Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric and HCI - Porter

This was a long reading! I like how Porter explains delivery as something that has evolved as the technology has. He starts by saying that delivery started as being the aural and oral aspects of speech as pertains to the body. Porter examines the body as a form of delivery in this reading. He explains that the gestures you make, your tone of voice, using pauses with your speech and perhaps a restrained tone will all help to convey your meaning and are all things that you don't usually see or hear online. I found it particularly interesting that on page 5, Porter mentions Gilbert Austin's work, which includes diagrams of how to hold your hands in order to get a point across. This was mildly entertaining to me because I don't think hands have that much impact, but perhaps I've never seen them used "correctly". I know a lot of people that talk with their hands, and most of the time they just kind of swirl their hands around, more like a nervous twitch than an intentional method of delivery. However, when I see this being done, I can't help but think the other person is feeling nervous and insecure. But that's just me.

In the digital age, however, delivery is also about the medium through which the message is given. With this new evolution of delivery, Porter explains that "understanding how the range of digital delivery choices influences the production, design, and reception of writing is essential to the rhetorical art of writing in the digital age". This stands out to me because there are so many different forms of writing online today. This specifically made me think of Twitter. The mode of delivery is new(er) and people are still adapting to it. For example, Twitter uses a lot of hash tags and ampersand symbols, which never would have appeared before in writing, but is rhetorically correct for Twitter because they link to other information, allowing for a large collaboration of ideas.

Porter also introduces the word "techne", which I believe has been in some earlier readings for this course. His definition is, "the art of creating discourse...to achieve a desired end for some audience". This helps me understand the word better, because it seems to me to be similar, though not the same as a goal or a purpose. It helps me tie it all in better. I enjoyed the section where Porter talked about the degrading of techne, saying it has becoming taught as more of a mechanical procedure than an art. He also applies it to digital writing, which again helped me to see the whole picture. He says that knowing how to use CSS does not make you able to be a web author, because you only know part of coding, not all of the basic components or an understanding of said components. I was able to relate to this specifically because I've taken web design and know that no matter how well you can use CSS, if you don't know HTML, it's not going to matter much. Porter also says that web design is becoming a degraded form of rhetorics as "the reduction of the art to routinized procedures". I agree and disagree with this. I think that in many tutorials and manuals, there needs to be routinized procedures to help people learn. However, the process needs to be somewhat left up to the imagination. What I mean is they should teach the basic skill set, such as a line of code, and teach you what you can do with the code, but leave it up to the coder how to use and implement a combination of code. After all, Porter says, "one cannot be a digital writer without knowing both technical procedures and how to deploy them to achieve the desired end". That makes knowledge more important than procedural coding.

There is also discussion about memory in here, which I found interesting. Porter says that in today's society memory is viewed as "a problem to be solved", not something which we should work to save. He disagrees, and I disagree. He gives the historical background of memory, but what what I found interesting came later. Porter says that in some western cultures and rhetoric, memorization became associated with mnemonics, especially the memorization of speech. Growing up in a public school system, this was one of my perceptions of memory; the memorization of writing for my classes. The other perception was of memories I had made with my family, friends, and athletics. I know there can be more than one type of memory, while they're both memory. Porter also says memory is essential for preservation. This impacted me as well because I am in a women's fraternity on campus, and will be the oldest member in the fall. That means that I will be the one that a lot of my sisters look up to with ritual questions and general questions about how things run and more importantly, why they run the way they do. Everything is written down and documented, of course, but it's not the same as having someone know by heart what needs to go on. When you go off of a piece of paper, it usually doesn't tell you why you need to do this and not that, or why this is emphasized but not that.

The last thing I want to really touch on is Porter's brief analysis of the websites. Victoria's Secret in particular. He says that the internet is by no means a neutral space where gender is invisible. This website is proof of that. However, he asks the question, "Is the primary audience for this site men or women? (Good question.)". My first reaction was that he was being sarcastic, because of course the target audience was women. When I took a second look though, I could see he wasn't be sarcastic, but serious. For example, sex sells. Usually though, it sells for men. As a women (though I can't speak for all women here) sex doesn't sell for me. Seeing some large chested, flat ab-ed women making a seductive face in lingerie doesn't make me want to buy it. I am under no illusion that I will look like a sexy supermodel when I try their clothes on. That makes me think the images are geared more toward a male audience.

There are also words like "angels" and "babydolls" on the website. Again, I don't know about other women, but why would I want to wear something called a babydoll? The same goes for angel, this I can understand the allure for, however, I don't think wearing sexy lingerie qualifies a woman to be an angel? This again makes me think of a more male audience. Yet another clue offers a free beauty tote. This has to be geared toward women, because while there are men out in the world who wear makeup, they most likely aren't going to be shopping for it at Victoria's Secret. This steers me back to a female audience. I wonder if this is the company strategy, however? Incorporate enough male elements so that men will feel comfortable shopping for their significant others (or themselves, who am I to judge?), but with enough female elements to where women won't be offended by shopping here? I found this section particularly interesting.