My dissertation explores how authenticity is a site of negotiation for lifestyle bloggers, their anti-fans, and their corporate sponsors. Lifestyle blogs, blogs written by women about their everyday lives, have garnered a fandom by utilizing social media, establishing (or what seems to be) intimate relationships with readers and other bloggers, and creating an authentic online persona. Falling under the category of micro-celebrity, these bloggers must maintain a balance between aspirational and authentic narratives of their lives so to maintain sponsorships and readers. I study the forums of an anti-fan site, Get Off My Internets, dedicated to critiquing a popular healthy living blogger from April 2016 – October 2018. Such research provides insights into how online readers define authenticity and how discourse communities implement snark and internet research into creating a fuller narrative of the blogger’s life. I argue studying sites of anti-fandom can address pedagogical goals to create users that are rhetorically savvy (in terms of mitigating risk) and empathetic to others.

Since the personal computing revolution began in the 1980s, digital technologies have become more powerful, affordable, and portable. Those tools have made possible the information age and new ways of communicating. When we connect, we encounter prompts to post, comment, edit, tweet, snap, capture, collaborate, and share. Within an app loaded on a device close at hand are the tools necessary to create and bring together images, videos, sounds, animations, and text. When we mix forms of communication in this way, we create multimodal compositions. Teachers, students, politicians, corporations, universities, journalists, employers, artists, authors, role models, and friends now communicate with multimodal compositions. The growing significance of multimodal compositions suggests the importance of learning how to consume and create these new media. Many educators consider such skills essential to literacy in the information age. In the context of higher education, rhetoric and composition courses increasingly take on the responsibility of teaching future leaders to make effective and responsible use of multimodal compositions in their communication. This study considers how college-level composition and rhetoric teachers and their students experience a time of transition between traditional speaking and writing assignments and multimodal composition projects that ask students to integrate different ways of communicating. I use qualitative methods to examine three levels of the composition curriculum: a single assignment, a single course, and a single department. The results point to possible advantages, obstacles, and complications of using multimodality as an approach to college-level literacy teaching and learning.

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The contemporary classroom currently faces an evolving world of computer based training, online courses, instructor-led learning and several blended approaches in-between. With the increased presence of computers and communication in every facet of students' lives, students have changed to adapt to the continuous presence of technology in their daily lives. These recent rapid developments have changed the relationship between technology and communication. Indeed, communication and technology have become linked to such a degree that it is difficult to differentiate one from the other, thereby altering our rhetorical situation as instructors. Instructors can no longer deny the presence of technology in the contemporary classroom, much less in the contemporary composition classroom. This case study serves as a post-modern analysis of the technology based blended classroom. A gap exists between what online learning is (being) today and what it is (becoming) tomorrow. This dissertation explores the gap by examining two rich data sources: online visitor navigational patterns and instructor interviews. The fundamental ideas that this text explores are the following: - Web server logs and PHP logs can be analyzed to yield relevant information that assists in the design, architecture, and administration of online and blended learning courses. - Technology in the writing classroom does not necessarily solve traditional problems associated with the composition classroom. Technology is a tool, not a solution. - Technology has changed the rhetorical situation of the composition classroom. As a result, instructors must adapt to the changed rhetorical environment. Via this study, readers will hopefully gain a better understanding of the relatively unexplored margins between instruction, composition and technology paradigms. Instructors, trainers, technical writers, pedagogues, industry and academia alike must step forward to research technology-assisted pedagogy so that they can de-privilege the paradigms that position technology itself as a solution, and move forward toward realistic and real-world expectations for instructors in technology mediated learning environments.