Rhetorical Criticism of Public Discourse on the Internet - Warnick

This was a really interesting read. The first thing that really stood out to me was when she quoted, "new communication environments... are themselves metamessages" (74). This was interesting to me because Marshall McLuhan's book, The Medium is the Massage came to my mind. This topic interests me because the same message is taken in different contexts based on where it's placed. If I post a Facebook post, for example, it will not have the same message as a Twitter Tweet or blog post or a Pinterest Pin. All of the mediums have their own connotations, and I love that about the digital sphere. To me, I kind of feel like the world wide web is just a giant puzzle, and as rhetors, we need to figure where to post our message and how in order to achieve the best result.

This reading also talked a lot about malleable texts. This idea is also fascinating to me because it makes so much sense, yet people still don't see this viewpoint when they're on the internet or when they're posting on social media sites or other websites. When I post something, I know it is not finite. It is not "set in stone", and I know others can - and may- distort it for their own purposes and attach their own meaning to it, essentially changing my text completely. A quote from the reading says, "we may have to change our expectations of what texts are and how they function" (75). This is completely true in my mind, however, deciding how to change the expectations is where the hard part comes in (for me at least). I, as a user of social media and the internet, switch back and forth from a rhetor to audience, and back again in the blink of an eye. This is the same for a vast majority of web users today.

This flows into Warnick's discussion of the audience and how the meaning of audience has had to adapt to the digital sphere. Because messages can be so distorted from their original meaning, and because they can be re-posted and distributed beyond our wildest dreams, "the audience is often not readily identifiable" (77). This leads me to wonder how much the audience plays a role in messages. To me, this new form of the digital sphere only strengthens the notion of audience. The original message had an audience that it was intended for, knowingly or not. The message that is constructed based on that message is then tailored to an audience, and so on and so forth. Without the notion of audience, the message wouldn't need to be reformed in the first place. Or so I believe.

Along with the question of the audience comes the question of authorship. There have been many times when I have found what seems like a great source for an academic paper, only to question whether the source is credible because there is not author associated with the content. In response to this, Warnick says, "one cannot tell who the author is, nor does it make sense to ask this question in the traditional way" (79). This brought up a whole new world of ideas for me, because it makes sense that if all the other traditional ways are being re-positioned to apply to the digital sphere, why should authorship not be redefined? It makes sense that it should be re-examined, especially as everyone on the internet (and especially social media) has the potential to be an author of content.

In response to the above paragraph, one quote that jogged my brain was when Warnick quoted, "to treat all representations as true" (79). This, however unrelated it may seem, made me think of a TV commercial. I believe it's a State Farm commercial. A man is on his mobile device when a woman comes up questioning the existence of the State Farm apps. She then goes on to say, "you can't put anything on the internet that isn't true" (Commercial). This just made me think of the level of credibility on the internet, and how some people will really believe anything they read or see online.

Overall, this article really jogged a lot of new ideas and theories.