In this dissertation, I report findings from three case studies of rhetoric about the internet based on a rhetorical theory of the internet as physical and digital hybrid. I understand digital and physical hybridity as connections between physical and digital objects enabled by the internet that trouble a delineation between digital and physical space. I begin my study by tracing the history of the internet and its relationship with materiality. While the vastness of the internet is not something that can be readily understood, it is something that spreads across space and time, resulting in effects that demand rhetorical response. I describe rhetorics of purification as rhetorical responses to the internet that isolate physical and digital objects and ascribe to these objects different qualities. These rhetorics can be productive in rendering the internet and its effects salient within different discourses, but they can also be limiting in terms of aspects of the internet that they elide. To situate my work, I review literature in the field focused specifically on the emergence of digital rhetoric and its theories, methods, and objects of inquiry. I describe a primary method of rhetorical analysis for locating rhetorical strategies used to account for internet technology in different discourses, with supplementary methods including distant reading and interface analysis. In the first case study, I consider a social media app that leveraged smartphone geolocation technology to situate anonymous online discourse within physical locations and analyze responses to the service and posts on the app. In the second case study, I consider legal decisions in the United States focusing on the rhetorical moves that make internet interactions matter within the context of internet surveillance and privacy rights. In the final case study, I consider online-only writing courses and the impact of online platforms on pedagogy through a procedural interface analysis. In conclusion, I focus on the relevance of these studies to ongoing conversations in digital rhetoric concerning social media, internet privacy, and pedagogy. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation considers the internet from the perspective of rhetoric, which is the study of the theory and practice of written, spoken, and other modes of communication and debate. I report findings from three case studies about the internet in terms of digital and physical hybridity and rhetorics of purification. Digital and physical hybridity refers to the internet in terms of connections between physical objects (like people, buildings, and the environment) and digital objects (like data and computer code) that make a distinction between the two kinds of objects difficult. This means that the internet itself cannot be completely reduced to physical or digital components, even though it sometimes is in communication. Rhetoric where this distinction between digital and physical occurs can be understood as a rhetoric of purification because digital and physical objects are separated, or purified, from the deeper network of relationships between physical and digital objects which makes up the internet and the common reality both kinds of objects share. Rhetorics of purification can make the internet easier to understand and communicate about, but they can also overlook the deeper effects of the internet and its relationships with places, people, and communities. This dissertation takes up three different case studies related to rhetorics of purification. To demonstrate how this theory relates to the field, I review literature in rhetoric that considers digital texts, interfaces, and the internet in different ways in response to changes in technology. To study rhetoric surrounding the internet, I used a method of rhetorical analysis applied to different texts related to the internet. I combined this method with several methods of computer-assisted analysis including analysis of large bodies of text and interface analysis. I applied these methods within three different case studies. Each case study considers examples of rhetoric that represents the internet as distinct physical and digital components. In my first case study, I consider a social media service that used location information from users’ devices to situate anonymous online discourse within physical communities and analyze responses to the service. In my second case study, I consider legal decisions in the United States about internet surveillance and privacy rights. My analysis focuses on the rhetorical moves that are used in the legal decisions that relate the internet to the privacy of individuals and groups. In my final case study, I consider online-only writing courses and the impact of online platforms on teaching. In conclusion, I focus on the findings from these case studies and their relevance to ongoing conversations in the field concerning social media, internet privacy, and online teaching.

This dissertation examines Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that “anyone can edit,” in order to locate an emerging digital rhetoric. That emerging rhetoric is being developed from the bottom up by various rhetors, and it offers rhetoricians a framework for rethinking some of the foundations of the discipline. The discipline has tended to define agency in terms of the conscious rhetor, intellectual property in terms of an author-origin, and community in terms of a shared project that a collective has agreed upon. This dissertation rethinks each of these disciplinary key terms by examining Wikipedia’s hospitable structure, a structure that welcomes writers regardless of identity or credentials. This structure of hospitality troubles the notions that agency can be reduced to consciousness, that texts are easily linked to an owner, or that community is the result of an agreed upon project. In many ways, Wikipedia acts as a microcosm of the various rhetorical collisions that happen to rhetors both online and offline. The proliferation of new media makes for more rhetors and more rhetorical situations, and this requires a complete rethinking of certain portions of rhetorical theory. The theory of hospitality that grounds this project is not utopian—it is instead a full consideration of the complications and perils of welcoming others regardless of identity or credentials. This is a structural hospitality, one that is not necessarily the result of conscious choice. This structure means that Wikipedia is far from a utopia—certain voices are filtered or silenced. But these filters are put up in the face of a hospitable structure that welcomes a broad range of writers, invites colliding interests, allows libelous or inaccurate writings, and encourages an endless chain of citations. The invitations extended by hospitable texts open up difficult questions for rhetoricians: Who is editing this text as I read it? How do we define “community” in such a situation? Who owns this text? “Hospitable Texts” rethinks these questions in light of the Web’s emerging ethical and rhetorical structures. / text

