While current approaches to theorizing rhetorical circulation often designate digital rhetorics as their object of study, this designation unintentionally closes off rhetorical inquiry. Analog, material rhetorics, like graffiti, resemble digital rhetoric in the circulation of their rhetorical effects. The study of graffiti rhetorics therefore invites a recursive application of theoretical models of rhetorical circulation. By analyzing examples of bathroom graffiti collected from a large college campus, this essay seeks to inform fresh models of rhetorical circulation that more fully account for the many diverse and interrelated systems from which the full meaning of any one instance of rhetoric is derived.

“Bio warfare” describes a digital rhetorical tactic used by teen climate activist Greta Thunberg to challenge oppressive anger norms and assert a feminist paradigm that sees sometimes-angry teen girl activists as credible, rational rhetors. On the surface, the rhetorical strategy is simple: Thunberg copy/pastes world leaders’ disparaging language into her 160-character Twitter bio. Yet, in these seemingly simple Twitter bio updates, Thunberg recontextualizes conservative leaders’ language into her own Twitter profile, inverting their meaning to assert an opposing ideology: that teen girls’ anger can be wise.

The author theorizes a rhetoric of disconnect, defined as exigencies and becomings of rhetorical energies in the event of an abrupt, institutionally enforced disruption of digitally networked circulatory routes. A rhetoric of disconnect destabilizes current frameworks for analyzing digital rhetorical circulation and compels us to rethink the interplay between material rhetoricity, circulatory dimensions, and the public’s rhetorical adaptability in a transnational context. The theorization is accompanied by an analysis of the switched-off rhetorical circulation and “rhetorical rerouting” during the extended period of internet shutdown in Xinjiang, China in 2009 and 2010 that lasted 312 days. The author concludes by urging digital rhetoric and new media scholars to reassess assumptions of “always-on” digital connectivity and consider the fragility of digital rhetorical circulation under different forms of global information governmentality.

Chronos and kairos are often understood as separate from one another in discussions of rhetorical temporality. For online and other highly mediated contexts, however, chronos and kairos can be understood as deeply related and intertwined. Via the concept of transduction, this article introduces machine time, which describes rhetorical time across a broad range of digital contexts, including online discussion forums and computer code.

One way toward a more embodied digital rhetoric is through interrogating constructions of digital disembodiment. To make that case, this article examines one of the most famous esoteric or “weird” programming languages, which are not designed for any “real world” purpose, but as art, parody, or experiment. This language, named “brainfuck,” is notorious for its difficulty and uses challenges of mastery to assert a “true” (white, straight, masculine) programmer identity. As brainfuck reveals, a contemporary struggle to connect the effects of technologies with the people who create them can be sustained because their creators perform being machine-like themselves.

This article examines how digital rhetoric in a big data age affects human and more-than-human life (lands, waters, energies, and so forth) in places beyond immediate rhetorical encounters. By putting particular pressure on what the author calls digital damage, the article draws out the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of Facebook’s New Mexico data center. Coupling Donna Haraway’s methodological tactic of “staying with the trouble” with cultural rhetorics perspectives on story, accountability, and relationality, the essay shows how digital damage can be expressed through a series of interruptive stories. Ultimately, the article intervenes in debates on the Anthropocene, arguing that attending to digital damage through story is one way to register the sensitivities, urgencies, and accountabilities needed to respond to worlds of entangled damage.

Previvors, women with a genetic predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer, blog in response to the rhetorical needs of their community, needs that are fillable only in writing, for a specific audience, and to engage that audience to act. Previvor bloggers have created a rhetorical community in response to specific kairotic moments and have fulfilled three common rhetorical needs: to educate others, to advocate for more research into BRCA mutations and/or breast cancer research in general, and to support others in the BRCA+ community toward the main purpose of social action.

