to a wide audience as a PDF document. End users can output the composition on their own inkjet printers, which are now capable of producing sophisticated documents that include color, font, layout, photographs, charts, and more. Moreover, the concerns articulated by Brecht and Enzensberger are partially addressed by the Internet, which, in contrast to traditional radio and television, is a many-to-many, rather than a one-to-many technology. The predominant metaphor for new media is not a pipeline distributing content from a central location, but a web or network that connects multiple users to each other.
To sum up, recent technological changes mean that across a wide range of media, from videos to posters, production is cheaper and easier, reproduction is cheaper and easier, and distribution is cheaper and easier. Public rhetors potentially(!) have access to powers of production, reproduction, and distribution that only a few years ago were not readily available outside of commercial media. As Mark Poster writes, the Internet “radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, film-making, radio and television broadcasting” (211). It is now possible to talk about the “demassification” and “mass amateurization” of media—to borrow terms from Bruce McComiskey (“Visual” 199) and Clay Shirky respectively.
As the preceding discussion should make clear, we are very interested in new media and the way new technologies open up new possibilities for rhetorical action, but we use the lens of new media generatively (to make visible more options) rather than as a filter (to reduce options). While new media may have distinct affordances, we are not suggesting that any category of media is preferable for all rhetorical situations. The term new media is typically reserved for practices that are “purely” digital, such as digital video, digital animation, webpages, virtual reality, etc.; however, focusing too narrowly on digitality is problematic. Sometimes “old media” options are better, and many compelling options are hybrid forms. Desktop publishing, for instance, ultimately leads to hardcopy ink-on-paper compositions, but the production of hardcopies is made much easier by the fact that the design process takes place within the digital environments provided by graphic design software. In chapter 4, we examine a case in which a message is communicated through a complex rhetorical chain that includes electronic and faxed (i.e., hard copy-to-digital-to-hard copy) press advisories, live performances, and alphabetic-photographic accounts published in both print and online newspapers. The approach we advocate is not characterized by a single-minded allegiance to new media, but by a commitment to a deep process of rhetorical invention that takes into account all available options.
Invisible Tools: A Short History of Cameras
In the previous section, we focused narrowly on technologies themselves. Our goal was to review the way recent technological shifts alter the dynamics of access, partially upsetting asymmetries between the power of large, conglomerated, for-profit media firms and ordinary people. As Barbara Jean Monroe observes, however, technologies do not exist in a vacuum. Reminding us that class inequality “is at once economic, racial, discursive, and epistemological in character,” Monroe suggests that “[r]esituating the [digital] divide within the landscape of larger social and political formations should allow for a richer, more complicated discussion of a host of issues that attach themselves to Internet access per se but are actually constituted by these larger formations” (5). To better understand the way technologies are inextricably linked to the cultural, the social, and the discursive, it is useful to examine the adoption of earlier media tools: the analog still camera and the motion picture camera. An examination of how these older tools were and were not assimilated reveals important insights into how both cultural and material logics circumscribe the adoption of emergent technologies and rhetorics.
In his 1909 talk “Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift,” reform photographer Lewis Hine implores his audience to use photography as a political tool. Visual rhetoric, Hine claims, “brings one immediately into close touch with reality” and the photograph in particular “has an added realism of its own,” an “inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration” (111). Hine remarks that although his own era belongs to the “specialist,” there is much to be gained “by the popularizing of camera work” (112).
Contemporary theorists like John Tagg and Don Slater agree with Hine’s earlier assessment that the camera, in the hands of ordinary citizens, can be a powerful political tool. In Slater’s words,
the camera as an active mass tool of representation is a vehicle for documenting one’s conditions (of living, working and sociality); for creating alternative representations of oneself and one’s sex, class, age-group, race, etc.; of gaining power . . . over one’s image; of presenting arguments and demands; of stimulating action. (290)
Slater and Tagg, however, both argue that the political potential of the camera has not been fully realized. To be clear, Slater and Tagg are not arguing that ordinary citizens have never used cameras for political or activist purposes. Instead, they are making a more general claim about the way a number of material and cultural pressures circumscribe political uses of the camera.
Tagg explains that technologies relevant to the photographic process “only passed into popular hands in the crudest sense of the term” and important “technical and cultural knowledge” remained unavailable to ordinary camera-users (17, 18). Anyone could snap a photograph, but in the age of film-based photography, most camera-users did not (for instance) own a darkroom equipped with the chemicals, enlargers, papers, and filters necessary to take advantage of the full range of photographic expression. Instead, most amateur photographers had their prints developed at local photomarts, thereby relinquishing the ability to make the rhetorical decisions that professional photographers routinely made in the darkroom: the ability to adjust contrast and tonality, to make precise determinations about how an image is cropped, to select an appropriate size and shape for the print, and more. Moreover, photography has been situated within a cultural hierarchy that privileged professionals and artists while it relegated amateurs to the domain of “kitsch” (19).
Slater examines other forces that have limited the ability of nonspecialists to deploy in photographic rhetoric, pointing to the effects of “high pressure mass marketing of photographic equipment” that relegates the use of cameras to nonpolitical purposes (290). Slater concludes that the “enormous productive power” of the camera “is effectively contained as a conventionalized, passive, privatized and harmless leisure activity. The mass of photography—snapshooting—is hardly a conscious activity at all: it is an undeliberated moment spliced into the flow of certain ritual events: watching the baby, being at a tourist site, spending Sunday with the grandparents” (289; see also, Tagg 18).
The case of the motion picture camera is strikingly parallel to the case of the still camera. Early on, observers were aware that the movie camera could potentially be appropriated by ordinary citizens to effect social change (Winston 67). As Brian Winston and others have demonstrated, however, a complex set of cultural and material pressures severely curtailed radical use of the movie camera and related technologies. Winston argues against the “technological determinist view” that sees technologies as having self-evident and self-realizing potentials. In this view, “[w]hat the technology can deliver is what the technology will deliver” (86). “On the contrary,” Winston argues, “technology is always responsive to forces outside itself” (86). The practice of using 35mm film is a case in point. Winston shows that the 35mm standard was perpetuated not because of “utility” but because of “unexamined cultural prejudice” including technology developers’ tendency “to work with film strips in culturally familiar widths” (59). Initially the result of a one-inch wide image plus sprocket holes, the 35mm standard was “naturalized” and continued to be enforced throughout subsequent decades. Amateurs paid the price for this naturalization. Using 35mm film, “required cameras (and, of course, projectors) somewhat too large to be sold to the public, inhibiting the growth of amateur cinematography” (60).
Eventually alternate standards more conducive to amateur cinematography were developed—16mm and 8mm films that were less expensive and more portable—but these
