories when similar issues come up over and over again because the issues are never properly addressed and solved.
Why are these issues not solved when first brought to public attention? How does rhetoric prevent them from being solved and how could it help to solve issues of public policy in the future?
Killingsworth says, “A modern person thinks that the world, or at least the human understanding of it, is generally improving. Because of advancing technology, accumulating knowledge, and increasing information, North Americans and western Europeans are inclined to see our world as better than that of our ancestors” (Killingsworth 39). This view that the modern world is better is incorrect though because issues of public policy like racism and discrimination that our ancestors battled with are still very relevant issues today. Aware of the fact that issues of public policy are often not improved on, Killingsworth discusses how rhetoric today appeals to time in order to introduce change in their audiences. Discussing the use of appeals to time, Killingsworth says, “Time becomes a position of value that authors use to draw audiences to their own positions. Authors may appeal to the past, present, or future, but the focus tends to fall on the need for change, the pursuit of something new, in the present” (Killingsworth 39).
Killingsworth also addresses the fact that news stories can not be pure re-mediation because audiences are interested in what is new and exciting, and therefore, appeals to time. In the chapter, Killingsworth says, “The implication is that what remains the same is not worth reporting. The result, according to at least one media critic, is that news stories build upon the four D’s: drama, disaster, debate, and dichotomy. New favors the volatile and dramatic but has trouble sustaining interest in topics over the long haul” (Killingsworth 39). This also brings up how audiences value time when Killingsworth says, “They assume that the audience thinks of time as money, values newness over oldness, and thinks of the present as the culmination of progressive forces working over the ages” (Killingsworth 40). If journalists and reporters using rhetoric to address public audience take on this view of time as something of value, then they can argue from a stasis of value to more effectively bring up issues of public policy and introduce solutions to enact solutions and actually change public policy so that issues won’t be re-mediated over and over again.
Handa introduces the idea of “re-mediation” in her text which she defines saying, “No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Handa 86). Using this definition, the use of re-mediation uses appeals to time in news media to report current events while also bringing up and comparing these news stories to past events to address large issues of public policy.
In her book, Handa also focuses on digital sources, which are largely used by the news media today and because these news stories are archived on online sources it make re-mediation even more successful. Handa quotes experts on the subject saying, “Emily Golson and Toni Glover, more recently, agree: ‘When we mix traditional composition pedagogies with pedagogies and knowledge from other disciplines, the effect can be disorienting, but if we push past the demarcation that separates the familiar and unfamiliar, we can harness powerful new energy made possible by mixing disciplinary knowledge and composition pedagogy” (Handa 154).
If today’s journalists and reporters appeal to time through current events and report them using digital sources where they can also re-mediate past stories to bring attention to issues of public policy, a new approach to changing public policy could emerge.
Handa, Carolyn. The Mediated Rhetoric of the Internet. New York: Taylor and Francis Group. Web.
Killingsworth, Jimmie M. "Appeals to Time." 38-51. Web.
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ReplyDeleteThe wording of your second paragraph, in conjunction with the rest of the piece, implies that rhetoric’s timeliness is somehow casually related to the desire for “newness.” I don’t think it can be argued that rhetoric is extremely time-sensitive- Grant-Davie, way back when, covered exigence, which includes timeliness, and Miller and Shepherd spoke about kairos as socially-perceived space-time- but something about the wording of your second paragraph seems to imply that the cycle goes like this:
ReplyDelete1. Issues are being brought repeatedly to the public’s attention without being solved.
2. Rhetors (authors, speakers, pundits, politicians, activists) are responsible for bringing the issues to the public’s attention.
3. Because the issues are not being solved, there is something about the way the issues are being presented to the public by the rhetors that is preventing the issue from being solved.
It seems to me that this is a gross oversimplification of the many issues that may prevent a specific issue from being solved. Lack of resources, majority/minority groups with a vested interest in maintaining a particular status quo, the emergence of a newer or more urgent issue, or decreased public energy are all possible mitigating factors that influence whether one has successfully “raised an issue” or not.
It also begs the question: according to this definition, what constitutes a successful dialogue on an issue? Is it when the issue in question has been solved entirely? If so, none of the pieces we discussed could be considered to be successful, since racial discrimination in the United States legal and criminal justice system has continued on since the publication of each book, study, interview, and article. Does a piece of rhetoric become successful when some tangible evidence of its success- such as a change in government policy, the creation of a new law or program, etc- appears in the cultural collective consciousness? If this is the case, it’s difficult to draw a direct line of descent from argument A, to argument B, to policy change C- rather, arguments A and B and on through Z are all small pieces fitting into the overall rhetorical situation. Porter, writing about intertextuality, said that all ideas are borrowed from each other, and based on my own experience with reading policy arguments, I notice that there’s often a great deal of overlap in opinions- given this, is the blame implied in the bullet points above attributable to any one person, or is it a collective failing of like-minded rhetors to change “the public” (never mind that “the public” is an incredibly vague term by itself) opinion?
The connection between Killingsworth’s ideas on newness- specifically, that it drives the audience’s attention- and Handa’s idea of re-mediation- that no medium takes place in a vacuum- seems to have been used here in order to support the bullet point #3: that is, that the reason the public isn’t more effective at responding to rhetors is because rhetors are not presenting “new” information. I’m not sure I agree with the implications here, since we’ve already established with Porter that everything is essentially salvaged from the scraps of its predecessors, so this therefore must not mean that only brand-new, completely unheard of information or perspectives can catch the public’s eye. Rather, I interpreted this to mean that “newness” is the flair added by each individual rhetor- for example, that two pieces coming from similar perspectives on the same issue will not be carbon copies of each other.