“Visualizing Street Harassment” is a digital map project prompted by the question of how and where activists have repurposed the format and characteristics of the YouTube video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Woman” to build public conversations about street harassment and to critique the public rhetoric surrounding it. The project was developed… Continue reading Visualizing Street Harassment: Mapping the ’10 Hours of Walking’ Street Harassment Meme by Rebecca Hayes

Despite the significant role digital technology has played in social movements, including the political protests in Iran last year, many still doubt the ability of these technologies to foster civic engagement and social change. In “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted,” Malcolm Gladwell claims the enthusiasm for social media is “outsized,” and… Continue reading Editor’s Introduction by Brian Bailie & Collette Caton

This article deals primarily with the issue(s) of student engagement and technology by examining two YouTube videos, both posted by professor of cultural anthropology Michael Wesch. A critical examination of such texts is both academically revealing and pedagogically useful. By foregrounding the complex interplay of cultural attitudes towards technology, progress, and the purpose(s) of education,… Continue reading Digital (Dis)engagement: Politics, Technology, Writing by Michael D. Donnelly

The emergence of blogs and social networking sites open new areas of study in composition and rhetoric, adding literate spaces and foregrounding multimodal communication. While assessments of these technologies range from celebratory to ominous, their ubiquity and their integration into our rhetorical situation is undeniable. I suggest that labor activists in higher education have new… Continue reading Viral Advocacy: Networking Labor Organizing in Higher Education by Kevin Mahoney

In this article we argue that mobile, design, content, and social media technologies have fundamentally redefined the role of the writer in the workplace. Rather than the originator of content, the writer is becoming a sort of multimodal editor who revises, redesigns, remediates, and upcycles content into new forms, for new audiences, purposes, and media. This article discusses data gathered from over one hundred hours of embedded workplace research shadowing nine different professional communicators. The data demonstrate the iterative, detailed, product-focused types of work happening within a range of workplace constraints and, in turn, emphasize the need for writers and teachers of writing to recognize the importance of developing a broad skillset to prepare for this kind of work.

This study examined the relationship between stress and social media usage, whether stress was an indicator of social media use, and tested moderators of the relationship between stress and social media use. Participants ( n = 201) were randomly assigned to a stress-inducing recall activity or a control task via an online survey. Next, they completed measures of stress, social media usage, social support, and habitual behavior. We found that seeking social support contributed to an increased usage of social media. In addition, increased usage of social media was related to greater frequency and strength of evoking habitual behavior.

This essay details the development of The Twiza Project, an initiative designed to allow students in the United States and Algeria to engage in on-line dialogues on issues such as human rights and democracy. At a time when there is a global crisis in democratic institutions, the goal was to enable students to collaboratively develop frameworks and responses which would address the crises of their specific contexts. It soon became clear, however, that while “social media” might allow terms, such as “human rights,” to circulate back and forth in their conversations, when embedded in the materiality of their lives these same terms seem to lead to unavoidable conflicts amongst them. It is out of such conflicts, out of such contradictions, we argue, that new democratic strategies and human rights practices much emerge.

In order to contribute new knowledge about the digital literacies of midlife and older adults on social media, this study examines the literate practices of a subpopulation of Instagram users: female lifestyle Instagrammers and bloggers who self-identify as being over fifty. Survey results reveal why these women use blogs and Instagram, how they developed digital literacies, and who or what influences their practices. Case studies provide examples of the unique ways three women use Instagram to achieve visibility. Whereas most existing scholarship on visual depictions of age focuses on images that are controlled by other people (e.g., advertisers, community groups), I show how women use digital literacies and the affordances of Instagram and blog platforms to control their self-representations. Through their multimodal performances of identity, the women participate in discourses on aging and gender and pursue their goals of self-expression, inspiration, connection, and promotion.

