In his first chapter “Interface,” Collin Gifford Brooke
grounds his theoretical approach to new media rhetoric in the now common
narrative of a shift from criticism to invention which he describes as a shift
from “what has been done” with new media towards “what might still be done with
new media” (10). Indeed, Brooke notes that this theoretical shift is paralleled
by a medial shift from text to interface in which the feasibility of
generalizing a theory from an individual reading dramatically decreases.
Referencing the interpretive approaches inherited from
literary theory, Brooke writes that the kind of “exhaustive” structuralist
approach to textual criticism promulgated by the likes of New Criticism “wouldn’t
really be a ‘reading’ at all, but rather the generation of a sort of ur-text
that cannot possibly exist for any reader” (13). Brooke is then quick to point
out that attempts to reconcile individual readings of hypertexts to theoretical
analyses often degenerate into little more than “poststructuralist
abstractions” and render the isolated text as little more than a pre-text for
discussing Deleuze and Guattari (13).
For Brook, the limitations of criticism arise due to the
emphasis placed upon a singular and static object of study, something which new
media problematizes through its shift to the interface. Thus, Brooke proposes a
concatenate shift for rhetoric from a focus on objects to ecologies, a move
which mirrors the shift from product to process in his particular discipline (composition
studies).
In his chapter on ecology, Brooke latches onto recent trends
in new media rhetoric that emphasize a methodological shift towards complex
systems or ecologies that attempt to map the unique singularity of rhetorical
situations as opposed to imposing static models upon them such as rhetorical
triangles. He justifies this approach by
noting that “what is ‘effective’ at one scale or location within an ecology may
fail utterly in another context” (for more on the pedagogical application of
ecological rhetoric see Bryon Hawk’s chapter on inventive composition
pedagogies in A Counter-History of Composition: Towards Methodologies of Complexity).
After referencing the various permutations of the term “ecology”
within both composition and media studies, Brooke describes his use of the term
in this book as an “ecology of practice” which focuses on “the strategies and
tactics that we bring to bear on new media at the same time that our
technologies constrain and empower us” (41). This approach places Brooke’s work
less in the hermeneutic realm of cultural analysis (e.g. Mathew Fuller’s Media Ecologies) and more in the realm
of methodological analysis that offers not just a critique of how media ecologies
function within new media societies but explicitly promotes strategic
interventions that seek to alter how these ecologies function in relation to our
various modes (practices) of writing.
Thus, Brooke proceeds to outline these ecologies of practice
using the rhetorical canons as “analytic and productive starting points” (41).
Memory
Out of the five classical canons of rhetoric, Brooke notes
that the canon of memory has received the greatest amount of neglect due to its conflation with the mnemonic strategies of oral
rhetoric which reduce memory to a synonym for storage capacity, thus mitigating
its potential as an active practice and reducing it to a passive account of a
“quantifiable amount of information” (143). This leads Brooke to locate the
central binary of historical memory as presence/absence. Either a memory is
there (present) or it is not (absence).
Brooke exchanges the presence/absence binary with N.
Katherine Hayles’ pattern/randomness. He uses Hayles’ analysis of knowledge
formation within virtual networks as evidence for this needed shift in memory
form storage to practice. In opposition to conceiving memory as a bit of information, memory becomes the act of identifying patterns.
In addition, Brooke deftly locates the presence/absence
binary at work in popular fascination with new media “distributed cognition”
(digital databases, search engines, etc.) which he claims devalues memory in
the same way that Socrates devalues writing in the Phaedrus (149, 151). Brooke notes that we conceive of distributed memory
as unproblematic storehouses of information without considering their potential
in better engaging this information or, in other words, recognizing new patterns
within it. This is similar to the way that Socrates conceived of writing as little
more than a static memory container, neglecting its revolutionary potential in
allowing for new modes of thought.
Brooke notes that these inherited conceptions of memory as
storage relate to the often unspoken teleology of academic referencing as the
culmination of a “super text” of our shared efforts. In reaction to these
accumulative models of reading, Brooke writes “Although in an ideal world we
might have the time and inclination to read, reflect, and synthesize all
potential sources in anticipation of writing our own texts, this is neither
practical nor realistic” (155).
In formulating his new media rhetoric for the canon of
memory, Brooke borrows the visual concept of “persistence of vision,” or the
phenomenon that is enacted when we perceive motion across a set of still
images. Neologizing this term for his present purposes, Brooke proposes “persistence
of cognition,” which he defines as recognizing “the construction (and
dissolution) of patterns over time” and “the practice of retaining particular
ideas, keywords, or concepts across multiple texts” (151, 157).
For me, this is the most intriguing aspect of new media
memory because it transforms the notion of memory from a passive re-membering
of information to an active re-cognition of the connections (“piece together”) within
the information. In this way, academic research is guided less by the arbitrary
totalities embodied by individual authorship (books, journals, etc.) and more
by the ideas and concepts that transcend these various iterations. Indeed,
academic publishing even seems to be moving in this direction (albeit very slowly) as large publishers take notice of the enormous
discourse generating potential of networked writing technologies such as wikis,
blogs, and social media.
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