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

Oral history projects about rhetorical studies contribute to transdisciplinary histories by creating living texts that reflect the dynamism of scholarly cultures. Through interviews conducted at the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology (ARST), we chart the organizational and intellectual history of a field, its contributions to science studies, and its potential future directions. These digitized, archived oral histories serve as an articulation point for transdisciplinary reflection, but they also represent an important strand of digital humanities work that creates living texts and keeps them open for future articulations.

Rhetorical approaches to identification have tended to favor it over its counterpart, division. However, compensatory divisions can be rhetorically productive for protest movements that challenge the state. An analysis of the use of these divisions in the Occupy Wall Street movement—particularly the use of the human microphone and computer networking—shows that these technologies aid in enacting divisions between protestors and the dominant social structures that they challenge, thus creating the potential for rhetorically productive sociality.

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in everyday online activities, arguing that scholarship in digital rhetoric can be informed by Raymond Williams's theory of media flow. Turning to Martin Heidegger and John Poulakos, I argue that the Web's rhetoric of the possible encourages a momentum of text consumption by which users are tempted to further immerse themselves in a “flowing” media experience. As digital technologies provide new opportunities for the surveillance and personalization of our Web practices, this article concludes by encouraging scholars to be critical of the tempting possibilities—and possible selves—crafted by this rhetoric.

Kelly Ritter's book, Who Owns School? Authority, Students, and Online Discourse, part of Hampton Press's New Dimensions in Computers and Composition Series, would at first glance appear to be writt...

Abstract RateMyProfessors.com has received critical reception in the academy: While some college teachers and administrators express support for the site, others complain that it invades their privacy and impinges on their academic freedom. This essay looks closely at one response to Rate My Professors, a weblog titled Rate Your Students that was founded in 2005. The site offers a compelling example of how Rate My Professors—and the movement to commodify higher education that it represents—affects public discourse between students and teachers. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Duane Roen and Edward White as well as Dana Anderson, Theresa Enos, Christine Farris, Joan Pong Linton, and John Schilb, for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. 2With a masthead that reads "Plagiarism, misery, colleagues, absinthe, snowflakes, ennui," Rateyourstudents.blogspot.com has hosted academic complaints about students multiple times a week since 2005. As of June 2010, the site closed down after five years, citing insufficient staffing as the primary cause. The original website still maintains a limited archive of its first five years. A spin-off site called CollegeMisery.com opened its doors at the same time. Both sites regularly accept and post reader comments about the drudgeries of academia, peppering them with bits of news and commentary related to higher education. Although the site's content is now somewhat more diverse than it was in the earlier years (not all posters are now attacking students, and some even defend them) the blog's initial inflammatory rhetoric has attracted attention and even inspired debate. However, the site itself is still strongly framed as a space for virulent and personalized critiques of students. 3In this essay I organize my thinking about publics according to Michael Warner's three definitions: the public as social totality (what Elizabeth Ervin terms in Public Literacy as the national public), the public as concrete audience, and the "public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation" (Warner 50). Warner focuses on the third type of public, as will I in this essay. A textual public is self-organized through discourse and operates independently of structuring institutions such as the state or church. Such a public is maintained through the circulation of discourse, and one can become, even temporarily, a part of that public simply by accepting its address (61). There is then not just one public but many that overlap and intersect at local, national, and global levels. Publics represent a heterogeneous range of context and group-specific interests and values, and they are maintained through the circulation of discourse that is both personal and impersonal—that addresses us (if we accept the address) and some group of imagined strangers beyond us. 4While I want to adopt this textual understanding of public formation for the purposes of this essay, I also do not want to lose sight of what David Kaufer and Amal Mohammed Al-Malki recently refer to in their analysis of the Arab-American press as the material embodiment of counterpublics (50). Drawing on work by Nancy Fraser, Rita Felski, and others, Kaufer and Al-Malki remind us that oppressed groups generate resistant and/or self-protective rhetoric in counterpublic spaces, offering insight into how power differentials between groups structure the terms of their participation in publics. Based on this understanding, I also define publics in this essay as not purely textual but also importantly connected to embodied experience and unequally positioned in relationship to cultural power, often in ways that place them in a contested relation to one another. However, as my analysis of the interaction of RMP and RYS indicates, public power differentials do not always manifest directly in the embodied presence of the actors involved; rather, power dynamics are written into the structures that mediate a public's textual circulation. 5The exaggeratedly caustic and insulting rhetorical postures of participants in RYS are certainly legible as a kind of Menippean satire, one that indirectly buffoons student rhetoric on Rate My Professors and the attitudes it implies. By returning the volley of character assassination begun by RMP, posters reveal some measure of the childish irresponsibility inherent in the rhetoric itself. Yet, while I do think there is certainly a relationship of subtle satire at work in the interaction between these two sites, I do not choose to concentrate on this relationship in my analysis but rather to look beneath it at the more lasting and meaningful public investment that posters on RYS seem to be expressing in their work. 6Nancy Fraser provides a crucial foundation for this point in her critique of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of the public sphere. Fraser contends that Habermas's concept of the universal public actually emerged in conflict with a variety of counterpublics, which themselves represented the interests of oppressed groups who could not meet the minimal expectations of property ownership and disembodiment, which were requirements for participation in the so-called liberal bourgeoisie public sphere. In imposing dominant interests as universal and seeking to delimit the terms of what could be civilly debated (and in what language), the bourgeois liberal public sphere in fact represented a larger shift from more openly autocratic to hegemonic forms of social control (Fraser 62). While Fraser is most often credited for rendering Habermas's concept of the public as a plural one, her critical intervention more pointedly challenges the vaguely positive connotations usually associated with public dialogue. Far from being an open forum for meaningful civic discussion, Fraser finds that the so-called public sphere is a veil of rationality that kept more divisive forms of social conflict out of view. 7In her article Welch persuasively argues that we err as teachers when we present public writing and rhetoric as an individual activity. According to Welch, seeing public action as individual dangerously isolates students and makes them less able to effectively confront the complexities of privatized public space. 8My analysis of the site layout was written in the spring of 2007, and the homepage of RateMyProfessors has since changed. 9The method of purposeful sampling is, I maintain, appropriate to the site and my inquiry alike. Obtaining a random sample from a site like RMP would be not just impossible but unnecessary, since I do not aim to make generalizable claims about the broader student population as a result of my analysis. I do want to make claims about how the site structures a kind of public discourse through consumerism, and a purposeful sample is more than adequate to that task.

