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| Digital Rhetoric opens up the way for new and flexible organization of information |
This image is less goofy and shocking than the central image for my website, but was the first hurdle I encountered when starting this project. After going through Dr. Ghanashyam Sharma's "The Third Eye: An Exhibit of Literacy Narratives From Nepal" from Stories That Speak To Us: Narratives From the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, which I write about here, I discovered that traditional ideas on presenting information in essay form have to be rethought because of the technological options afforded by the Internet.
First, Dr. Sharma's "The Third Eye" is a collection of videos of Nepalese scholars discussing their experiences with literacy acquisition and education in their native country, focusing on learning English. These videos are accompanied by text written by Dr. Sharma that breaks down and analyzes each speaker's video from the words used to body language to what kind of identity each speaker is trying to portray. If viewed in order, the videos present basic literacy narratives at first, but then evolve into critiques of the Nepalese system of education and its requirement that in order for one to graduate from high school, one must learn English, a foreign language that has been imposed by outsiders. The cumulative effect of the videos becomes one in which we see that while all participants have worked hard to achieve an education, the educational system itself has some flaws that privileges English language learners over those who may also be able to achieve, but are held back by this literally foreign requirement.
The text written by Dr. Sharma explicates the nuances we might miss from the personal voices of those who provide video. Both work together and yet one can watch the videos by themselves in any order and get different narrative threads that all hold equal validity. There is a symbiosis of these threads in which all can work together or separately. A reader or viewer can walk away with the individual struggles of each participant, or the cumulative effect of seeing how all participants struggled and achieved within a problematic educational system.
So just as Dr. Sharma worked with the metaphor of the Third Eye, I worked with the symbol of a circle, a shape with no beginning and no end. In fact, this project operates on two concentric circles: the website that analyses the image and the website that discusses the process by which the image is analyzed. My goal was to discuss the image in a way that privileges no information over any other. One can click on any link and start the journey at any point or jump around and the user will learn about the image. Users are also welcome to add comments to discuss what they think the image means or to offer ideas on meaning in general. The circle is a very egalitarian shape and my goal is to write a very egalitarian analysis of the Care Bear/Hellraiser image.
Therefore, structure is the main challenge in digital rhetoric. You might still need a thesis for a strong essay, but now there are potentially many narrative threads all working at once and some can come from outside the writer as well. And while the circle is egalitarian, it is also closed. My ultimate goal, then is to not only make all the information in this project stand on the same level, but also open up discussion on meaning as well. So while the information might work in a "circle" structure, the growth of knowledge happens in a way reminiscent of this image:
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| The 8th Oxherding Picture, representing nonduality; a person becomes one with everything, therefore empty Picture found here |
This image is 8th in a series of 10 pictures about ox herding that serve as a metaphor in the achievement of enlightenment in Buddhism. It is empty, meaning one has become one with everything and there is no separation of self from the rest of the world. However, I want to draw attention to the open end at the bottom, how the circle does not connect there. This represents the idea that even when we reach enlightenment, there is still room for growth. The Internet is both product and process. We can write about things, but the conversations never truly end and voices can come from anywhere. The one track of narrative before the digital age has grown because of technology. The challenge is therefore finding not just new things to talk about, but new ways to talk about them.
To go back to the Home page for the Care Bears/Hellraiser image, click here.
If you're the type of person who just wants the tl;dr version, click here. It's still technically tl, but it's a shorter read.
If you're the type of person who just wants the tl;dr version, click here. It's still technically tl, but it's a shorter read.
