THE
REVIEW OF
COMMUNICATION
1 (2001):
219-225
© 2001 National
Communication Association
Electric Rhetoric
Laura J. Gurak
Kathleen E. Welch. Electric Rhetoric: Classical
Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999. 240 pages. $35.00.
What is speech? What is writing? What—in this
day of digitized, speedy, non-spellchecked, co-authored, non-linear
discourse—is it that we do? What are arguments in electronic space?
Does punctuation matter? What is privacy? Is it lost? Is copyright dead?
How can we tell a hoax from a fact? Is the body “out” and distance
education “in”? What is the state of rhetoric in the age of the
electronic gestures? Cyber-law scholar Lawrence Lessig has argued that code
(in the way of software), not laws and regulations, will ultimately
regulate the Internet. Likewise, our writing and communication are now
based on code. Students use word processing templates and grammar
checkers instead of struggling with what seem like abstract issues of
audience and purpose. Professionals choose PowerPoint templates rather
than create the most rhetorically appropriate format. There are even Web
sites that write for you, such as Planetfeedback.com, which not only
emails complaint messages but also writes the letters for you (you
choose the template).
Yet this code is not value-neutral. Take, for
example, the notion of plagiarism, the big no-no of academic discourse.
The Internet encourages this behavior; in fact, the whole world of code
was based on shared, hacked, collaborated lines of syntax and logic. No
early Internet programmer was ever jailed for sharing code, but we
threaten to punish students for doing the very things that the Internet
invites us to do. The outcomes of writing code, for academic discourse,
require us to understand, teach, and work with the Internet in
increasingly literate ways. Not “technical literacy” as in “can
you use a computer,” but a critical form of thinking that questions
the shape and outcomes of discourse technologies.
Kathleen Welch’s exciting new work, Electric
Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy, sets the
rhetorical stage for this discussion by reconfiguring what we must mean
by literacies of the twenty-first century. She writes
By “literacy” I mean . . . not only the
ability to read and write but an activity of the minds . . . capable of
recognizing and engaging substantive issues along with the ways that
minds, sensibilities, and emotions are constructed by and within
communities whose members communicate through specific technologies. In
other words, literacy has to do with consciousness: how we know what we
know and a recognition of the historical, ideological, and technological
forces that inevitably operate in all human beings. (67)
In this book, Welch challenges us to rethink what
we mean by literacy, and she invites us to reconsider the entire
humanistic tradition within the context of the electrified rhetorics of
our times. She echoes the work of scholars in a range of fields, known
loosely as “computer mediated communication,” (these days,
“Internet Studies,”) who have begun to challenge our very basic
premises about very basic concepts. Not surprisingly, much of this work,
while not offering itself as overtly rhetorical, does in fact resonate
with Welch’s project. For example, Sherry Turkle’s Life on the
Screen coheres around the concept of identity: what is identity in
the age of the Internet? Turkle might as well be a
rhetorician—Aristotle and Kenneth Burke all rolled into one. Likewise,
questions about credibility—ethos—and other central rhetorical
concepts are coming forth into the Internet research arena When we see
students relying on Web sites of questionable authorship for their
research papers, we realize that rhetorical questions abound in
cyberspace.
For her contribution to rhetoric and technology,
Welch draws on the Isocratean tradition; I applaud her for finding a new
use for such an ancient, non-Aristotelian theory. In her first book (Contemporary
Receptions of Classical Rhetoric), Professor Welch helped us see the
connections between classical concepts and contemporary ones. In Electric
Rhetoric, she succeeds again, this time in bringing notions of civic
discourse and non-linear thinking to bear on electronic communication
technologies. As Welch, Tyner, and others have argued, scholars of
rhetoric and communication, especially those trained to think about
writing, view life through a terministic screen that creates a print
dominance, which has profound implications for higher education, because
while students spend hours watching television and playing on the
computer, their schoolwork still focuses on printed books. How, Welch
asks, can we reconsider the humanistic tradition in the context of these
flying electrons, which have often been the bane of humanities
disciplines?
