A Rhetorically Minded Anthropologist

February 26, 2007 · Posted in Composition, Media Ecology, Probes, Rhetoric 

I know it’s well beyond the moment to be posting about Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us,” but for whatever reason I didn’t get around to posting this until now. What I want to comment on is not the video itself but the fact that it was an anthropologist who made it. I think it was on Jenny’s blog that I first saw reference to the video in the blogosphere, but I first learned about the video earlier that morning when Wesch himself posted a link to it on the Media Ecology discussion list.

In her post, Jenny asks the really good question:

By the way, why is it that I find such smart work being done in other fields (like cultural anthropology) that don’t seem to have a problem with the notion of rhetorics, or even the notion of rethinking it? Meanwhile, seems like we’re still working on that newfangled “wheel” thingamajig.

I wonder if we’re all too often working on that “wheel” because as we’re focusing inward far too much in an attempt to assert disciplinary status, and in doing so we’re forgetting to look around us. This isn’t a new idea, at least among many of those in my blogroll, and I think Jeff Rice put his finger on the problem in his 2005 Composition Studies article “The 1963 Composition Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Computed, or Demonstrated by Any Other Means of Technology.”

We, as a field, don’t find ourselves rubbing shoulders with cultural anthropologists because we, as a field, decided to equate composition, and our connection to rhetoric, with print literacy. We decided that the interests of McLuhan, Postman, Havelock, and to a lesser extent Ong — media ecologists all — were not what composition studies should be about. While I might be wrong, I can’t help but see the technology plank dustup and the ongoing unsubscribing from WPA-L and even TechRhet as closely related phenomena.

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