Though a relatively new form of communication technology, the podcast serves as a remediated form of the classical orator—merging the classical practices of oration with current methods of production and delivery. This study draws connections from the historical five canons of rhetoric and current usability studies to build a heuristic for developing and evaluating usable podcast design.

abstract: The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as a focus, this dissertation examines the significance of the varied strategies used by and contexts among which the NWHM and entities like it negotiate for digital, material, and rhetorical space within U.S. public memory production. As a “cybermuseum,” the NWHM functions within national public memory production at the intersections of material and digital culture; yet as an activist institution in search of a permanent, physical “home” for women’s history, the NWHM also counterproductively reifies existing gendered norms that make such an achievement difficult. By examining selected aspects of this complexly situated entity, this dissertation makes visible the gendered nature of public memory production, the digital and material components of that production, and the hybrid nature of emerging public memory entities which operate simultaneously in multiple spheres. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and guided by Carole Blair’s work on rhetorical materiality, this dissertation explores key aspects of the NWHM’s process of becoming, including an examination of the centrality of the interpellation of publics to the rhetorical materiality of public discourse; an analysis of the material state of public memory production in national history museums in the U.S.; and an exploration of the embodied engagement that undergirds all interaction with and presentation of historical artifacts and narratives, whether digital, physical or both at once. In a synthesis of findings, this dissertation describes a set of key characteristics through which certain hybrid digital-material entities (including the NWHM) enact increasingly complex variations of rhetorical agency. These characteristics suggest a need for a more flexible analytic framework, described in the final chapter. This framework takes shape as an heuristic of functions across which digital-material entities always already enact a situated, active, embodied, and simultaneous agency, one that can account fully for the rhetorical processes through which space is “made” for women in U.S. public memory. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

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The metaphors “tipping point” and “paradigm shift” are used to describe the moments surrounding social and scientific changes; however, I argue that in examining changes in culture and communication, the role of technology suggests the need for a new metaphor. Weaving together cultural studies, digital rhetoric and technology theories, I offer a complimentary metaphor, the cultural gateway, defined as specific artifacts that are simultaneously familiar and strange, providing a comfortable bridge between “before and after.” This thesis posits that the iPhone behaves as such a gateway to our current, fully mobile paradigm, and has changed the face of everyday composition. Employing the circuit of culture, I examine evidence found in early media accounts of iPhone’s impact, literacy narratives that name smartphones and iPhones as literacy agents, and early advertising. Investigations suggest that these quotidian artifacts have additional, unintended purposes that are quite human and intrinsic to our ordered realities.

Though a relatively new form of communication technology, the podcast serves as a remediated form of the classical orator—merging the classical practices of oration with current methods of production and delivery. This study draws connections from the historical five canons of rhetoric and current usability studies to build a heuristic for developing and evaluating usable podcast design.

Agency is a foundational and ongoing concern for the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Long thought to be a product and possession of human action, rhetorical agency represents the most obvious connection between the educational and theoretical work of the field and the civic project of liberal arts and humanities education. Existing theories of anthropocentric rhetorical agency are insufficient, however, to account for the complex technological work of digitally enmeshed networks of humans and nonhumans. To better account for these complex networks, this project argues for the introduction of new materialist theories of distributed agency into conversations about agency within Rhetoric. Such theories eschew the distinction between rhetorical and material agency and instead offer a way of accounting for action and change that makes room for rhetorical and material interventions as well as human and nonhuman participants. I take as my site the social media aftermath of the 2013 bombing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The digital networks of human users and nonhuman spaces (especially Twitter and Reddit) produced specific tangible effects: #BostonHelp helped stranded runners and tourists find food, shelter, and ways of communicating with family and friends, and Reddit’s /r/findbostonbombers forum enabled and fueled hurtful speculation about an innocent missing student. The strength, impact, and endurance of these networks leads me to three important conclusions: rhetorical/material agency must be distributed across a network of human and nonhuman participants; human intention no longer functions as an appropriate measure of the success or failure of rhetorical/material agency; and responsibility – like agency – must be distributed across networks’ human and nonhuman members.

abstract: In this dissertation, I study large-scale civic conversations where technology extends the range of “discourse visibility” beyond what human eyes and ears can meaningfully process without technical assistance. Analyzing government documents on digital innovation in government, emerging data activism practices, and large-scale civic conversations on social media, I advance a rhetoric for productively listening to democratic discourse as it is practiced in 2016. I propose practical strategies for how various governments—from the local to the United Nations international climate talks—might appropriately use technical interventions to assist civic dialogues and make civic decisions. Acknowledging that we must not lose the value that comes from face-to-face civic deliberation, I suggest practical pathways for how and when to use technology to increase democratic engagement from all stakeholders. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016