EBOOK
Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local
Rhetorical Dynamics Across Networked Publics
Carl WhithausSeries: Composition, Literacy, and Culture(0)
About
Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local examines the social and rhetorical dynamics around emerging writing technologies. Carl Whithaus argues that these dynamics work across networked publics as patterns of behavior and ways of interacting through and with multimodal texts. This rhetorical analysis of the production and reception of born-digital rhetoric shows the ongoing and evolving impacts of online public discourse that can lead to bad restaurant reviews or the subversion of democracy. It is a networked process that gains significance because of the interplay and tensions between the global and the local. As these texts are created, distributed, received, and then recreated and shared again in viral ways, different messages resonate across media ecologies. Whithaus documents how emerging social dynamics shape-and are shaped by-digital writing, reading, and distribution technologies.
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Reviews
"Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local revitalizes our understanding of what writing is and does in the world. The focus of this astute and timely book might be on digital forms of communication, but the case studies and analyses in it have ramifications for our understanding of writing-writ-large. By tracing the ways different forms of writing emerge in situ and in deep interrelation with writers'
Jonathan Alexander, University of California, Irvine
"In the 2010s and 2020s, writing has seemingly exploded, with its fragments settling unpredictably across media and adhering to other modalities in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. Drawing on cases of writing from the past fifteen years, Whithaus sifts through these fragments, exploring how people write together in shared multimodal ecologies. These cases involve Twitch livestrea
Clay Spinuzzi, University of Texas at Austin