With the advancement of technology
rhetoricians now have the ability to strengthen their arguments to make them
tailor made for their audiences. As author Carolyn Handa said in her article The Multimediated Rhetoric of the Internet
“..the internet is a digital super mall…” (Handa 83). What Handa further
explains in this sentence is just like you can go to the mall to find something
that suits your needs and desires that the internet can know suit our needs and
desire. The advancement of the internet enhances rhetorician’s arguments in
ways that could not have been done previously before. Though the internet
enhances rhetoric in many ways I would like to focus on how it strengthens the rhetorician’s
ability to support their argument. More specifically I would like to focus on
how the internet enhances the rhetorician’s usage of space to support their
argument.
Author Handa talks about how if a
writer was to write traditionally on a paper then their space would be the
pages but in the digital world a writer’s space is the pages that they design
online. Handa really focuses on websites
as space throughout her article to provide an example of how using space
effective can communicate rhetorically to a mass audience.
How you’re able to communicate to a mass audience
is through multidimensional movement. Handa talks of how pages are associated
with each other and that there is a “multidimensional movement” taking place (Handa
155). Handa really wants her audience to see that everything that is laid out
on a webpage is multimodality but it’s enter connectedness works together to
give off a rhetorically message. Handa compared writing for a website to
walking through a museum exhibit. Hana says “how the [architect] and the [viewer]
understand the [digital space] is conditioned by the physical and visual
character of the [Web space] they use (Handa 153). What handa is trying to
convey to her readers is the author of the text creates a character through
their construction of space and it’s up to the viewer to see the character to
gain understanding of the product that is being presented.
This is such an effective tool
because as Handa mentions “the practical meaning of rhetoric is determined by
the effect it has on an audience and their subsequent decisions and attitudes”
(Handa 117). A rhetorician’s job is to change attitudes and behavior and what
better way to do that by using the tool of space in the digital world. As rhetoricians
we have to see that someone is going to conduct a rhetorical analysis of our
works. Rather the public does this intentionally or untentionally it’s
something that is bound to happen. Hand describes the goal rhetorical analysis
as being to see what the text is saying to “…people who produce and consume
text” (Handa 84). As rhetoricians if we
begin to really think about how we use the space that we create online to convey
our rhetorical argument we may actually come up with better tailor made
arguments for our audiences.
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