Burke

Okay, I'll admit, I didn't really understand the readings fully no matter how many times I read them. I did, however, pick up some key points about Burke's philosophies that I think can be applied to a lot of what we are studying in this class.

Some key terms that Burke liked to use a lot in his writings:

Form: the psychology of the audience; the creation of an appetite in the mind of an audience and the satisfying of the appetite.
Rhetoric: rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.
Dramatistic Pentad: when we attribute motives to others, we tend to rely on ratios between five elements - act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose.
Terministic Screen: a set of symbols that becomes a kind of screen or grid of intelligibility through which the world makes sense to us.

What his philosophy was (or what I understood it as) was that human life is an artform that can be easily explained. We are naturally attracted to the beauty in things. Whether it is a piece of music or a really good writing that (that might as well be art), we make better sense out of things that are beautiful to us.

How does this relate to Digital Rhetorics? When we read anything, we want it to be interesting to us. The way that the words are organized need to be artfully done so that we may not loose interest. Words on a website are the same way. Also, the way that things are organized on a page - such as the colors or images - need to be appealing to the eye. There is an artform in being a web designer - in a way that there is an artform in being able to create something that appeals to people's senses.