Some rhetors, some 9/11 memories.

1. September 11, 2014

2. Today:
1)Reminders
2)Your Rhetors
3)The Rhetoric of 9/11
4)Group work: the 9/11
5)Next time!

3. Remember:
Your first rhetorical analysis is due to your
response blog tonight. This is in addition to
your usual response. Make sure to mark
the rhetorical analysis 1 as what it is (name
it “Rhetorical Analysis 1”).

4. Your rhetors:
Here’s what your groups came up with for
us!

5. Danielle DeVoss
“…86 percent of teenagers believe that writing well is
important to success in life. But they don’t see most of the
writing that they do in their lives as “real” writing, yet it is
the writing in which they find the most pleasure, that they
do most eagerly, and, arguably, that they do most
successfully.”

6. Teenagers in today’s society are more likely to spend
more time fixing their grammar and re-reading blog
posts, tweets, facebook statuses, and instagram
captions than their written papers for class.

8. Education

9. BIO

10. Publications
• (in press & in process)
– Purdy, J., & DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.). (In process). Making space:
Writing instruction, infrastructure, and
– multiliteracies.
Rife, M., & DeVoss, D. N. (Eds.). (In process). Cultures of
copyright. Peter Lang.
– Garcia, E. M.; DeVoss, D. N., & Choffel, E. (In process). Document
design in/and the writing center. Manuscript in process for
submission to Writing Center Journal.

11. She Likes Her Cat

12. Lev Manovich

13. Why is it important

14. Quote
In short, the cultural tactics evolved by people were turned into
strategies now sold to them. If you want to
“oppose the mainstream,” you now had plenty of lifestyles
available – with every subculture aspect, from music and visual
styles to cloves and slang – available for purchase.
Manovich, Lev. The practice of Everyday (Media) Life. 2008.

15. What it means
• People buy thing, but they are not 100% sure on what it does
• In order to be accepted you must be in the main stream of
products
• No matter what you want there is something and someone out
there for you
• The quote gives the reader the idea that they need to be a part of
time and that it is important for them to be a part of the new
generation.
• No matter what you do or what you want to get you can get it.

16. Background
• Author of books regarding
new media
• Professor in computer
science at City University of
New York, Graduate Center
• On the list of 25 people
who are shaping the future
of design

17. Lev Manovich
“In short, the cultural tactics
evolved by people were turned
into strategies now sold to
them. If you want to “oppose
the mainstream,” you now had
plenty of lifestyles available –
with every subculture aspect,
from music and visual styles to
cloves and slang – available for
purchase.”

18. The meaning
• Even when you oppose the idea, you are still
involved.
• Culture and technology changes over the years
based on what people want.
• For any subgroup you want to be apart of, there
specific array of things for that lifestyle (music,
clothes, language, etc.)

19. Stuart A. Selber

20. Some have laptops, some do not. This is an example of
distraction as well because the student is clearly on
Facebook, instead of listening to the instructor.

21. “Whereas teachers of writing and communication have
increasingly called for reflective approaches,
conventional programs rarely dwell on social, political,
and economic contexts. As a rule, then, students are not
encouraged to ask important questions when it comes to
technology development and use: What is lost as well as
gained? Who profits? Who is left behind and for what
reasons? What is privileged in terms of literacy and
learning and cultural capital? What political and cultural
values and assumptions are embedded in hardware and
software?”

22. • Technology can be both good and bad. Good in the
sense that you have a lot of accessible knowledge at
your fingertips, but at the same time it can cause
distraction and diminish that art of searching for
knowledge.
• Technology can have different levels of accessible
based upon who you are and where you are from,
economically.
• Technology requires privilege to use because it is
not equal to all in the same ways.

23. Stuart Selber
Students of writing with a new media focus, too, should be able to
“confront the complexities associated with computer use.” Instead of
believing that a computer is an instrument that can solve all problems, “A
functionally literate student is alert to the limitations of technology and
the circumstances in which human awareness is required.”

24. Explanation
• Selber is saying that while computers are capable of almost
everything and anything, we, as students, need to realize that
technology can only do so much, and we are responsible for
doing the things that technology cannot.
• Technology doesn’t define itself, rather the people who use it
execute what the technology does. In order to understand
this, we need to be technologically literate while also
ensuring that we are not technologically dependent .

