4,5,6

Hey, interactivity. That word sure looked familiar…

“Online interactivity…functions as a means of activating user responses and as a mode of address that can influence users and can itself be rhetorical in it’s effects.” This really made me think of the topic I’m going to be doing for my paper. I feel that in World of Warcraft interactivity are users communicating with each other. But the tools that the users have been given – and how the function – have a strong rhetorical value and also have their own level of interactivity. I feel this form of text-based interactivity that the game pervades for it’s users not only effects the overall game style but also effects the gamer culture community within the context of WOW. It may be even argued – though I may not because this may be another paper – that World of Waracraft’s strong influence on the gaming industry means this form of interactivity and the arguments that it makes have leaked out into other games.

 The fourth chapter looked at the rhetoric behind what I would almost think of as the viral thought process online. While looking at how a viral video becomes a viral video and what this could mean rhetorically was interesting I think the more important part of this chapter for me was circulation. This concept of reproduce, transport and shared stored information is a huge part of recent social media and is taking over the internet as a whole. I think this concept is going to get more and more important as the internet develops.

The fifth chapter went back to interextuality to look at it’s rhetorical function. Interextuality is how different texts are connected – so it’s easy to see how this would be applied to the internet. The idea of Burke’s ‘unending conversation’does sound interesting (though don’t make me read it!) because I do think this idea can be applied to the internet. The rhetoric of the internet is just not the text but all the connections of the texts; not only the text but the space in between.