Research Reading Reflections

In my last year as a camper at my old summer camp, I decided to take guitar lessons from an older friend who happens to be a fantastic musician. He had been playing guitar for a very long time, and he started off our lesson by describing his relationship (I do not use that metaphor lightly) with his guitar. “There are some days when everything will make sense and you won’t want to do anything except play guitar,” he said, “and then there are other days when you will be so frustrated and confused that you will want to take your guitar and throw it at the wall.” About ten years have passed since I first heard these words, and while I have let that dream slip away, this friend’s passion for music has inspired and haunted me to this day.

I know that in my life, the closest parallel to my friend and his guitar is my relationship with my research. I imagine this is true for many of you as well. My Master’s thesis has expanded upon a paper I wrote on the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and it has been the toughest and most rewarding project I have ever encountered. I had my first “throw it at the wall” moment about a year ago while I worked on the original paper; unfortunately, it was not a figurative “throw it at the wall” moment. I naively decided that it would be “inspirational” to watch Hotel Rwanda and American History X while working on my papers on the Rwandan Genocide and Holocaust denial (warning: side effects may include literally throwing your belongings at your bedroom wall). Fortunately, I have since learned how to handle the doom and gloom of my research. For that matter, I have even seen it as a coping mechanism for personal struggles (no matter how bad things in my life may get, it is still, thankfully, machete-free).

A few weeks ago, I had a tough but very enjoyable assignment. I was asked to present my research along with a reading that inspired it. Presenting my research was the easy part; exposing others to some of the texts I read made me slightly uncomfortable. Given the nature of what I study, I wanted to be very careful about the readings I selected; not everyone has the stomach for everything I read (I even came close to vomiting--again literally--from a paragraph I read over Winter Break). Ultimately, I chose two book chapters that put human faces on the work that I do, which is often caught up in discussions of the number of people killed or the circumstances that shaped the conflict. The books--Paul Rusesabagina’s An Ordinary Man and Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families--are both fantastic reads that remind me why I study what I do. First, as I have already noted, they put a human face to something larger than what most of us can fully comprehend. Second, they remind us that genocide is more than an event; it is a lasting process with very serious and complex long-term consequences. Third, they demonstrate that rhetoric plays a significant role in nearly every aspect of genocide. What I have noticed about my own scholarship is that it would not be nearly as stimulating, rewarding, or effective without the nonfiction personal stories that, more often than not, get left out of the final scholarly product.

This quasi-paradoxical realization made me wonder about the inspiration that others might draw from nonfiction works that border on mainstream sources. I recognize that I have probably set up a false dichotomy between “academic” and “mainstream” here, but I see a clear difference in my own reading, and I see both types as necessary, enjoyable, and invaluable, even though one type often upstages the other. I am curious about what role (inspirational, contextual, sense-making, etc.), if any, more “mainstream” nonfiction plays in other people’s research. This was the conversation that I had hoped for when I presented my research, but, given the organic nature of conversation, it took a different (yet no less satisfying or useful) path, so I thought I would open my questions to this forum:

What kinds of “mainstream” texts (loosely defined for both “mainstream” and “text”), if any, do you read in relation to your scholarly research? If you do not read “mainstream” sources, do you see any potential value in doing so? If you do, what role does such reading serve for you? How does such reading shape your research identity? Does the relationship between “academic” and “mainstream” sources mirror the relationship between “text” and “context”? Does it transcend it? 

The Rhetoric of Identity in the Age of Social Media

The following post is relevant to my dissertation research on digital rhetoric, authorship, and identity, but I hope that readers will find it interesting since it is applicable to their online interactions as well. I'm eager for any feedback that you have. -CCM

In Rhetoric: A User’s Guide, John D. Ramage claims that “the most important function served by rhetoric is the work it does in service of identity formation” (33). He claims that “Who were are, who we wish to be, and the amount of control we have over either of those two matters depends significantly on our rhetorical skill” (33). Managing our identity rhetorically requires even more skill in the digital age and more recently involves the sacrifice of a personal degree of control over identity which we thought we had gained in the early days of the Internet. Although freedom and flexibility were often associated with online identity in the early years of chat rooms and MUDs, in recent years it appears that a new fixity regarding identity has emerged with the advent of social media.

