“What New Media Offers,” by Dene Grigar

Grigar, Dene. “What New Media Offers.” Computers and Composition. 24.1 (2007): 214-217.

In the short article, “What New Media Offers,” Dene Grigar answers a question posed after her final presentation for her post-doctoral study. The group she presented to included “digital musicians, videographers, virtual reality dance performers, multimedia artists, and interactive architects,” basically all people trained in multimedia, but not rhetoric. One member asked, “Why do rhetoricians pursue new media?”
Grigar developed a graduate level course entitled “Telematic Texts” in which she focused on “shifting practices in reading, knowledge-making, and the conceptualization of space and time as well as the intersections of rhetoric, new media, biological systems and consciousness” (214). Grier calls this mingling of disciplines “Media Rhetoric.” Basically, Grier turns the question around and answers what rhetoric has to offer new media. She uses Barthes’ theory on the pleasure of the text to explicate how rhetoric can help us fully understand the complexities and “bliss” of the shift in literacy that new media has brought about. She concludes that “what new media has to offer is a way of seeing that allows for vistas beyond the print artifact and beyond the orator’s podium” (216).

I agree with Grier that rhetoric lends itself to new media and vice versa. Rhetoric first relied on the spoken word because that was the dominant medium. It then shifted to the written text with the dominance of print literacy. And now, in a natural progression, rhetoric must align with the new media available through digitization or electracy.  Rhetoric, because of its very nature, will always be aligned with the critical analysis and interpretation of the texts of the times.

This short article is a good example of a reflective piece that was accepted for publication by CCC, and Grier provides a good model in this regard.