Abstract This essay draws on concepts developed by Kenneth Burke to examine how a rhetoric of national insecurity has saturated phishing research and antiphishing campaigns. In response to the widespread public dispersal of antiphishing campaigns, it calls for a new terminology that challenges the underlying racial violence that characterizes its current practices. Notes 1Jakobsson and Myers define phishing as "[a] form of social engineering in which an attacker, also known as a phisher, attempts to fraudulently retrieve legitimate users' confidential or sensitive credentials by mimicking electronic communications from a trustworthy or public organization in an automated fashion" (1). 2In July of 2009, Symantec observed a fifty-two percent increase in phishing attacks from the previous month. 3Robert C. Miller and Min Wu argue, "Phishing succeeds because of a gap between the user's mental model and the true implementation, so promising technical solutions should try to bridge this gap" (291). Note how the technology becomes the agent of intervention. 4See, for example, Gurak and Warnick. Later, I will discuss how phishers utilize peer networks to share components of phishing solicitations in order to make the process more efficient. This use of file-sharing technology complicates more sanguine perspectives on the role that collaboration and sharing play in digital networks (see Devoss and Porter; Moxley). I am not alone in pointing out the dangerous limitations of digital technologies such as emails and online forums (see Holdstein; Moses and Katz; Blair and Takayoshi). 5Jenkins writes, "New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments… . Only certain things are known by all—the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises" (27–28). 6I am grateful to RR reviewers Stephen Bernhardt and Jim Zappen for their helpful feedback on this essay. Thank you RF, MM, and MH—you are indispensable.

