Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric

• The author is using the social media reformation of Hamilton to show the power of rhetoric in regards to their project to reshape perceptions of a city
• Ad hoc- created or done for a particular purpose as necessary.

• “‘Our sense of place…tends to remain rooted in an imaginary that describes communities as a collection of discrete elements, like houses, families, yards, streets, and neighborhoods,’”(45). The physicality of an area is never what makes an area feel “homey” or any particular adjective. The city of Hamilton is just buildings and streets, so in this particular case, the revitalization didn’t  focus on the city’s physical form or aesthetic, it aimed to create a new perspective in peoples’ minds about Hamilton.
• Nonhuman influence such as words are not always the main method of advertising/marketing a product or idea. In the case of Hamilton, many people were influenced not only by other people talking about the city, but the visual imagery of Hamilton and its lovely features and sites. Things like these are capable of persuasion just as much as someone saying something about a product,company, etc..

Tweeting Disaster: Hashtag Constructions and Collisions 

• The author is thinking about Twitter as a news platform in emergencies and disasters. Due to Twitter’s ability to update a situation during an emergency, the author brings to  notice the issue with Twitter’s tagging system, as some important tweets that people in an emergency should she are getting lost in tags due to misspelling or lack of information as to what hashtags are to be used in emergencies. 
• “Folksonomies”- ad hoc labelling and tagging systems, systems for managing managing massive information streams.
• “Hashtags related to the same event or discursive context proliferate, creating potential problems in maintaining ‘sustainable’ communication contexts,”(236). This quote is discussing the issue with hashtags that overlap and are reused in different contexts, making it difficult to discern what information belongs to which incident. This makes the communication between people in emergencies clustered and confusing.
• This work explains the power of hashtags, not in the sense of advertisement, but for spreading information quickly in disaster settings. Organization of hashtags is primarily in the hands of the user who is tweeting, but in the case of disaster and maintaining communication through Twitter, the platform must do a better job of maintaining this organization so information is not lost. 

Rhetorical Functions of Hashtag Forms Across Social Media Applications

• In this essay the author is sharing their study on what genres hashtags can be categorized into. The author finds that there are 5 main categories of hashtags.
• Emphasizing, Critiquing, identifying, iterating, rallying
• “Data collection and analysis were ethnographically‐focused and reflexive, using methods of participant observation so that we would be able to engage in “primary‐cycle” coding in real time to determine whether users’ hashtags were functioning metacommunicatively or indexically.” Here the author is talking about their method for  collecting the data they did. This quote means that they had first person information on the people who were tweeting in order to know if the hashtags meant anything specifically or if they were a well known/used tag.
• How the information in this essay can be applied to our class is in our analysis of social media posts. We can now look at hashtags, which I previously viewed them purely as organizational tools, as rhetorical devices.

In all the texts we read, the authors emphasize the importance of hashtags and metacommunication. In the case of the reading about Hamilton, the metacommunication applied there was in the visual imagery that was used to revamp the city, as they found that the physical property of something is rarely what makes it enjoyable, so they simply worked on changing perceptions. In the instance of hashtags, it’s less about what the tag is specifically saying, and more about the underlying motives or intentions #TheMoreYouKnow

#4. Composing for Recomposition

• The author wants us to know that everything we read is composed in a way that allows for repurposing. This feature makes it so a text can be used in many ways while also being traced back to the source which is good for marketing
• rhetorical velocity: “a conscious rhetorical concern for distance, travel, speed, and time, pertaining specifically to theorizing instances of strategic appropriation by a third party”
• “‘If I release the video in this format, could the video be used in this way, and would it be worth their time to do this? And would it be supportive of my objectives for them to do that?’“. In this quote, the author is demonstrating the thought process behind composing rhetoric with rhetorical velocity in mind.
• There are many different decisions made in creating impactful rhetoric with different issues to address. For example a company may know what they want the consumer of their content to do with their rhetoric, but is it worth it for the consumer? Would it be too difficult for them to accomplish? Is what the company wants at all desirable for the consumer to undertake?

These readings have made me more aware of not only how companies, politicians, etc. compose their speeches or posts for twitter, I am now thinking about what these companies and people writing posts for social media want or expect me to do with what they’ve given me. When I see a cringey or embarrassing post from a company on Instagram, I recognize that it’s purposeful, and not a genuine failed attempt at being cool using memes (not always cringey memes perse, but it  usually is), but now when I see a post like that, I’m more likely to see what this company wants the world to do with their horrible content (stuff like: do they see this post becoming a meme itself? Is this post so embarrassing that it’s almost endearing?)

Getting Likes, Going Viral, and the Intersections Between Popularity

• The author is trying to understand the value of likes in terms of academia, and if there is any value at all.
• Viral: “implies that viewers and users passively transmit and infect others without conscious consent”

Spreadable: “suggests that we knowingly spread and keep alive

articles, photos, videos, and other information by posting and sharing that which we believe will make a positive and advantageous impact on others and ourselves.”

• “‘Program and ‘content’ analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media or to their subliminal charge’”. Here the author is saying that there is content that is amazing that does not go viral, and that it’s hard to discern what makes any particular thing gain traction in likes or views.
• There are many factors that have been found to affect the virality of content. These can be things like hashtags, multimedia posts(e.g videos along with a tweet) that make a post get clicked on more, meaning viral content doesn’t have to be “good” content.

#3. Composing With Rhetorical Velocity

Prompt: In the chapter, the authors offer an approach–a set of guiding questions–for analyzing circulating text. Discuss their approach and how it might be applied to our rhetorical analysis. What does this approach bring to light that Wysocki’s approach does not? 

