The rhetoric of the implicit and the politics of representation in the age of copy-and-paste

Abstract

The paper discusses the effects of copy-and-paste on the rhetoric and politics of communication in digital environments, by examining direct and indirect (mis)quotation and referencing in YouTube video-exchanges and by providing further examples in one-to-one communication via Facebook and email. The forwarding of (snippets of) artefacts in new contexts reshapes patterns of coherence and cohesion, producing intertextuality and implicitness. A rhetoric of the implicit shapes the politics of communication in elitist terms, assigning meaning-makers the responsibility for communicative success/failure while discharging sign-makers from obligations of being clear, cohesive, coherent and explicit. Common in informal contexts, such rhetoric may effect also more formal ones, with more or less successful results, hence the usefulness of meta-reflection in raising sign- and meaning-makers’ awareness on the varied effects of these practices in different contexts.

Keywords:

• social semiotics
• YouTube
• Facebook
• email
• intertextuality
• quotation
• remix
• multimodality
• copy-and-paste
• implicitness

Notes

The producers of the private exchanges analysed here have given consent both to analysis and to anonymized publication of their texts. The discussed YouTube video-exchanges are publicly available; for the author's ethical position on covert observation of these data, cf. Adami (2010a).

An introductory type-written ‘not with the idea of dissing Chris Crocker’ hedges the interpersonal function of the video; for an analysis of the blurry boundary between homage and criticism of YouTube parodies cf. Willett (2009).

Excerpts in this section are translated from Italian.