of the digital commons functions as a network, but the digital commons exceed this infrastructure. By comparison, it would be odd to reduce the natural commons to the infrastructure of space, spatial relations, and physical movement. Relatedly, the internet, which is a network of networks, is not the digital commons. It is not, in its current form, a commons in any effective sense, including though not limited to the sense of shared property and governance. From the early years of the 1990s, the policies that determined internet expansion and access were dictated largely by the private sector. As Benkler notes with reference to the Bill Clinton administration’s telecommunications programs, corporate interests shaped the internet into a market structure from the beginning, in which “property-like regulatory frameworks” were strengthened while “various regulatory constraints on property like rights” were eased.54 Whether this history is good or bad is beyond the scope of my project; the same goes for the question of whether the internet or the World Wide Web could, in terms of ownership structures, become a “real” commons in the future. It seems, to me, unlikely. What I am concerned with as a rhetorical scholar are the habits of language, which in the case of the digital commons invent a form of being together digitally. In part, my reason for drawing conceptual insights from the natural and cultural commons is that doing so allows me to study the digital commons not solely as a function of property, but as a living arrangement. As a living arrangement, the digital commons are constituted by the commoners, the cultural productivity in which they are engaged, and the networks through which they are connected.
For rhetorical scholars, digital networks have in recent years acquired a new inflection and prominence. According to Damien Smith Pfister, “The changing conditions of mediation merit the development of a ‘new rhetoric’ capable of guiding public advocacy and deliberation in contemporary times. Networked media spur networked rhetorics.”55 In his study of the blogosphere, Pfister explicates a historical “shift in sensibilities as people participate in, make sense of, and enact new modes of thinking, feeling, and being.”56 As he carefully notes, however, the network has long been “rhetoric’s key metaphor,” connecting rhetors and audiences via paths of influence.57 In terms of the value of the concept of network for the study of digital rhetoric, Pfister and I agree. What is especially compelling is how he mobilizes the rhetorical tradition to study “how the affordances provided by networked media change practices related to the invention of public argument, the role of emotion in public life, and the exercise of expertise.”58 And yet the network concept on its own is necessary but insufficient for a study of digital rhetoric; that is, it is insufficient to function without a framing concept such as commons.59 One of my reservations about the network as self-sufficient is that it tends to orient one’s imaginary and focus toward utilitarianism.60 Networks function with a purpose, designed to execute. With some exceptions, networks have a greater potential for efficiency than commons do, and a higher aspiration for efficient processing, specifically information processing.61 It is difficult to conceive of a network in which figurative litter is simply lying around. Compared to the commons, networks have nodes rather than textured destinations. In the commons, including the digital commons, the multitude of commoners live with each other’s cultural residues. Networks do not necessarily contain a tradition or the products thereof. Commons, however, do.
As is by now evident, this book belongs in an interdisciplinary literature dedicated to digital rhetoric. As a rhetorical scholar rather than, for example, a media literacy critic, I take the term “digital rhetoric” to designate the practice and study of persuasion in the activities, objects, and sites of digital information technologies.62 Specifically, as my point of view is informed by theories and grammars of the classical canon, I join the conversation that Kathleen Welch pioneered twenty years ago, Collin Brooke mapped ten years after that, and many others have contributed to richly.63 I wholeheartedly agree with Michele Kennerly and Damien Smith Pfister, who introduce their innovative collection of essays by noting, “Returning to ancient texts from new technocultural vantage points shakes up accepted interpretations, produces readings with different nuances, allows old terms to be revivified and reinhabited in new ways, and generates theoretical resources to guide critics, theorists, and publics in negotiating continuity and change.”64 Further, I appreciate Aaron Hess and Amber Davisson’s dialectics of theory and analysis, whereby they emphasize that “the concept of digital rhetoric requires sustained attention to the ways that rhetoric changes in a technological era and how technology is shaped by human expression both about and through the technology itself.”65 As Douglas Eyman notes, “Digital rhetoric should be viewed as a field that engages multiple theories and methods rather than as a singular theory framework.”66 Responding to Barbara Warnick’s germinal work, Eyman explains that scholars of digital rhetoric “need to align theories and methods of classical and contemporary rhetoric to networked texts and new media as objects of study, but we also need to develop new theories and methods to account for gaps in these more traditional approaches.”67 By inventing and deploying the concept of the gifting logos to examine discourses of expertise in the digital commons, I respond to the invitations extended by these scholars.
Scholars of digital rhetoric, as well theorists like Castells and Benkler, are explicitly wary of being charged with technological determinism, and for good reason. And because I, too, could be indicted on this charge, a comment is warranted. As the word “determinism” suggests, the idea is that mechanical, industrial, and communication technologies constrain and enable human habits and perspectives in ways that we ourselves do not control. To a point, this seems a fairly obvious assessment. A commuter train allows me to go faster than a car, but not as fast as a rocket ship. A telephone allows me to hear my friend’s voice, while a letter does not. The reason that the point of view known as technological determinism is so often rejected or even derided is that extreme versions of it tend to elide the human origins of technology. In scholarly analyses as well as popular discourse, technology at times is talked about as though it appeared out of nowhere, enveloping and dictating human life. This point of view is especially prominent at historical moments of innovation, such as at the introduction of the printing press, the steam engine, the incandescent light bulb, microprocessors, and the internet. In terms of information technologies and media specifically, tales of origin are often fervently optimistic, marking a moment of ingenuity after which people were brought closer together and communicated better than ever before.68 The way the tales get recounted obscures not only the social context in which a technology is invented but the historical precedents thereof: the moments in the past when old technologies were new and characterized with the same enthusiasm as that with which the most recent technological invention is hailed.69 To critics of technological determinism, the phrase “new media” and the revolutionary impact that enthusiasts predict allow a presentist interpretation of media and human practices.
Although I obviously agree that all inventions and technologies are produced in a social context, that “history matters,” and that hope springs eternal until it gives us amnesia, I submit that a brusque rejection of technological determinism sometimes exaggerates human agency and control over machines.70 Of course we did not wake up one morning inside microelectronic networks and begin to produce culture there, conditioned by the technologies of the network and the machines in our midst. Instead, the networks were installed and continue to change, shrink, and grow as humans do things to them. But now that the networks are here, they do in fact shape life in the digital commons: not all the time, or in all matters, but significantly. To underestimate this process of impact is to overestimate the authority that humans exercise over the technologies of our lives, communicative and otherwise. As I look around my office, my home, and my city, it is evident that technology in some measure “determines” me. As Castells writes, “Our society is characterized by the power embedded in information technology, at the heart of an entirely new technological paradigm.”71 My concern is with the language in which that power is vested and with which it is negotiated in particular moments. Thus, I am cautious with my own tendency to reinforce the perspective of technological determinism, but because of what my project demands, I am compelled to recognize the rhetorical indicators of determination.
Before
