A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric Read Online Free PDF Page A

the social and political situations of the interlocutors? How might the communication be different if any of these factors were changed? Context is particularly important to rhetoric because consideration of rhetorical dynamics starts not with the text, but with the social and political shaping of the text and the need for communication in a particular place and time. Contexts can range from immediate contexts (the people concerned, the time, the room in which they meet, the nature of the meeting, and the formal conventions at play) to wider contexts (the current political situation, economic constraints, etc.). It is important to chart what the contextual factors are in any act of communication and to map these factors in relation to each other so that a full picture of the nature of the communication is possible. Once the factors are understood, the communication can be shaped and adjusted accordingly.
    Finally, in this catalogue of the constituent elements of contemporary rhetoric, what of
digitization?
Digitization has been over-egged in one sense. Particularly from the early 1990s onwards, the rise of digitization has heralded grand claims about what it can do and how it can transform lives, societies, and politics. In many senses, such changes have happened: we can transform
information
from one mode to another, repurposing it with ease. We can store huge amounts of information in small spaces, and examine it from different perspectives and via different lenses. It has enabled electronic social networks of various kinds. Much has been written about the power and potential of digitization. In rhetorical terms, its value is that it enables us to repurpose and reshape communication; it gives us a larger repertoire of media via which to communicate; and it provides unlimited storage space. In chapter 12 , full consideration is given to the relationship of rhetoric and the digital.
Toward a Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric
    The record of sitting in a café on a street in Berlin is, in one sense, simple: it is the observed recording, initially on slips of paper borrowed from the waiter, of what is happening in and around the café in a given short period of time. In another sense, it is complex: the record hardly scratches the surface of what is going on in the interactions between a hundred or so people who moved through that street and around that café on that day in September 2011. Not only are there physical and spokeninteractions; there are written rituals, like bills and receipts exchanged, as well as others who are recording on iPads, cell phones, or in notebooks. In addition, there is the material world of the street—buildings, cars, signs, baggage, and so on—some of which is inscribed with words, icons, logos, and images. Furthermore, there are the ambient sounds of the street: café music, the sound of radios from nearby apartments, and music percolating from headphones of passers-by.
    In my initial notes, I mused that rhetoric is ever present in this scene, that the framing of the scene is virtually invisible, and that multimodality is present and ubiquitous, but insufficient to account for the wealth of communication that is taking place. The other elements of a rhetorical account—articulation, digitization, context, and the time dimension— were not considered at the time of initial recording and minimal reflection, but nevertheless play a part. Articulation is present in at least two of the senses of joining: first, in the
segues
between what we used to consider as genres or schemata (like the paying of a bill, with its own internal articulations) and the running
continuo
of experience (sitting in a café). This simple example will help to demonstrate that articulation operates to join one frame to another, one schemata to another. In this case, because the paying of a bill is part of the experience of sitting in a café, one frame is nestled within another. The line between the
continuo
of everyday