something like, a set of contested and complementary, affective and desire-laden imaginary social phenomena brought into being through multiple acts of rhetorical poesis, addressed to strangers and occurring over time and in spaces that are simultaneously discursive, cultural, and material.
PART II: Kairotic Inventiveness and Rhetorical Ecologies
2 Multimodal Public Rhetoric and the Problem of Access
Public rhetoric is increasingly dominated by centralized commercial media. Many important channels of communication—spanning across film, TV, radio, and print media—are owned and operated by a small number for-profit firms. This reality severely limits who can enter into public conversations and on what terms. Conditions dictating access, however, are not fixed, but are always shifting, always in a state of flux. Changes in cultural practices and in communication technologies open new opportunities even as they foreclose others. The nineteenth century saw the invention of the camera, for instance, potentially opening up new forms of visual expression for public rhetors. A kairotic approach demands that we see each moment as, to some degree, new—characterized by new opportunities as well as new constraints. But this is much easier to say than to do. In this chapter, we attempt to confront the complex and shifting nature of access as it relates to material, cultural, and pedagogical conditions.
The Wonder of It All: Confronting Rhetorical Options in a Moment of Crisis
In our introduction, we called attention to a new kind of printer that outputs fully-formed, three-dimensional plastic prototypes. We posed a few questions for rhetorical practitioners, theorists, and educators: Do you plan to integrate 3D printing into your rhetorical practices, models, and classrooms? Why or why not? How would you make such a decision? Why should printers that output ink on paper be privileged over printers that output 3D plastic prototypes?
We use the 3D printer as an example precisely because it combines the familiar with the strange. Printers have become a normalized technology in writing instruction, evolving seamlessly (or so it might appear) from earlier technologies like the typewriter. Yet we expect that many readers will laugh at the proposition that this new kind of printer—which produces not words on a page, but 3D plastic prototypes—is relevant to composition students, teachers, or theorists.
We are not interested, here, in advocating for the adoption of 3D printers. Rather, we aim to focus on the broader intellectual problem that scholars and practitioners face when confronted with new rhetorical options in an era of rapid cultural and technological change. Technologies (like 3D printers) that appear marginal, esoteric, and laughable one day appear mainstream, common, and important the next. Given that, how do we decide what to emphasize in our rhetorical theories, pedagogies, and actions?
This is a sobering question to us—partly because it speaks to the question of access. We can’t teach everything, especially in an era when new technologies continually make available new options. But the decision to teach certain genres, modes, media, and technologies instead of other available options constitutes an important cultural intervention. Every time we select a particular rhetorical option to teach, we intervene in two ways: we give students opportunities to practice that option and we normalize it. Conversely, when we decide not to teach an option, we withhold from students the opportunity to practice that option and we marginalize it. Whether or not rhetors see 3D rhetoric as a productive rhetorical option depends in part on whether the sum total of their educational experiences has provided them with the necessary knowledge and competencies to use 3D rhetoric effectively. But it also depends on whether rhetors view 3D rhetoric as a legitimate option to begin with, and this legitimacy derives, in part, from the way 3D rhetoric is (or is not) treated in institutionally sanctioned spaces of education (e.g., first-year writing).
In an age of rapid technological change, new rhetorical options become available daily. We can chose to ignore them, to rely on established traditions and practices that have become comfortable to us, but this runs counter to a kairotic approach. According to Eric Charles White, a commitment to kairos demands that we be willing to suspend accustomed habits of thinking and interrogate the moment to see what new possibilities it contains:
[K]airos regards the present as unprecedented, as a moment of decision, a moment of crisis, and considers it impossible, therefore, to intervene successfully in the course of events merely on the basis of past experience. How can one make sense of a world that is eternally new simply by repeating the readymade categories of tradition? Tradition must answer to the present, must be adapted to new circumstances that may modify or even disrupt received knowledge. Rather than understand the present solely in terms of the past, one should seek to remain open to an encounter with the unforeseen spontaneity we commonly describe as the “mother of invention.” (14)
Honoring kairos, then, has a destabilizing effect, forcing us to question past practices in light of new possibilities. In an age of rapid technological change, these new possibilities include things like 3D printers, wrap-around virtual worlds, multiplayer online games, and other options that at first seem strange, newfangled, irrelevant.
Diana George, in “Wonder of It All: Computers, Writing Centers, and the New World,” eloquently captures the stunning effect of rapid technological change. George observes that “[c]hange is difficult, mostly because we just don’t know how to change” (331). Drawing on the work of Stephen Greenblatt, George suggests that our encounter with new technologies is analogous to Europeans’ encounter with the so-called “new world” (332). The “wonder and amazement” that accompanied this encounter induced a kind of cultural and intellectual paralysis, akin, as Greenblatt puts it, to “the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole momentarily convulsed” (qtd. in George 332). Likewise as we encounter the new world of emergent technologies “we are in danger of either recreating the old or staring at the new in wonder” (333). The only cure for this paralysis the hard intellectual work that enables us to make sense of this “new world.” We need “theory building” for without it, “we have no way of understanding the New World—the world of marvels, of wonder” (334).
This chapter heeds George’s call for theory building. We offer a four-part heuristic aimed at supporting a kairotic approach—an approach, that is, in which we experience each moment as a moment of crisis, full of possibilities that might not be self-evident. Our heuristic derives from analysis of earlier moments in history when new rhetorical technologies, namely the still camera and the movie camera, emerged as tools potentially available to public rhetors. Before we turn to these old new technologies, however, we want to establish a more general understanding of the dynamics of access and the way recent developments in media technologies are shifting those dynamics.
Two Technological Divides
In recent years, it has become common to refer to the “digital divide”—the gap between the technological “haves” and “have nots.” Discussions of this divide often suffer from simplistic, acultural understandings of technology and from an uncritical reliance on problematic constructions of race and class. As Barbara Monroe and others demonstrate, much “digital divide” discourse relies on “bootstraps” narratives in which success is the simple result of an individual’s hard work. In this formulation, once the “have nots” are given computers they will automatically secure lucrative jobs and a high quality of life. And if they don’t, it’s their own fault (Monroe 5–30).
The issue of access is further complicated by another kind of “divide.” The rise of technologically-intensive mass media (e.g., TV, film, print media, and the Web) has meant that culturally important channels of communication have increasingly been owned by large, centralized, for-profit media firms. These firms command resources of capital, technology, and talent that far exceed what ordinary people possess. We now take it for granted that media conglomerates (e.g., Time Warner, Disney, and News