While conducting research for this article, I often came across this claim: Rhetorical criticism has traditionally been housed in speech communication de partments.1 One look at the bibliography for this article seems only to validate this claim; almost all of the journals and books are written by and for speech communication scholars. And really, this comes as little surprise when we con sider that the majority of the New Rhetoricians are communication theorists or that speech communication scholarship has been interested in analyzing specific communication situations. In all, the work of these scholars attempts to define the strategies employed, determine whether those strategies were effective to a specific rhetorical situation, and from that, articulate theories based on this care ful observation about different approaches to rhetorical criticism. However, I remain uncomfortable with making the claim that rhetorical crit icism grew up in speech communication, which to me implies that the field of rhetoric and composition does not have a history with rhetorical criticism. Yet many of the publications in our field give lie to that implied claim?Shirley Wilson Logan's We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women, for example, conducts rhetorical criticism of the public discourses and speeches of nineteenth-century black women, while Ken McAllister's Game Work: Language, Power, and Computer Game Culture con ducts an in-depth rhetorical analysis of computer games in an effort to articulate a rhetorical theory that can account for games as a rhetorical text. The reason that rhetorical criticism has historically belonged to speech communication may simply be the fact that speech communication scholars have attempted to define and theorize it as a legitimate disciplinary concern. The purpose of this bibliographic synthesis is to provide rhetoric and composition scholars with a broad understanding of the field so that we can begin to theorize the work we do with rhetorical criticism and think through the ways in which we can enrich our own scholarship. Due to page-length limitations, I am unable to provide a synthesis of all the different approaches to rhetorical criticism. I have chosen to limit my scope to definitions, general methodology, and objects of rhetorical criticism, which com prise the first three sections. The final section will summarize four textbooks on rhetorical criticism, all four of which provide excellent starting places for those

I participate in a teaching and learning collaborative called Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP). The project's goal is to enable students' participation in democratic culture through rhetoric and public writing. Using Internet and Web technology, we inhabit an electronic public sphere where both teaching and learning are collaborative, connecting teachers and students from many institutions across country, and where pedagogy, public issues, and politics intersect. From perspective of rhetoric and composition, IEDP embraces three topics important to our field: computers and writing; public discourse, especially deliberative rhetoric; and multiculturalism, specifically contact-zone theory and pedagogy. This essay elaborates some implications of this nexus. While much of pedagogy I discuss reflects strategies successfully used in IEDP, its implications extend to similar projects that engage students in electronic public sphere. Ever since Mary Louise Pratt challenged teachers to develop pedagogical arts of contact zone (40), many teachers have become more sensitive to multicultural dynamics of their classrooms, and they have begun to chart what Richard E. Miller calls the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in contact zone (407). There have been theoretical projects such as using contact zones as a basis for rethinking and reorganizing English studies (Bizzell); efforts such as those that address challenges posed by asymmetrical power relations in classroom (Miller) and differences in cultural perspectives and values (van Slyck); and investigations of specific contact-zone phenomena such as students' strategies for coping with dominant discourses (Canagarajah) and the politics of style (Lu). These developments signify our ability to respond to multicultural classroom conditions by accommodating educational needs and desires of all students. Nowadays, however, classroom per se is no longer sole site for teaching, learning, writing, and speaking. With growing interest in public discourse and civic participation among students-and with rapidly increasing