26. Lisa Nakamura

27. Quote
On cybertyping: “distinctive ways that the
internet, propagates, disseminates, and
commodifies images of race and racism.”

28. Explanation
The Internet in a way promotes racism through
use of Website names, addresses, and brands that
represent a smaller culture, race or population
than the overall general public.
i.e. AsianAvenue.com, BlackPeopleMeet.com,
ChristianMingle.com

29. Keith Gilyard

30. Keith Gilyard
● Prominent writer and teacher at Penn State
● Discusses race, ethnicity, language, writing and
politics
● Looks for authentic and genuine voices amidst the
general conformed opinion

31. Keith Gilyard
● “Writing is not an activity that features social
responsibility as an option. Writing is social
responsibility. When you write, you are being
responsible to some social entity, even if that
entity is yourself. You can be irresponsible as a
writer, but you cannot be non responsible. (Let’s
Flip the Script, 21)

32. “Writing is social responsibility.”
● You are responsible for what you say
o Everything comments on something
● Important to understand how your writing is
received by yourself and other audiences
● Responsibility to give an informed unbiased
opinion
o It’s possible to be irresponsible but that doesn’t mean
it’s okay

33. His Quote on Code Switching
“The ability to move back and forth among
languages, dialects, and registers with ease, as
demanded by the social situation” and that it is also
a "strategy by which the skillful speaker uses his
knowledge of how language choices are interpreted
in his community to structure the interaction so as
to maximize outcomes favorable to himself"

34. Gilyard is discussing rhetoric from the back interface.
What he’s describing is rhetoric being created online.
He uses his knowledge of code to generate beneficial
responses for a specific community.

35. Adam Banks

36. “...anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is
a problem for black students or that it is somehow
connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire
to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video
cassette player, and it's time for those folks to be
retired, be they teachers, administrators, or
community leaders, so the rest of us can try to do
some real work in the service of equal access for
black students and all students.”
-Adam Banks, Digital Griots: African American
Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age

37. Why it Matters
• This quote is a transformative take on how
contemporary society should view the use of
ebonics as a lack of resources rather than a lack of
intelligence associated with a specific culture.
• It’s important that all groups of people are given
equal opportunities to access a better educational
experience, regardless of race, gender,
socioeconomic status, etc….

38. Example
• A privileged white student shouldn’t be viewed as
more intelligent or affluent than a student who may
use ebonics as a mode of language communication.

39. Quote
“ In the pursuit of greater equality in our education
system, from K to PHD, technology access, print
literacies, and verbal skill all collide as requirements
for even basic participation in an information-based,
technology-dependent economy and
society.”

40. This quote is pulled from the Digital Griots: African
American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age. Banks
exclaims that racial inequalities are becoming more
present in different areas of society (technology and
education). In the pursuit for greater equality,
African Americans need to assert themselves into
the digital story.

41. James Paul Gee
“School is often based not on problem solving, which perforce involves actions and goals,
but on learning information, facts, and formulas that one has read about in texts or heard
about in lectures. It is not surprising, then, that research has long shown that a student’s
doing well in school, in terms of grades and tests, does not correlate with being able to solve
problems in the areas in which the student has been taught (e.g., math, civics, physics).”
― James Paul Gee,
The Anti-Education Era: Creating Smarter Students through Digital Learning
“An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily
content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically
changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated,
debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting,
and, often, writing and reading.”
― James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

42. So what’s he talkin’ about?
• Education in our society is built off of an agreement of
what skills are important.
• We value facts more than actions.
• Even though students learn more by problem solving,
the accepted social practice suggests the opposite:
memorize formulas and facts.
• Education does not exist in a vacuum, rather an
evolving environment of learning

43. LuMing Mao

44. “Therefore, the notion of “difference” “poses a
problem because such differences are not absolute,”
and they are “relative to the cultural practices of
ethnographers and their readers”
LuMing Mao

45. Chinese Game Shows
Without any cultural references or understanding,
foreign media seems strange to us. Without rhetorical
and cultural clues, an American audience would not
understand the show.

