While Wysocki provides a conceptual framework in which to define new media, other scholars are exploring possible rhetorical systems in which new media might be described, understood and critiqued. In their webtext "Re-Inventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media," Cheryl Ball and Ryan Moeller seek to demonstrate "that rhetorical theory is a productive way to theorize how meaning is made among new media texts, their designers, and their readers" (abstract).
What sets Ball and Moeller apart from other new media / composition scholars is their insistence on the creation of particulr rhetorical terms to practice rhetorical analysis of new media texts. The authors employ two Greek concepts to create these rhetorical terms: topoi, "designerly strategies for meaning making or persuasion;" and commonplaces, "points where readers of a text come together and negotiate agreement among their readings." Types of topoi include genre, sequence, designer, link and audience. Context, reader, element, emotion, juxtaposition and proximity all serve as types of commonplaces (New Media Topoi, New Media Commonplaces).
While Ball and Moeller further demonstrate how these terms might be applied by analyzing and discussing two student compositions, they don't apply their terms to a new media text that we might consider professional or expert. Their own "webtext," in fact, accomplishes very few of the topoi or commonplaces a new media text might employ and could be almost as effective as a "letterate" text.
To satisfy my own curiosity, in part, and to test the applicability of Ball and Moeller's terms, I decided to experiment with an application of topoi and commonplaces to one of the most successful new media texts I could think of, a website/game/humanitarian project freerice.com. Freerice, a "a non-profit website run by the United Nations World Food Programme" was designed to accomplish two goals: to "provide education to everyone for free" and to "help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free" (About). The "text" accomplishes these goals through rhetorical usage of numerous topoi and commonplaces throughout. Audience and link topoi are perhaps the the most interesting / effective, although the text utilized the other types as well. Additionaly, the commonplaces proximity and pathos are also exceptionally effective.
In line with Ball and Moeller's definition of audience (see New Media Topoi), the designation of the audience's participation in freerice is participatory and empowering. The player or contributor of freerice creates rice donations by interacting with the trivia game: "For each answer you get right, we donate 10 grams of rice through the World Food Programme to end World Hunger" (Index). This transaction is made possible by the presence of advertisements.
Such participation is ultimately rewarding for the audience and extremely effective rhetoric because of the explicit link, the "direct connection to elements within or outside of a text used to inform a reader in support of a designer’s claim" (New Media Topoi), between the fun of game-play and the pleasure of humanitarianism. On Freerice, giving is not only "free," it's fun.
Such topoi are major contributors to the text's multimodal system of rhetoric, but commonplaces play enormous persuasive roles as well. The text's use of emotion or pathos, which is most evident in a proximate link to view videos of rice distribution, demonstrates tangible results and thus encourages more playtime among users/readers.
Furthermore, the text's proximate display of social network links (twitter, facebook) to the main module (the quiz game) allows users to broadcast their smart and charitable identities, thus reinforcing their own identification and connection with the text and further encouraging more game play.
The application of a few of Ball and Moeller's rhetorical terms demonstrates, I think, the efficacy of their critical system. Furthermore, applying this system to new media texts which are unconnected to new media studies is an especially important task for two reasons. First, such a task demonstrates the unbiased capability of new media critical vocabularies to analyze current new media texts. Secondly, the online and thus public presence of these critiques serves to further disseminate knowledge the utility of new media studies as analytic tool.
Ball, Cheryl and Ryan Moeller. “Re-inventing the Possibilities: Academic Literacy and New Media” The Fiberculture Journal 10 (2007). http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue10/ball_moeller/index.html
Breen, John. Freerice. United Nations World Food Programme, 2007. Web. 18 Jan. 2011.
I did not think to apply Ball and Moeller to new media texts that were not student projects. I played on the Freerice site for a while and completely agree on its rhetoricall effectiveness. The site, of course, is completely unlike the student projects. There is a lot more text involved. In the posts this week, several of us have expressed how we are not yet sold on the new media projects that our readings talked about. Perhaps looking at other new media texts (non-student projects) would be helpful in showing us the possibilities of new media and give us better ideas of how it can be used in the classroom. I, for one, would rather start with having my students rhetorically analyze some new media texts before they start creating their own, and our readings do not address that as I would like.
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