A Theory of Contemporary Rhetoric Read Online Free PDF

experience, and the framed genre, is transgressable, fuzzy, and permeable. Articulation helps us to see the nature of those joins. Digitization is evident in a number of ways, many invisible to the eye. Had I been writing and sketching on an iPad, it would have been more evident. Even so, the instantiation of sound as mentioned previously; the wireless device via which the bill is paid at the table; the electronic navigating systems of cars that pass—all these and more are driven digitally, and transform information for particular purposes digitally. Context and time—in effect the immediate framing of space and the 30 minutes or so of sitting in the café—require some discussion. The context is not “framed” tightly, though the café itself is (even though it spills out on to the street). The café is situated on a street, and views each way are extensive: one way to a major road junction, the other way into a denser part of the city. The context is, if we take the widest aperture possible, limitless—we have to provide framings of some kind in order to be able to make sense of the place and the experience. We can term that framing
orientation
. We can also move between foregrounded activity and phenomena—the tea cup, the table—and much further distant contextual elements, like Berlin, Germany, Europe. Moving between the foregrounded phenomena and those at more distance is a process of positioning, of multiple framing, and articulation. Time is a less tangible, more elusive factor. Again, in one sense, it looks simple: I sat at the table on September 14, 2011, between 3:30 pm and 4:00 pm. If I had done the same thing half an hour later,or a day later, would the experience have been different? Actually, I did go back the next day to test exactly that (and because it was an excellent café). Much was the same. I do not think that the account I wrote on the first day would have been very much different from that on the second day. There were different people (even the waiters), different cars; but the same buildings, same street, same signs, same city. The weather was slightly different, and, of course, if I came back in a different season, or in a different year, there might be more significant and noticeable changes: the café might no longer be there, I would be older or younger, and so on. The rhetoric of the scene would have changed.
    We can thus say about the case of the Berlin café experience in relation to rhetoric that it helps us to define a spectrum of possibilities with regard to a theory of contemporary communication. At one end of the spectrum, we can use rhetoric to account for micro- and mezzo-social encounters, like the paying of a bill or a brief conversation with a stranger. There are formalities to observe with the bill: the customer requests the bill, orally or by gesture. The waiter calculates it and brings it to the table. There may be a pause. In due course, the customer pays the bill in one of a range of different ways, and either personally to the waiter, in his or her absence, or at a central till. The transaction is completed with a greeting, with thanks, or simply in silence. This example is close to a social schema, and the rhetoric of the situation is largely prescribed. In a brief conversation with a stranger, there are fewer
rules
. One person initiates it by finding common ground for talk; the other reciprocates fully or not; the parameters of the conversation will be set by mutual agreement. There is a range of such speech, written and multimodal genres from the personal to the wider public sphere.
    At the other end of the spectrum is the total experience of the period in the café in the Berlin street. By
total
experience, I mean not only the total perceived and necessarily selective experience of one person and their observations, but the totality of the communicational networked scene in that place and at that time. The scene frames a multitude of social and communicational