New Media Theory

Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing is designed to spark conversation. It is intended to highlight the growing importance of posthumanist approaches to writing studies, and, in doing so, works to solidify the importance of such work to the future of writing studies. Its organizational structure, length, and approach serve this agenda, working as much to encourage a growing conversation as it does to provide substantial, original work from which such conversations might emerge. The thirteen original essays that comprise Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing are organized to provide a progression from articles that introduce theoretical concepts regarding the intersections of posthumanism and writing to works that examine specific contexts as vehicles for developing posthumanist theories.

Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media explores how and to what ends wearable inventions and technologies augment or remix reality, as well as the claims used to promote them. As computer components shrink and our mobile culture normalizes, we wear computers on the body to create immersive experiences.

The essays in New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy pose an invention-based approach to new media studies. They represent a specific school of theory that has emerged from the work of graduates of the University of Florida. Working from the concept of electracy, as opposed to literacy, contributors pose various heuristics for new media rhetoric and theory.

The PC era is giving way to a new form of popular computing in which smart, globally-connected objects and environments are the new computational ground. This new ground is the exigence for a new approach to digital rhetoric and writing. In Suasive Iterations, Rieder calls for an approach that is grounded in a new canon of digital style. He explains that the growing range of microcomponents and —processes can be botanized for the new canon. Drawing on Claude Levi-Strauss' theory of bricolage, he describes his stylistic approach as a transductive science of the concrete, the goal of which is to engage audiences suasively by allegorizing aspects of the physical world to which the new era of microcomponents give us access. Suasive Iterations will appeal to scholars and practitioners-faculty and graduate students-in digital rhetoric, writing, digital humanities, and the digital arts. One of its innovative features is the inclusion of original, open-source programming projects for each of the four main chapters. The projects are written in/for Arduino, Processing, and the Kinect sensor. They are designed to highlight issues in the scholarly tradition.

From the beginning, rhetoric has been a productive and practical art aimed at preparing citizens to participate in communal life. Possibilities for this participation are continually evolving in light of cultural and technological changes. The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric explores the ways that public rhetoric has changed due to emerging technologies that enable us to produce, reproduce, and distribute compositions that integrate visual, aural, and alphabetic elements. David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel argue that to exploit such options fully, rhetorical theory and pedagogy need to be reconfigured.

A new experience of identity is emerging within the digital apparatus under the rubric of "avatar." This study develops "concept avatar" as an opportunity to invent a practice of citizenship native to the Internet that simulates the functionality of measure dramatized in the traditions of "descent" ("avatar") or "incarnation," including the original usage in the Bhagavad Gita, and the Western evolution of the virtue of prudence from the Ancient daimon, through genius and character, to the contemporary sinthome.

Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio-Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers begins by placing audio-visual writing within established theoretical frames in rhetoric and composition and moves through a variety of applied pedagogical concerns with the aim of helping writing teachers use audio-visual writing assignments to realize a wide variety of learning goals in their writing classes.

In THE TWO VIRTUALS, Alex Reid shows that to understand the relationship between our traditional, humanistic realm of thought, subjectivity, and writing and the emerging virtual space of networked media, we need to recognize the common material space they share. The book investigates this shared space through a study of two, related conceptions of the virtual. The first virtual is quite familiar; it is the virtual reality produced by modern computing and networks. The second, less familiar, virtual comes from philosophy. It lies in the periphery of more familiar postmodern concepts, such as deconstruction, the rhizome, and simulation. In drawing the connection between the two virtuals of philosophy and networked media, Reid draws upon research in computers and writing, rhetoric and composition, new media studies, postmodern and critical theory, psychology, economics, anthropology, and robotics.

Of all the topics of interest in the digital humanities, the network has received comparatively little attention. We live in a networked society: texts, sounds, ideas, people, consumerism, protest movements, politics, entertainment, academia, and other items circulate in and through networks that come together and break apart at various moments. In these interactions, data sets of all sorts are formed, or at the least, are latent. Such data affect what the humanities is or might be. While there exist networked spaces of interaction for digital humanities work, considering in more detail how networks affect traditional and future goals of humanistic inquiry is a timely pursuit. Networked Humanities: Within and Without the University takes up this issue as a volume of collected work that asks these questions: Have the humanities sufficiently addressed the ways its various forms of work, as networks, affect other networks, within and outside of the university? What might a networked digital humanities be, or what is it currently if it does, indeed, exist? Can an understanding of the humanities as a series of networks affect-positively or negatively-the ways publics perceive humanities research, pedagogy, and mission? In addressing these questions, Networked Humanities offers both a critical and timely contribution to the spacious present and potential future of the digital humanities, both within academe and beyond. Contributors include Neil Baird, Jenny Bay, Casey Boyle, James J. Brown, Jr., Levi R. Bryant, Naomi Clark, Bradley Dilger, Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Paul Gestwicki, Tarez Samra Graban, Jeffrey T. Grabill, Laurie Gries, Byron Hawk, John Jones, Nate Kreuter, Devoney Looser, Rudy McDaniel, Derek Mueller, Liza Potts, Jeff Pruchnic, Jim Ridolfo, Nathaniel Rivers, Jillian J. Sayre, Lars Söderlund, Clay Spinuzzi, and Kathleen Blake Yancey.