Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local: Rhetorical Dynamics across Networked Publics

Abstract

Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local examines the social and rhetorical dynamics around emerging writing technologies. Carl Whithaus argues that these dynamics work across networked publics as patterns of behavior and ways of interacting through and with multimodal texts. This rhetorical analysis of the production and reception of born-digital rhetoric shows the ongoing and evolving impacts of online public discourse that can lead to bad restaurant reviews or the subversion of democracy. It is a networked process that gains significance because of the interplay and tensions between the global and the local. As these texts are created, distributed, received, and then recreated and shared again in viral ways, different messages resonate across media ecologies. Whithaus documents how emerging social dynamics shape—and are shaped by—digital writing, reading, and distribution technologies. In the 2010s and 2020s, writing has seemingly exploded, with its fragments settling unpredictably across media and adhering to other modalities in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. Drawing on cases of writing from the past fifteen years, Whithaus sifts through these fragments, exploring how people write together in shared multimodal ecologies. These cases involve Twitch livestreams, Discord servers, TikTok videos, Reddit threads, Nextdoor screeds, and Yelp reviews. They recount writing collaborations spanning fandom communities, Dungeons & Dragons games, antagonistic trolling, conspiracy theories, and local political action. Parodies, pastiches, and protests all show up in this extended mediation on what it means to write multimodally and how that writing creates and shapes locality. Read it—and don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe. Carl Whithaus is a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of California, Davis. He studies writing technologies and digital cultures, edits the Journal of Writing Assessment , and works on a variety of projects related