Temptation and Its Discontents: Digital Rhetoric, Flow, and the Possible

Abstract

This essay explores the role of rhetoric in everyday online activities, arguing that scholarship in digital rhetoric can be informed by Raymond Williams's theory of media flow. Turning to Martin Heidegger and John Poulakos, I argue that the Web's rhetoric of the possible encourages a momentum of text consumption by which users are tempted to further immerse themselves in a “flowing” media experience. As digital technologies provide new opportunities for the surveillance and personalization of our Web practices, this article concludes by encouraging scholars to be critical of the tempting possibilities—and possible selves—crafted by this rhetoric.

Notes

¹I thank Pat Arneson, Ashley Kelly, Carolyn Miller, David Rieder, Jeff Swift, and Kenneth Zagacki for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I am especially grateful for the careful, patient assistance of RR editor Theresa Enos and reviewers Barbara Warnick and James Zappen.

²Warnick and Heineman distinguish between user-to-document interactivity, user-to-system interactivity, and user-to-user activity (55–56; see also Warnick 69–90). While my analysis will focus mainly on the rhetorical constraints of user-to-document interactivity, these other modes of interactivity offer productive scenes for the future analysis of flow and digital rhetoric (see endnote 7 of this essay).

³Since the mid 2000s, there has been much discussion of the technical innovations presented by Web 2.0; and now, of course, we are beginning to hear about the emergence of Web 3.0. The term Web 2.0 was coined by business professionals discussing the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. Many of the Web companies that survived the collapse, they concluded, shared certain features: they offered unprecedented levels of interactivity, social networking, and user control, relying on user- and database-driven applications and “collective intelligence” rather than HTML and rigid software (O'Reilly). In the words of Paul Anderson, Web 2.0 is “a more socially connected Web in which people can contribute as much as they consume” (4). So while it is essential to consider personalization and interactivity when theorizing web activities, the extent of the “Web 2.0 revolution,” just like the extent of the original Web revolution, can lead one to overlook the structured rhetoricality of the Web (Keen).

⁴While characterizing Aristotelian rhetoric as “linear” is somewhat reductive, it does satisfactorily capture the contrast between textuality as articulated by an individual rhetor, on the one hand, and digital textuality as emerging uniquely in a user's audiencing practices, on the other.

⁵As Warnick notes, this capacity for coproduction is a key dimension of digital rhetoric: “[U]sers become active cocreators of messages when they customize site content … or post messages and photos that become part of the Web site text… . By involving users in posting and reading user-contributed content, [web]sites can promote [user] identification” (76, 89). Like many websites, then, Wikipedia offers users several different avenues for identification, and hence their capacity for flow extends beyond my focus on user-to-document interactivity.

⁶In my case, there is an ad for car insurance and an ad for an online university. It is important to note that Google's advertising website uses this sales pitch to potential customers: “Earn more money by showing ads that relate to your content and users” (Google Ads). This personalization, according to O'Reilly (19–25), is one of the signature features of Web 2.0; for Eli Pariser, it is one of the emerging Web's greatest dangers (47–75).

⁷We might consider, for example, how Web browsers like Safari and Firefox recall users’ previous Web activities. These browsers’ address bars confront users with hyperlinks to their most frequently visited sites, ensuring that even when users are not enticed by the links on a particular webpage, they are presented with a pull-down list of “favorite” and frequently visited sites. While offering users a detour from the semantic-pragmatic flow at hand, these features offer different “channels” on which new flows, initiated by the hyperlinks offered on these and subsequent sites, can arise. This example is more representative of what Warnick and Heineman call “user-to-system” interactivity (see endnote 2 of this essay).