Rhetorical Convergence...

Anders Fagerjord, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo; Visiting Scholar, Scholarly Tech. Group, Brown University

In their 1999 book Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write: "The cultural expectation [in North America today is] that the Web remediate all earlier media [Ö]" (210).

One of the difficulties of applying existing media theories to the Web is that periodic Web media seem more to be hybrids of forms from different older media than media just emigrating to a new, digital environment. As this is a logical consequence of the digital development called convergence, I propose to call this rhetorical convergence.

Convergence means to come together, and is a word used widely to describe the development of digitalisation. The fact that letters, still and moving images, and sound can be coded as digital numbers so they all can be displayed and manipulated by computers and distributed through computer networks have lead to what many call the "digital revolution".

I use the word rhetoric to describe the products of an author's choice of topic, arguments, sequence and words. Further, as I take the word text to also cover other media than writing, I will expand rhetoric to cover more than written words. Here, it also embraces still and moving images, visual aspects of text (typefaces, sizes, colours, layout, etc.), and programmed procedures in computer texts. In the wide sense, then, I use rhetoric to describe how media messages are made to appear. I am aware that quite a few scholars will find this to be a peculiar use of the term rhetoric2, but I hope there also are those that find it natural.

In borrowing the term rhetoric I also want to imply a wish to start the collecting of a catalogue of techniques and figures of the rhetorical convergence. The rhetoric tradition has always made catalogues of rhetorical figures and techniques (although sometimes blown up to a ridiculous scale). As a well known centuries old tradition, these studies form the backbone of a diversity of literary studies today. By starting to single out and classifying new ways of conveying meaning in interactive media, we can build a backbone strong enough to form scholarly opinion on the new literary and journalistic formats as well.

My question to the study of Web media then is: can we find rhetorical convergence on the Web? What forms does it take? Which rhetorical forms survive, and which disappear as a result of the convergence?

New media tend to lift rhetoric techniques from several media, what I here call rhetorical convergence: Rhetorical convergence occurs when rhetorical techniques inherited from different media co-exist on the same Web page. Why call this convergence, and not collage or coexistence? Because the coexistence itself brings about new effects: As Gunnar Liestøl has shown, text and moving images are read differently, as the eye moves over the former, while the latter is played in front of our eyes. To read the page combining the two will force a reader to shift between these two modes of acquisition. Liestøl's argument goes much further, I will stop by noting that this simple combination of video and text, to be found every day on Web pages such as CNN Interactive or BBC News gives new effects that not lend themselves easily to descriptions from studies of newspapers or television, or even hypertext studies.

But still, if we just place a text and a video clip next to each other, is this not just a change in reading, and not in authoring of messages?

My hypothesis is that it is a change in authoring as well. Above, the opposition between moving images and text was deduced from their different kinds of signification. Furthermore, rhetorical convergence can also describe a coming together of conventions of rhetorical practise. Some of these are mutually exclusive, and the author must make a choice. When rhetorics converge, different practises will have to be weighed against each other. Some conventions and practises from old media will be used, and others will not. The first part of the study of rhetorical convergence will be a charting of this process.

In the presentation, I will analyse some examples from sites such as MSNBC and Nationalgeographic.com, showing that their combination of rhetorical figures from different older media result in a new, convergent rhetoric, posing new challenges to the reader.

	Rhetorical Convergence: Remediation on the Web	<back to program

Anders Fagerjord, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo; Visiting Scholar, Scholarly Tech. Group, Brown University In their 1999 book Remediation, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write: "The cultural expectation [in North America today is] that the Web remediate all earlier media [Ö]" (210). One of the difficulties of applying existing media theories to the Web is that periodic Web media seem more to be hybrids of forms from different older media than media just emigrating to a new, digital environment. As this is a logical consequence of the digital development called convergence, I propose to call this rhetorical convergence. Convergence means to come together, and is a word used widely to describe the development of digitalisation. The fact that letters, still and moving images, and sound can be coded as digital numbers so they all can be displayed and manipulated by computers and distributed through computer networks have lead to what many call the "digital revolution". I use the word rhetoric to describe the products of an author's choice of topic, arguments, sequence and words. Further, as I take the word text to also cover other media than writing, I will expand rhetoric to cover more than written words. Here, it also embraces still and moving images, visual aspects of text (typefaces, sizes, colours, layout, etc.), and programmed procedures in computer texts. In the wide sense, then, I use rhetoric to describe how media messages are made to appear. I am aware that quite a few scholars will find this to be a peculiar use of the term rhetoric2, but I hope there also are those that find it natural. In borrowing the term rhetoric I also want to imply a wish to start the collecting of a catalogue of techniques and figures of the rhetorical convergence. The rhetoric tradition has always made catalogues of rhetorical figures and techniques (although sometimes blown up to a ridiculous scale). As a well known centuries old tradition, these studies form the backbone of a diversity of literary studies today. By starting to single out and classifying new ways of conveying meaning in interactive media, we can build a backbone strong enough to form scholarly opinion on the new literary and journalistic formats as well. My question to the study of Web media then is: can we find rhetorical convergence on the Web? What forms does it take? Which rhetorical forms survive, and which disappear as a result of the convergence? New media tend to lift rhetoric techniques from several media, what I here call rhetorical convergence: Rhetorical convergence occurs when rhetorical techniques inherited from different media co-exist on the same Web page. Why call this convergence, and not collage or coexistence? Because the coexistence itself brings about new effects: As Gunnar Liestøl has shown, text and moving images are read differently, as the eye moves over the former, while the latter is played in front of our eyes. To read the page combining the two will force a reader to shift between these two modes of acquisition. Liestøl's argument goes much further, I will stop by noting that this simple combination of video and text, to be found every day on Web pages such as CNN Interactive or BBC News gives new effects that not lend themselves easily to descriptions from studies of newspapers or television, or even hypertext studies. But still, if we just place a text and a video clip next to each other, is this not just a change in reading, and not in authoring of messages? My hypothesis is that it is a change in authoring as well. Above, the opposition between moving images and text was deduced from their different kinds of signification. Furthermore, rhetorical convergence can also describe a coming together of conventions of rhetorical practise. Some of these are mutually exclusive, and the author must make a choice. When rhetorics converge, different practises will have to be weighed against each other. Some conventions and practises from old media will be used, and others will not. The first part of the study of rhetorical convergence will be a charting of this process. In the presentation, I will analyse some examples from sites such as MSNBC and Nationalgeographic.com, showing that their combination of rhetorical figures from different older media result in a new, convergent rhetoric, posing new challenges to the reader.

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