In this essay, we extend prior discussions of user interactions with wearable devices, framing these interactions in the context of identification and rhetorical invention. We identify the limitations of the preset identifications made available by the logic of what we term screened wearing, a representationalist framework for understanding wearable devices and the data they produce. In contrast to these logics, we identify the inventional opportunities for wearables enabled by what we term diffractive wearing, an open-ended approach to wearables that situates data within larger systems of activity.

The essays in this special issue identify and analyze the rhetorics enabled and disabled, disclosed and foreclosed by wearable devices and the discourses attending to them, focusing on new rhetoric...

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

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.

Networks have a remarkable ability to bring people together in communities, both online and offline, but such community building is not the only possible result of network use. This article examines the case of a tagging network on Twitter, the online social networking service characterized by short messages. Although Twitter has many social features that foster interaction between users, the use of hashtags to signal the topic of a message exists outside of the site’s primary social structures, creating a unique writing environment. This article analyzes a hashtagged exchange surrounding the 2009 health care debate in the United States, examining the social features of this exchange and how participants used it to communicate about that debate. While traditional social features were certainly present within the exchange, they were not prominent or common; rather, users engaged the network properties of this exchange to make connections with other networks, drawing on a form of network power called switching. The analysis focuses on how the Twitter network’s structural features affect communication between users.

This study examines the revision histories of 10 Wikipedia articles nominated for the site's Featured Article Class (FAC), its highest quality rating, 5 of which achieved FAC and 5 of which did not. The revisions to each article were coded, and the coding results were combined with a descriptive analysis of two representative articles in order to determine revision patterns. All articles in both groups showed a higher percentage of additions of new material compared to deletions and revisions that rearranged the text. Although the FAC articles had roughly equal numbers of content and surface revisions, the non-FAC articles had fewer surface revisions and were dominated by content revisions. Although the unique features of the Wikipedia environment inhibit strict comparisons between these results and those of earlier revision studies, these results suggest revision in this environment places unique structural demands on writers, possibly leading to unique revision patterns.