Richard Marback. Plato's Dream of Sophistry. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 163 pages. Gregory Crane. Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 348 pages. Josiah Ober. Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. xiv + 417 pages. Harvey Yunis. Taming Democracy: Models of Political Rhetoric in Classical Athens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. xv + 316 pages. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson, eds. Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Logan: Utah State UP, 1998. 332 pages. Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe. Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. Pages viii + 452. $29.95 paper. Tharon Howard. A Rhetoric of Electronic Communities. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1997. Pages xii + 203. $24.95 paper. James Porter. Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998. Pages xiv + 203. $24.95 paper. Russel K. Durst. Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1999. 189 pages. $22.95 paper. John Louis Lucaites, Celeste Michelle Condit, and Sally Caudill. Contemporary Rhetorical Theory. New York: Guilford Press, 1999. Pages, xl + 627. Richard E. Miller. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. 249 pages. Lynn Z. Bloom. Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration. Logan: Utah UP, 1998. 288 pages. $19.95 paper. Duane H. Roen, Stuart C. Brown, and Theresa Enos, eds. Living Rhetoric and Composition: Stories of the Discipline. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999. 233 pages. $22.50 paper. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, ed. Women/Writing/Teaching. Albany: SUNY P, 1998. 294 pages. $19.95 paper. Peter Dimock. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. 118 pages. $12.95 paper.

In this article I intend to share my experiences of teaching writingintensive courses at a large state university with the use of computers.' I want to present my positive experiences to the reader in such a way that will make you want to join me in exploring the myriad of possibilities of teaching with technology: ways that will free us, not constrict us-ways that will enhance learning and dialogue, not provide new ways of shutting down the inquisitive minds of students, but rather of expanding and enhancing all their possibilities and ours. Let me explain at the outset that the technologies I am advocating for teaching writing in writing-intensive literature and folklore courses are largely electronic mail formats and web sites for the distribution of assignments, for syllabi, for student writing, written assignments and peer reviews, and for the position of hypertext archives for class listservs.2 E-mail discussion listserv formats provide an easy way for everyone in the class to communicate automatically with every other member of the class, as well as with the instructor(s).3 Teachers, teaching assistants, tutors, and students can all be subscribed to the discussion listserv; whenever anyone on the list posts a memo addressed to the listserv, all persons subscribed to the list receive a copy of the entry. The listserv owner (generally, the teacher) controls who can be subscribed to the discussion list and who can participate in this electronic forum and how the discussion will operate. For example, in my descriptions below, I will illustrate how every student journal entry or writing assignment goes automatically to the computers of all the other students and myself. However, when I wish to communicate privately with a student or send her or him a graded paper, I can send that message only to that particular student simply by addressing the note to the individual student rather than to the entire list; similarly, when students are doing peer reviews of other students' papers, for privacy, they can post their comments only to the author of a paper, rather than to the entire class. In this paper I am advocating the use of the e-mail discussion list format because I believe in its capacity to better enable students to write well

Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure, and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney.... I couldn't begin to survive without my personal [computer] base: I wouldn't know who I was.... We're all cyborgs, Yod. You're just a purer form of what we're all tending toward. -Marge Piercy, He, She and It (150)

In summer of 1987, Donald Stewart began a survey of English departments, attempting to uncover changes in curriculum that had resulted from changes in discipline. Stewart reported results of his survey in a 1989 CCC article, is an English Major, and What Should It Be? Stewart acknowledged limitations of his study: he was considering only 194 colleges, and only 108 of these actually responded to his request for information beyond catalogue description. Furthermore, many of respondents indicated that their curriculum was constantly being revised. Still, survey provided an important window on English major, particularly with regard to options in creative writing and rhetoric/composition. Stewart found that only 74 of 194 colleges surveyed, or 38%, offered students chance to specialize in some aspect of writing in addition to literature. The majority of English departments surveyed by Stewart (55%) offered only literature emphases, with optional electives from other areas of English. Based on his findings, he made a call for the establishment, in all departments, of options in creative writing, linguistics (where departments of linguistics do not exist), and composition and (193). In our survey of writing concentrations or majors within English departments, we wanted to follow up on Stewart's survey to see if more undergraduates were able to specialize in composition and rhetoric.1 The initial impetus for this survey came from an e-mail discussion among writing program directors about concentrations in writing and rhetoric being offered in their departments. After several writing program directors informally announced new courses and writing concentrations, we thought a review of these changes