Who’s Talking? A Review of Week 2, Part I

It’s struck me throughout this week, re-reading the assigned texts and then experiencing the flow of all your conversations on those texts (creating, inevitably, and entirely new string of texts to also talk about), that the problems which have most interested most of you come down to one of the most basic questions askable in rhetorical analysis: Who’s talking?

My list of hot topics includes trustworthiness—how do we know who to believe and who not to as writing becomes less edited and there are fewer and fewer gates to it; individuality—in a world where writing grows increasingly collaborative, how do we ensure any authorial independence, responsibility, or incentive?; and engagement—how, in electron- and technology-soaked environments, especially classrooms, do we encourage or regulate engagement with the individuals who are “present” in physical spaces? I can see all of those concerns as stemming from the ways in which writing technologies are showing us more about a writer/rhetor’s entanglements, both intertextual and collaborative. Take the trustworthiness or believability question, otherwise known as the “internet dog” effect. 

Electronic publishing can make it indeed very difficult to know the most basic authorial information, who someone is. And beyond basic identity, we stand to be fooled about authority: it’s quite easy to sound authoritative without being authoritative. So how do we know who’s talking?  And whether we should listen to them? 

Wikipedia captured the height of these anxieties: a 1900s understanding of publishing met the possibility of democratic editing, leading to a hysteria born of not understanding that entries would be continually edited, not just edited by The Bad Guys and then left in perpetuity as would happen with a print text. The Wikipedia hysteria also captured another old-school presumption: the Single Authoritative Source, or “knowledge in a vacuum.” To presume that Wikipedia would be the end of accurate information as we know it is to presume that what it says can’t be compared to other sources and that readers can’t make judgments about what to believe. 

Don’t you love being trusted so much, dear reader? Don’t you love it when the proponents of such hysteria say, in effect, “I am smart enough to recognize such deception but nobody else is.” Okay, whatever. (Like when 30 people get in a room to complain about how advertising is too persuasive, and each of them says "I would never be swayed by an ad like this, but all those boneheads out there will be." If none of us are swayed, where are all those boneheads?)

The rules of rhetorical source evaluation haven’t changed. You still ask the same three questions you should always have been asking of any text you encounter, no matter the type:

• What is the purpose and motivation of the text? Why did someone bother to write this to begin with?
• Who benefits from this text? Now that the text is written, who does it help? Who does it serve? And if you like, who does it work against or resist?
• Who has paid for this text? Even in a world of essentially free electronic publishing, most texts are still expensively produced, and even of the free ones it’s easy to ask, “If this text cost money, who would pay for it?”  This question gets at sponsorship, and sponsorship gets at supporters and networks of friends. If you know who paid, you know whose interests the text aligns with.

What’s funny is that you probably have never had these questions put to you before exactly this way, but you’ve always needed them, even before the “Who’s Talking?” concerns raised by open electronic publishing. We don’t actually need them more now, we just use them more now, which says spooky things about the past, if you ask me.

So: electronic, networked texts expose – in ways that the traditional publishing industry disguised – questions of the writer’s authority and identity, but rhetorical analysis and the same networked electronic resources (search engines, online reference works) give us just as good ways to ascertain these things as we’ve always had. Often better.

Next up: maintaining indivudality, and staying engaged.