46. “…what characterizes Native Rhetorical Traditions
across tribes and across time is an orientation to
making that is attuned to carrying traditional
values and ideas forward, but that is not trapped
under the mistaken anthropological notion that
new materials make them somehow corrupt.” –
Malea Powell

47. It’s a common notion that modern ideas and materials
are erasing traditional values and ideas that have existed
for centuries. In production, Native Americans include
traditional values and ideas through symbols and specific
processes that have rhetorical symbolism to those values.
While it may be true that technology has eliminated
some of the tedious work involved with Native American
production, some of the materials are more difficult to
obtain in order for the makers to follow through with
their traditional process and make the rhetorical
symbolism have the same meaning.

48. These baskets tell stories while maintaining
traditional practices by Native Americans. Some of
the traditional material required are not available so
they have to compromise

49. Judith Butler

50. Quote
“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of
gender... identity is performatively constituted by the
very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.”
(Judith Butler)

51. Explanation
Its not about who you are biologically, but more along
the lines of how you can externally present your
emotions via facial expressions, your mood, the way
you dress, and how you carry yourself.

52. Jean Baudrillard

53. “We live in a world where there is more
and more information, and less and less
meaning”
- Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and
Simulation

55. Importance
• The book seeks to “interrogate the relationships among
reality, symbols and society”
• The quote relates directly to this:
• Multitude of information
• Aware of the truth, aware of the lies
• Finding meaning among the noise

56. James Paul Gee
• MA and Ph. D
of Linguistics
• Discourse analysis
• Researcher and
educator

57. Key Quote
• “After all, we never just read or write; rather, we always
read or write something in some way.”
• Explanation: Gee researches rhetoric within social groups,
and defines 2 main types of rhetorical discourse
– Discourse: language, within social group identified by certain
common social practices, which has certain significance due to the
group setting
– discourse: language in use (doesn’t exist in reality)

58. Examples
• Gee created the following categories in which different
types of Discourse are used
– N-identity: natural born differences given importance by
society. Ex. Male, female
– I-identity: set by authority or institution. Ex. Student, prisoner
– D-identity: personal traits within social interaction. Ex. Caring,
stubborn
– A-identity: shared experiences within affinity group. Ex.
Religious, nationality, hobby groups

59. LuMing Mao
• Miami University English Department Chair
and Professor of English and Asian/Asian
American Studies
• Researches and teaches rhetoric with a
focus on global/ethnic studies (specifically
in regards to Asia)

60. Quotation from Mao
“Togetherness will not lead to the erasure of
differences, but rather, when togetherness takes place
we should become more aware of our differences.”

61. Mao’s Words in Action

62. Cindy Selfe

64. General Information
• English professor at OSU
• Tries to convince people who are
strictly humanist to use technology
• Encourages the teaching of utilizing
technology in the classroom,
especially for networking

65. “There are still a lot of humanists, who use technology,
but don’t think about focusing on it in their classes—
especially in terms of critically informed production. So
while these folks use a cell phone and use scholarly
databases and use a lot of websites, and use technology in
their classes in terms of making multimodal texts
available for consumption by students, teaching students
to analyze and criticize mediated texts, I still know plenty
of teachers who avoid teaching students how
to compose or produce such texts because they personally
don’t feel it’s their responsibility to compose, or to teach
composition, in any modality except the alphabetic.
composition.”

66. Transition

67. The Rhetoric of 9/11
You listened to a piece about 9/11 today. This is in part a
flash-forward; later in the semester you will create an
NPR style audio essay.
But what I want us to talk about a bit today is the
rhetoric of 9/11. Many of you likely don’t remember the
world before the attacks. Some of you might. It changed
American culture dramatically.

68. Major changes
1. We never thought
the US mainland
could be attacked
2. We basically lost
our privacy, at least
at airports and
events
3. That ticker showed
up on the news
4. Patriotism surged
5. We started military action in
the middle east
6. Fear of our borders ramped up
7. Towers become a major symbol
8. Rampant American identity
confusion

69. Activity
Form pairs. The image below is the 9/11 Memorial logo.
Using what we’ve learned about design rhetoric so far,
make a better one.

70. For Tuesday:
Read: The first 5 chapters of The
Non-Designer’s Design Handbook
(it’s not as long as it sounds).
In-class we talk about C.R.A.P.