Early online models of communication such as multiuser dungeons (MUDs), chat rooms, and discussion boards permitted ample flexibility with identity since they permitted users to adopt a different screen name and a different persona in each venue. One of the first studies to address the implications of identity in the digital age was Sherry Turkle's (1995) Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. In her examination of MUDs, Turkle examines various attributes associated with this newfound flexibility. While some participants chose an avatar or user persona who was very similar to their offline personalities, others chose one that was dramatically different (183). It was not uncommon for participants to choose the opposite gender or to adopt a race or ethnicity that was different from their own. Of course, there were disadvantages associated with anonymity and flexibility of identity online, including flaming, trolling, and outright deception. Many cases of deception such as the Kaycee Nicole cancer hoax were well publicized and created an attitude of suspicion concerning online identities.  

Over the past 10 years, there has been a shift toward more fixed forms of rhetorical identity online, and this shift appears to coincide with the popularization of social media. In social media, facets of a user’s online and offline identity are often closely linked with one’s offline identity – even acting as an extension of it. For example, an average user may have a Facebook account, contribute to several blogs, and be affiliated with various websites. Each of these venues encourages users to “link” their identity on that particular site with various other dimensions of online identity, thus creating a sense of cohesion regarding identity online. The “real name” policies enforced on some websites only further contribute to this phenomenon by enforcing an association between dimensions of one's offline and online identity. (For some insight on Facebook’s real name policy, see danah boyd.) The result is that one’s rhetorical identity is no longer shaped only by the direct online context in which one is participating, but it is also shaped by various other tidbits of information which exist out there in cyberspace and by an affiliation with one’s offline life. These aspects merge to create a more fixed rhetorical identity online.

If more fixed/cohesive forms of rhetorical identity are being shaped online, is this shift toward fixity a response to hoaxes and deceptions – a desire to establish some sort of authorial accountability in a previously “authorless” context, or is it merely a trend that is strongly influenced by social media platforms (perhaps even for commercial gain - the more companies know about you, the more they benefit)? 

Also, how might we use rhetorical theory to characterize this new method of “shaping” identity online? Does it mark a shift from a medium where the Aristotelian concept of ethos as identity constructed in the text was acceptable to one where the Ciceronian understanding of ethos (which also considers one’s character and actions outside of the message) is more appropriate? 

All of these questions are worth considering as we move into an age where social media increasingly play a role not only in our personal lives, but in our professional lives as well.

References

boyd, danah."'Real Names' Policies Are an Abuse of Power." apophenia. 4 Aug. 2011. 22 Feb. 2012.

Johnson, Bobbie. "The Short Life of Kaycee Nicole." The Guardian. 27 May 2001. 22 Feb. 2012.

Lynch, Diane. "Wired Women: Beautiful Cancer Victim a Hoax." ABC News. 30 May. 22 Feb. 2012.

Ramage, John D. Rhetoric: A User's Guide. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2006.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

A future for Foucault scholarship in rhetoric; or, tales of a disillusioned poststructuralist

"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." ~ Kay, Men in Black (1997)

The day I realized I wanted to get a PhD in rhetoric was the day that my wonderful rhetorical theory instructor at Ripon College, Professor Jody Roy, lectured about Foucault. It certainly wasn't a comprehensive overview of Michel Foucault's theories; she talked about his theory of the episteme, the cultural system of knowledge production which comes to tyrannize our systems of determining truth. There was something about this concept that rang true to me, as someone who grew up in a town where cultural assumptions about normal and abnormal, right and wrong, were very narrow and seen as objective, and who often felt people jumped to conclusions about what they "knew" far too rapidly. Quite frankly, my mind was blown.