The book is divided into two sections, each of
which contains three chapters. The first section, “Classical Greek
Literacy and the Spoken Word,” is where Welch sets up her main premise
and her use of Isocrates. In chapter 1 (“Introduction: Screen Literacy
in Rhetoric and Composition Studies”), she introduces us to her notion
of “screen literacy.” “Screens,” she notes, “now dominate many
workplaces” and other central spaces of our daily lives (3). She tell
us that in our age, “video rules” (3), and yet, our rhetorical
theories—and subsequently, how we teach—come to us mainly from the
print age. In this chapter, she outlines her three themes for the book
(13). The first is her use of Isocrates and the Sophistic tradition, the
second is an overview of current literacy theories, and the third is an
argument about “the inherently rhetorical nature of television and
computers and their inevitable relationship to writing and the histories
of communication technologies” (13). In so doing, she hopes to
“contribute to a movement that changes the actions people take in
their daily writing and speaking lives” (13). She reviews and
critiques the rhetorical tradition, setting us up for her next chapter.
In chapter 2 (“An Isocratic Literacy Theory: An
Alternative Rhetoric of Oral/Aural Articulation,”) Welch “present[s]
Isocrates as a Sophist whose writing and teaching life offers us a
vision of Sophism that we can adapt to our scholarly and teaching
lives” (31). For Isocrates, she notes, “logos
lies at the center of learning. . . . His paideia,
more than Plato’s, empowers people and culture” (31). Here, Welch
argues that Isocrates’ logos is “more associative than linear”
(32) and as such may be far more appropriate for our screen age, where
texts are increasingly associative (hypertext) and where “the
agonistic use of epideictic rhetoric is related to his being part of an
oral culture” (48), which again resonates with the
oral/written/agonistic quality of today’s electronic discourse. On
this note, Welch describes the literacy-orality debate (55), and I must
say I find this to be one of the best summaries of the “Ong debate”
around. She ends the chapter by noting that Isocrates offers an
alternative to the Platonic-Aristotelian rhetorical theories that have
dominated theories and teaching of rhetoric.
In chapter 3 (“Disciplining Isocrates”), Welch
notes the cultural implications of any pedagogy (76). Here, she offers a
close reading of Isocrates, moving us to “the regendering of
rhetoric” (91). She notes that the Isocratean tradition, while
appropriate, is as biased as all the other ancient Greek theories when
it comes to women. “Isocrates’ biggest problem,” she notes,
“lies in his and his culture’s erasure of women.” To address this
problem, she draws on the work of Diotima, drawing on Cheryl Glenn and
others to indicate that even in the Sophistic world, there were women.
We can use this example to “redirect . . . issues of hierarchy,
history, and gender to the daily issue of working with our students, all
of whom live and study, as we do, in gendered worlds” (95). While some
rhetorical purists may take issue with anything that adds to the
original works of Isocrates, I agree with those who feel that if we wish
to use any of these ancient theories in our modern world, we must update
them in ways that are both appropriate and relevant. (On this note, I
have always found these “appropriation” discussions to be akin to
their religious counterparts, with religious conservatives wanting us to
rely only on “the word” while reformers ask us to update ancient
traditions while maintaining intent. I am of the second camp.)
Moving now to the book’s second section
(“Logos Performers, Screen Sophism, and the Rhetorical Turn”),
chapter 4 takes on “The New Rhetoric,” opening with one of the key
notions for the book: the HUT. Borrowing from those who study television
audiences, she tells us that “[w]e all reside in rhetorical HUTs,
households using television . . . and the machine’s ubiquity has
changed rhetoric” (102). Now, of course, we are surrounded by even
more screens: PCs, Palm Pilots, cell phones, even an everyday watch has
a screen interface. Welch argues that this HUT culture requires us to
“reject the Great Divide theory of orality and literacy” (103) and
understand in “electric rhetoric . . . the new merger of the written
and the oral [which have] led to electronic consciousness” (104).
Current rhetorical theories, if not modified, she warns us, “are
inadequate” (104). Her project suggests that the Isocratean tradition,
which “walks away from linearity, rationality, and dualisms of the
entrenched Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,” can (with a little help in
the gender area from Diotima) offer us a new view of rhetoric and
writing. “Our students perform habits of literacy that are
substantially different from people born into a three-channel world or
before” (109); rather than snub anything related to the television or
Internet (as, she suggests, literary types are likely to do) or simply
relegate this line of study to mass communication and media (which,
while she does not say so, has done a terrible job of bringing its
theories to bear on the most important media of our time), rhetoric
scholars should embrace these new discourse spaces. She notes that by
doing so, we can uncover the true issues of our times, including the
racism inherent in television culture (117) and the powerful forces at
work in television news (133).
