How do new media technologies change rhetorical practice? How do nascent genres of communication, like blogging or memes, provide opportunities for citizens to affect public culture? How does digital mediation expand the communicative repertoire of citizens beyond the linguistic and into the visual? How do these new modes of communication play out in the networked public sphere, where citizens interact to contour democratic public life? How does the evolving technical infrastructure of digital media–from mobile to wearable computers–shape sensation, interaction, and culture?
My first book, Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere, was published in the Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation series by The Pennsylvania State University Press. Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics situates the growth of the blogosphere in a longer communicative history of rhetorical entrepreneurs leveraging affordances of new media to shape public deliberation.
Ancient Rhetorics + Digital Networks was published in February 2018 by the University of Alabama Press. Co-edited with Michele Kennerly of The Pennsylvania State University, this volume consider how ancient rhetorical theories shed light on new digital communication practices and, conversely, how the rhetorical flows in digital networks offer a new vantage point by which to reconsider ancient rhetorical theories.
I am currently working on a book tentatively titled Always On: Fashioning Ethos after Wearable Computing about the public rhetoric around four wearable computers released from 2009-2015: Motorola Droid mobile phones, Fitbit activity trackers, Google Glass, and the Apple Watch. Always On uses case studies of these wearable technologies to prompt larger questions about culture in a time of intense technological change: What values were privileged in public communication about wearable computers as they became popularized? What habits were prescribed and proscribed by the rhetorical choices of industry leaders and commercial advertisements? How did the articulation of these values and habits shape our broader culture? Might we recuperate other values and habits to advance a more humanistic vision of the good life amidst proliferating digital technologies?
Details about my scholarly pursuits can be seen on my CV, and my research articles can be downloaded here.
