Hello World...Class Post #1

I am a junior majoring in English and truly appreciate the breadth of topics offered by the department, from your traditional literature analysis, to performance material, to issues of cultural and political relevance today, such as this course in digital rhetoric. In a broad sense, I am very interested in the humanities, but of course more specifically on literature, creative expression, the performing arts, and analyzing the role of culture and critiquing popular notions. My sincerest personal aspiration to learn a variety of classical dance forms from ballet to Middle Eastern to Indian and in the meantime I hope to support myself with a professional career relating to communication, media, and journalism in some form.

I don’t consider myself all that sophisticated technologically (as I tend to have little patience with all things technical), but part of my reason for taking this course is to improve myself somewhat in this area. Even better is that the course focuses on a specifically linguistic and cultural aspect of the digital which certainly makes it more appealing to someone with my background and interests. I feel the biggest advantage I will be getting of this course is the applicability of these skills to the workplace today, especially considering how businesses advertise and communicate more and more through the digital. Honing one’s creative abilities in digital communication would definitely be very marketable in any field.

Arrangement and style are two rhetorical conventions I see most explicitly in Wesch’s video. The arrangement aspect can be seen in the progression where we start with written (nondigital) language being presented and steadily and switch to digital. Progression also includes taking the viewer through a history of digital where web was once written in HTML. Part of the persuasion in favor of digital comes from the style in which each type of text is presented with the former being sloppier or hastier than the latter. This video is very stylistic in the sense that there is a specific artfulness to how the message is being communicated. One example is the typing, highlighting, and deleting of words in no particular order towards the beginning of the video. The video makes use of the flexibility of digital space to present how efficient digital is. As digital rhetoricians, we can definitely use Wesch’s video as a model of creativity when considering how to combine visual and technical elements with the verbal to convey our messages.