Chapter 5 addresses “Technologies of Electric
Rhetoric.” Beginning with a quote from Sherry Turkle about the
cultural significance of the computer, Welch states that “[t]he
Sophistic performance of electric rhetoric has arrived,” and that this
performance is on the computer (137), with its visual, verbal, and
textual features and its “endless repeatability” (137). Here, Welch
puts forth her call for a digital literacy, noting that such literacy is
required not only for anyone seeking a job in today’s market, but also
for those who wish to experience the fullness of today’s electronic
experiences (140). Welch argues that we need to teach such literacy, and
that the Sophistic tradition will help us in the electronic world and
with all the texts that surround us: “Students who are trained in
electric rhetoric, that is, to perform and interpret electronic texts in
Sophistic ways (ways that are situated, raced, fragmented,
self-consciously performative, gendered, relative) will be more likely
and able to decode other texts that constitute their lives” (140). In
keeping with her project’s overt plan to include marginalized people
in the electronic world, Welch notes that “digital literacy and Native
American studies have more in common than many have been willing to
admit” because in both cases, oral/aural communication is important
(142). As in other places in her published work, this chapter reminds us
that the two most ignored of the classical canons—memory and
delivery—are now in the foreground in the digital age. This chapter
also contains an informative rhetorical analysis of a “sight bite”
from an NBC Nightly News episode.
The final chapter, “Screen Rhetoric: Sophistic
Logos Performers and Electric Rhetoric,” begins with a metaphor: the
layout of a television remote control device. At the top of the device
is “power.” To the left and right are “enter” and “jump”
with “erase” and “control” below these. The bottom of the device
allows us to “mute” or move “backward,” “forward,” or into
the “picture.” Each of these buttons becomes a point of critique.
Power, Welch tells us, has been drained away from the humanities over
the past 500 years. “The printed, book-bound word, interacting with
various other forces, led to the empowerment of the humanities in the
early modern period and now contributes to its precipitous decline in
the last two decades” (193). But electric rhetoric, she argues in this
closing chapter, “has, perhaps ironically, potentially increased the
power of the humanities/posthumanities/literacies” (194). Moving
through the remote control, we next encounter “enter,” which she
begins with the line, “the book is dead; long live the book” (196).
We should “jump into the post-typographic age and then . . . lead
it” (199). Yet we must be careful not to “erase,” as did the
ancients, women and minorities from this move. We must pay attention to
who has control and whose voices are muted. We must move forward, not
backward, and we must resist technophobia by understanding that the
picture is dominant. The book ends with an appendix, an excerpt from the
origin myth of the Acoma to illustrate Welch’s notion of the power of
orality.
Welch’s writing is associative, and some may
find this frustrating. Yet she is writing what she preaches, a style
that pulls together from many elements, moves quickly, packs many
concepts into single sentences, and invites us to make our own
associations. In a way, she writes her book like a Web page, and her
wonderful footnotes are links that one can spend much time on before
moving back to the main page. Take the footnote on page 68, where she
glosses her term “techno-liberal-arts,” suggesting that this point
of view “would help define the era that will follow post-modernism.”
Here is a whole new inventional agenda: bringing the technology experts
together with the liberal arts ones. It is something genome people
understand when they hire ethicists, and it is something software people
understand when they hire cognitive psychologists or usability folks for
software projects. Yet this blend of the techno with the liberal is
something most universities have not undertaken.
I end this review with a return to my original
questions. What is speech? What is writing? What is it that we teach or
research? Welch asks what writing textbooks will look like in the
future, and I would add, what will we call such things? What will we
call the “writing” part? What will we call the “book” part? The
“speech” part? Given that electronic communication seriously muddies
the waters between the spoken and the written, does it makes sense to
separate speech communication and English anymore? Shouldn’t it all be
under Rhetoric? How can we blend the techno with the liberal? Good
questions indeed. Kathleen Welch’s Electric
Rhetoric gives us a great start to begin to considering the answers.
Laura J. Gurak teaches rhetoric at the University of
Minnesota.