In this article, I propose Critical Race English Education (CREE) as a theoretical and pedagogical construct that tackles white supremacy and anti-black racism within English education and ELA classrooms. I employ autoethnography and counterstorytelling as methods that center my multiple identities and lived realities as I document my racialized and gendered experiences in relation to my journey to Ferguson, MO and my experiences as a secondary ELA teacher. The research questions guiding this study are the following: (1) As a Black male English educator and language and literacy scholar, how am I implicated in the struggle for racial justice and what does it mean for me to teach literacy in our present-day justice movement?; (2) How are Black lives mattering in ELA classrooms?; and, (3) How are we using Black youth life histories and experiences to inform our mindset, curriculum, and pedagogical practices in the classroom?This article explicates findings from three interconnected stories that work to show how CREE can be operationalized to better understand the #BlackLivesMatter movement in its historical and contemporary dimensions. The data analyzed stem from my autobiographical narratives,observations, social media artifacts, and images. I aim to expand English education to be more synergistically attuned to racial justice issues dealing with police brutality, the mass incarceration of Black people, and legacies of grassroots activism. This analysis suggests implications that aim to move the pedagogical practices around the intersections of anti-blackness and literacy from the margins to the center of discussion and praxis in ELA contexts.

The introductory technical communication class serves many purposes, but perhaps an understudied purpose is the class’s role in university retention and persistence. In this study, students used Twitter to complete biweekly assignments as a way to develop a sense of belonging, which is an important component to retention and persistence. Authors explore how this Twitter intervention affected students’ sense of belonging, their creation of an online community, and their continued pursuit of a technical communication education.

This study investigates YouTube’s beauty community, an online group of women who make videos about makeup products and techniques. The videos contain makeup application instructions and challenge ideas about what is “usable” procedural discourse. They sometimes defy conventions for high production quality. Moreover, storytelling and instruction are integral to the rhetorical work of these tutorials. For the diverse groups in this community, procedural discourse also serves as a means of establishing credibility not otherwise afforded to them, as well as opportunities for identity- and relationship building.

Technical and professional communication instruction is well suited to helping students develop digital literacy but must be informed by research regarding how students are using specific social media platforms, particularly the propensity to post content that could damage their career capital. This study examined this question for students in Austria, Australia, and the United States. In Austria and Australia, this behavior was found to be no greater for Twitter than it was for Facebook. Conversely, for the United States, the behavior was found to be more pronounced. These and additional results regarding attitudes toward information privacy are reported.

Indie rock musicians are a group of extra-institutional individuals who play an often-vibrant role in urban economic development. The organizational structure that guides their professional activities has yet to be investigated. Interviews with 18 indie rock musicians provided a way to investigate organizational structure. They reported a build structure featuring the principles of audience development, slow growth, and unevenness. The constraints of the musician’s professional situation require long-term promotion of aesthetic products to a slowly growing audience in a saturated market that produces unevenness through power imbalances. This slow-growing structure contrasts with organizational structures that provide immediate benefits.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

YouTube video innovations should be more widely developed and implemented because they uniquely meet the needs of today’s diverse learners.

“Researchers must be mindful of the identities they create on social media, being sure to consider the ethics of these platforms as both user and researcher. Social media platforms are powerful research tools, but they are above all rhetorical, and therefore deserve our continued methodological attention.”

“In the end, GamerGate activism resembles a churn of constant invention, moving from one celebrity to another, whether as friend or foe . Rather than possessing a single, authoritative argument, GamerGate welcomed whatever argument caught fire.”

“Yik Yak was simply too open, too democratic, too anonymous, and too ephemeral to survive in the monetization-driven world of social media platforms today. Unlike Snapchat, which we use as counterpoint in this article, Yik Yak appears to have been incompatible at the structural level with what we call corporate kairos.”

This article examines how the popular television series Downton Abbey, functioning in tandem with twentieth-century novels, provides students with a cultural forum that opens up a cultural, literary, and historical period that would otherwise remain distant. By encouraging students to perceive television as participating in what Horace Newcomb and Paul M. Hirsch call “public thinking,” the article highlights the way the PBS period drama offers students the means to engage critically and empathetically with a historically distant cultural moment. Ultimately, the author argues that incorporating Downton Abbey and related social media to the study of novels of the early twentieth century enlivens the material, motivating students to enter into a period of history through its literature in service of not only increased historical and literary knowledge but also a more nuanced understanding of the importance of the humanities in examining society and its values, the very elements television both shapes and reflects.

This article examines the tactical online rhetorical choices of a young African American professional communicator, Gina. Drawing on situated analysis to show how Gina engaged with her African American Hush Harbor (AAHH) of young professionals online, the author argues that Gina used Twitter to maintain professional network ties in her AAHH community while resisting organizational discourses of surveillance. The author further argues that analyzing particular choices in boundaryless career situations allows us to see important nontask-based professional writing activity.

