Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local
Rhetorical Dynamics across Networked Publics
Published on 15. April 2025
399 pages
978-0-8229-9010-9 (ISBN)
Description
Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local examines the social and rhetorical dynamics around emerging writing technologies. Carl Whithaus argues that these dynamics work across networked publics as patterns of behavior and ways of interacting through and with multimodal texts. This rhetorical analysis of the production and reception of born-digital rhetoric shows the ongoing and evolving impacts of online public discourse that can lead to bad restaurant reviews or the subversion of democracy. It is a networked process that gains significance because of the interplay and tensions between the global and the local. As these texts are created, distributed, received, and then recreated and shared again in viral ways, different messages resonate across media ecologies. Whithaus documents how emerging social dynamics shape-and are shaped by-digital writing, reading, and distribution technologies.
More details
Person
Carl Whithaus is a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of California, Davis. He studies writing technologies and digital cultures, edits the Journal of Writing Assessment, and works on a variety of projects related to writing in the sciences, engineering, and agriculture. His books include Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres, Writing across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning, and Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing.
Content
- Cover
- CONTENTS
- Preface: The #PepperSprayCop Meme and the Minneapolis Airport
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: In Situ Rhetorical Analysis
- PART I. SWARMS
- 1 Swarming Texts: Writing as Community Building across Live Streams, Blogs, and Image Boards
- 2 Liquid Minds: Writing Together, NaNoWriMo, and Fandoms on Discord
- 3 The Quick (and the Dead): Complex Relationships across Networked Communities
- PART II. VIRAL WRITING
- 4 Trolls and Mobs: When Social Media Writing Fuels Violence
- 5 Witnesses: Resistance and the Everyday
- 6 The Playful Virus: Remixing on TikTok and Reddit
- PART III. THE LOCAL
- 7 What We Remember, Where We Remember: Memes, Digital Archives, and the Possibilities of the Local
- 8 You Are What You Eat: Local Media Ecologies around Yelp and Food Blogs
- 9 Writing Neighborhoods: Local Wikis, Nextdoor, and Social Street
- Coda: Questions, Categories, and the Promise of Change
- References
- Index
- A
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- D
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- F
- G
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- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
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- W
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