The approach discussed in this reading is more focused on how different audiences may perceive, and possibly misconstrue a composition, and focuses more on the perspective of the creator rather than the observer (as Wysocki’s approach does). This approach can be applied to our rhetorical analysis by allowing us insight into what goes on behind the scenes of creating a composition, what is the thought process behind what the author chooses to incorporate into their composition? One question in this approach talks about how rhetoric can be misconstrued and poses the question “how can we limit misappropriations?”, which is an example of how we can analyze rhetoric from the eyes of the composer.

• The author makes a point of saying that rhetors should expect the audience to not only absorb and look at their rhetorical compositions but for them to repurpose and revise the rhetoric 
• Rhetorical Velocity– The way rhetors strategize about the potential recomposition and redistribution of a text.
• “We want them to think of their composition as a falling Tetris block: Someone else may turn it sideways or upsidedown and fit it into a new combination,”(79). This quote is referring to the idea of reconfiguring and revising rhetoric made by other people. Creators of rhetoric should look at their work as something that can be changed and repurposed for another project.
• This work has informed me of the common practice of reusing rhetoric. I didn’t consider rhetoric to be something that’s commonly sampled such as in the music industry. It will be interesting to see if I begin to notice any commonalities among the rhetoric we analyze in class.

 Case Study: The D Brand

• The author is saying that the image of Detroit has been tarnished, and aims to fix the “scary, empty and valueless” view of Detroit and promote tourism
• The D Brand- “A sustained attempt to transform Detroit’s ‘image’”
• “The D Brand is an instance of ‘applied storytelling’,”(164) here the author is talking about how all of the components used in the media created to revamp Detroit’s image go along with a particular narrative that they’re trying to get across. In the case of ‘Blind Date’, the story being shown is helping to show Detroit in a certain light. 
• This case study showed me that digital rhetoric is not always a company trying to sell me something. In this case, it’s an organization using rhetoric in an attempt to change the publics’ view of the city of Detroit. 

#2. Silva Rhetoricae 

• The author’s main point is that rhetoric can be a difficult subject to comprehend, but it provides a lot of insight, and you can enjoy it without understanding  100% of what it’s saying. 
• Rhetoric is a forest, it provides valuable resources for a variety of uses, but it can be easy to get lost and overwhelmed.
• “you can enjoy the simple beauty of a birch tree without knowing it is Betula alba” is saying not to get caught up on the complicated words you don’t know
• The definitions of words used are not what makes rhetoric so powerful

The Multiple Media of Texts

• The point of this essay is to show the many ways that visual elements affect how we perceive media, such as differences in typeface, size, color, imagery, etc.. The author wants us to think more critically of the information that a particular media is trying to get across, not only by their words but the elements listed above as well
• Lettershapes: typefaces- Letters have shape because of their typefaces
  • The overall shape of type The shape of type on a page—or screen—can suggest many things to us
• “The visual aspects of text are (therefore) to be understood not simply in terms of physiology but also in terms of social context,” things change based on the needs of the people who use said thing e.g smaller books for holding in our hands, larger ones for public speaker such as in monasteries 
• This work provided more insight into what particular visual elements in media mean and what they convey, such as certain typefaces 

“After introducing the reader to multiple media of texts, Wysocki offers a three-tiered approach for analyzing visual aspects of texts. Discuss her approach and how it might be applied to analyzing aspects of social media across different platforms or channels”

Wysocki’s process can be rewritten as 1. Analyze the visual elements, 2. find the relationship between those elements, 3. Consider how these relationships will be perceived by different audiences. By analyzing a business’s social media page, and seeing the kinds of posts they create, it’s easy to see who their market is and what kinds of customers they’re trying to reach out to. For example, companies will include ‘joyful’ colors if they want to be seen as fun and hip, as their product is likely aimed towards teens to young adults, but it would include more monotone/neutral colors and regal font-types if they wanted to be seen as fancy/classy, and attract older or sophisticated customers.

All Writing is Multimodal, Platforms Intervene, Keeping Up with the Algorithms

• When writing rhetorics we use more than one mode of communication making it multimodal, there is no such thing as monomodal, the author wants us to realize that we are seeing what an algorithm thinks we want to see, and in a way can be seen as censorship

• There are 5 methods of communicating: Linguistic, Aural, Visual, Gestural, and Spatial, you never see the things that a platform’s algorithm or the platform itself deems unacceptable

• “In multimodal theory, the definition of mode is complicated to distribute equal emphasis on how meanings are created, delivered, and circulated through choices in design, material composition, tools and technologies, delivery systems, and interpretive senses,”(multimodal). This means that communication implements more than just words.

“Social media platforms don’t just guide, distort, and facilitate social activity, they also delete some of it.”(platforms intervene). Social media and their respective algorithms choose what we do and don’t see. 

“Algorithms now dominate the social media marketing discussion – almost everywhere you engage, within almost every platform you use, machine learning and data sorting is used to decide what it is you see.”(algorithms). This quote is saying that we are seeing exactly what an algorithm believes we will see based on previous data collection. 

• This essay shows us early on that you’re not just looking at the text when analyzing digital rhetoric, When analyzing digital rhetoric and social dynamics we should know that we’re not always seeing the ‘real’ side of a platform, we see what the platform wants us to,Algorithms are directly influencing what we see online, this is affecting social media marketing/advertising.

“Drawing from examples in the readings, in what ways do platforms and modes influence the way we read, write, and circulate communications.”

• Influenced by visual cues such as body/hand gestures
• Infographics and other visual rhetorics
• Studies are done to find the most influential/effective modes
• Algorithms monitor what we like and then predicts what we’ll be likely to click on in the future