Professional and technical communication increasingly involves developing narratives that traverse multiple genres, media formats, and publishing venues. In marketing and advertising, brand stories unfold across Web sites, ad campaigns, and social media properties. A fundamental challenge in such work is multigenre coordination, leading to a key question: How do professionals manage complex ecologies of genres, media content, and interactions in ways that build and sustain narrative coherence and audience engagement? Reporting findings from a study of transmedia writers, this article argues that metageneric texts may emerge as important coordinative resources for planning, developing, and tracking uptakes within multigenre narratives. It thus contributes to professional and technical communication by describing a widening gap in scholarly approaches to metagenre; arguing for empirical examinations of metageneric constructs in tangible, flexible texts that serve situated needs in given activity systems; and demonstrating how such texts may emerge and play a formidable role in coordinating contemporary, multigenre narratives.

This article explores the epideictic nature of online discourse, or what might be considered a digital version of social knowledge. In particular, it draws from Vilém Flusser's concept of the technical image, the image projected as singular but that is, in fact, layered with many other meanings. Working from two primary examples—the resignation of University of Missouri president Tim Wolfe and the reporting of Israeli flooding of a Gazan valley—the article theorizes how a consensus is constructed as a technical image and thus problematizes the nature of consensus in specific rhetorical moments.

The author reports on social media research in technical and professional communication (TPC) training through a national survey of 30 professional and technical communication programs asking about their use of social media in technical communication. This research forms the basis of recommendations for training online TPC faculty to teach with social media. The author offer recommendations throughout for those who train online TPC faculty as well as for the teachers themselves.

Facebook (FB) is a popular communication medium and community building tool for health outreach, promotion, and support groups for patients with chronic and rare conditions. Medical writers and health communication specialists are often tasked to write the content and support community interactions in health-related FB interventions. However, studies have reported mixed results at sustaining patient participation and engagement in FB interventions. Questions remain about the relationship between health behavior and FB usage and best strategies for evaluating health-related FB interventions. Furthermore, few studies examine health-related FB usage of people not designated as patients, which might help identify native activities that can sustain participants’ interest in and engagement with FB interventions. This study examines offline and online health-related activities of FB to identify characteristics shared by people who use FB for health-related purposes. The data from 455 users indicate that offline social health activities do not transfer online; privacy issues, interaction preferences, and differences between FB and offline networks may be barriers. FB campaigns and interventions should have modest and focused goals, such as supplementing offline activities and increasing preexisting FB activity. Designing FB interventions for networks and social groups with preexisting emotional ties and trust would be ideal.

This study focuses on start-up entrepreneurs on the move—in coordination with an array of other actors—as they weave and are woven into transnational networks. Central to this study is a shift from activity to mobility systems. Building on technical communication scholarship, the frame integrates actor networks and activity theory knotworks. Disrupting workplace and national container models (methodological nationalism), the analysis is grounded in a study of Israeli start-up entrepreneurs. Dubbed the Start-Up Nation, Israel contains more start-ups per capita than any other country in the world, with its high-tech industry made up of a dense ecosystem of conferences, accelerators, meetups, social media, and coworking spaces. Tracing actants’ trajectories across this social field, the author argues for a conceptualization of entrepreneurs as knotworkers who mobilize genres, modes, languages, and spaces.

ABSTRACTThe spread of mobile technologies and social media have contributed to making snapshot photography an ordinary part of everyday life. As snapshots become more omnipresent, asking why we take so many photos becomes less exigent than asking what might stop us from doing so. Drawing on insights from affect theory, new materialism, and studies of visual rhetoric, this article argues that deterrents to snapping pictures arise not only from the range of human rhetorics or “laws” that influence our actions or inactions, but also from a dynamic tangle of extrahuman factors, ineffable though this influence may be. Speculating about the implications of these extrahuman deterrents for how we understand rhetoric, I suggest that the ineffable enchantment of certain encounters exhibits a worldly rhetoricity in itself, one that conditions the possibility of—and sometimes prevents—the anthropogenic symbolic actions we are more accustomed to recognizing as rhetorical.

This study describes how members of a transnational social network of Mexican bilinguals living in Chicago manipulate their language on online social media to facilitate and maintain close connections across borders. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, I examine conversations posted on members’ Facebook walls and the contexts in which the discourses are formed. I argue that members of this transnational social network engage in the use of deterritorialized discourse to create chronotopes; that is, through discourse, members connect temporal and spatial relationships and form them into a single constructed context. These chronotopes help members recontextualize Facebook as a unique transnational social place that connects families and allows for the continuation of cultural practices that maintain their transnationalism. This study sheds light on the use of linguistic resources and modes of communication to examine how individuals construct imagined experiences within a real intimate community in the deterritorialized space of online social media.

With their timely, interactive nature and wide public access, social media have provided a new platform that empowers stakeholders and corporations to interact in crisis communication. This study investigates crisis communication strategies and stakeholders’ emotions in response to a real corporate crisis—the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214—in order to enhance our understanding of socially mediated crisis communication. The authors examine 8,530 responses from Chinese stakeholders to crisis communication on the Chinese microblogging Web site Sina Weibo. Their findings suggest that the integrated use of accommodative and defensive communication strategies in the early stage of postcrisis communication prevented escalation of the crisis.

Literacy researchers might develop a richer understanding of how literacy practices construct communities and writers within those communities through more detailed attention to what writers do when they write. Very little is currently known about the processes by which individuals are actually composing in digital writing environments. However, in this cultural moment of sweeping social, linguistic, and technological literacy transformations, research on digital composing processes involves unique methodological challenges. Contemporary writing technologies intersect with digital literacy composing processes in ways that require critical ethical and methodological decision-making by literacy researchers at all stages of the research process. In this article, I argue that research on contemporary composing processes provides a crucial window onto literacy as a social practice, and further, that such research poses unique methodological challenges for researchers. Through an examination of Facebook writers’ composing processes, I articulate some of these challenges and offer guidance for future research.

This article introduces the concept of stylization and illustrates its usefulness for studying online discourse by examining how writers have employed it in order to parody sexist products such as BIC Cristal for Her, using genderlect in order to introduce dissonance into and reframe patriarchal discourse. A corpus analysis of 671 reviews, written from August through October 2012, confirmed a dramatically higher presence of lexical items and adjectives often stereotyped as feminine, compared to a reference corpus of other parody reviews, as well as the GloWbe corpus housed at Brigham Young University. A qualitative analysis shows the stylized use of these features, and how they contribute to the construction of personas that are intended to mock the sexism inherent in BIC’s advertising. This analysis hopes to encourage more attention to how stylization functions in emerging online genres.

Present Tense is happy to announce that one of our Editors has started a tenure-track position this year. Don Unger, our Social Media Editor, is now an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at St. Edward’s University.

On August 27, 2015, Multimedia Editor Alexandra Hidalgo and Guest Editor Donnie Johnson Sackey discussed special issue 5.2 on race, rhetoric, and the state on Twitter. The Q&A has been curated with Storify below in hopes of continuing conversation on states’ questionable treatment of people of color until the issue’s release in late fall. See: […]

The social media campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks has called for more varied works of literature. However, one of the arguments for increasing the visibility of diverse books has not received much attention: using #WNDB to cultivate religiously pluralistic thinkers. Currently, there is a conflict between the evasion of religious neutrality in English language arts (ELA) instruction and the need to prepare young people to become pluralistic thinkers in a global society. This article examines three lines of inquiry: How likely are preservice teachers to (a) include children’s books with religious diversity in their future classrooms, (b) discuss the religious content of the books with their future students, and/or (c) employ dominant social discourses in interpreting the religious content? Grounded in theories of religious neutrality, social discourses, and cultural superiority,the study analyzes 79 preservice teachers’ responses to the cultural-religious milieu of the renowned picture book memoir In My Family/En Mi Familia (Garza, 1996). The corpus of data, which includes the preservice teachers’ written reflections and responses to a set of open-ended questions,indicates that privileging a nonreligious reading lens and excluding relevant religious perspectives from discussions about diverse works of children’s literature can inadvertently contribute to the defamation of other cultures and religious traditions. The study underscores the responsibility of teacher educators to help preservice teachers take a religiously neutral approach to ELA instruction.