Paper Abstract

Here is the working abstract for my paper:


A fundamental step in persuasive communication is analysis of audiences, situations, and genres. As persuasive communication moves into the complex realm of interactive social media, an understanding of these factors becomes critical. This paper traces the development of genre field analysis and shows its unique usefulness in analyzing the potential of persuasive messages in social media. Using the Facebook page of a regional university recruitment office as a case study, this paper examines how system mapping through genre field analysis can aid recruiters in crafting and managing the content of their page. Through examining the elements of genre-agents, player-agents, transformative locales, and play scenarios in a Facebook page a richer understanding of the complex interactions in social media emerges.

Activity Networks

Once again, I couldn’t get past the opening pages of this Spinuzzi’s Network without finding my personal example to which I could apply the principles. One of my most challenging (and not surprisingly short-lived) jobs was as a coordinator with Utah State University’s distance education program. I was responsible for all of the courses (200+ per semester) taught via satellite and video-conferencing and found myself as a node, perhaps the primary node between academic departments and their instructors and curriculum, distance education campuses/centers and their unique needs, university registration offices, two separately located technical support centers, technology service (channels, internet pathways, etc) schedulers, physical resource (classroom) schedulers, and probably another half-dozen entities I should have been in communication with but ended up neglecting. A network indeed.

Looking back, which theory would have been better for analyzing it? I’m sure it will take me our discussion in class and then probably a rereading to really wrap my head around the differences between activity theory and actor-network theory. In chapter 3 while discussing the connections between development and political-rhetorical interests, Spinuzzi suggests “each side accuses the other of putting the cart before the horse” (p. 67). While this is a helpful metaphor, it seems to me that each side is accusing the other of putting the chicken before the egg. I understand that each believes in their perception, but at the end of the day I see the “which came first” question as nonsensical, and that in reality development and political-rhetorical interests are in a perpetual cycle of creating one another.

However, my initial reaction is that activity theory provides a better lens of analysis. I’m not sure I understand the differences of symmetrical/asymmetrical, but I do agree with the concept of activity theory that gives agency to humans (I’m not ready for the computer uprising). I also like the idea of the woven net more than the splice. I’m most intrigued by the notion of overlapping activity systems. Part of it comes from my minimal understanding of systems theory with its notions of permeable boundaries and processes of inputs, outputs, and throughputs. While the overlapping activity systems is probably more helpful than the linked activity systems, figure 3.2 is instructive. Multiple activity systems (such as the various organizations I identified in my opening paragraph) each have their communities consisting of rules, meditational means, divisions of labor, which transform their subject (inputs) in their objects (object(ive)s). However, none of these function independently. Each part of one activity system is theoretically a part of another activity system forming this complex network web. 

Genre fields and soccer fields. Much difference?

Not surprisingly, I found the visual metaphors of these articles very compelling. Between terms like field, play, follow the ball, and follow the game, I couldn’t think about these articles without a vivid picture of a youth soccer field in my mind. I’ve been coaching my 6-year olds son’s AYSO soccer team for the last couple of months, and that space became the perfect image for applying these terms.

For the record, I am not a soccer guy. I haven’t played soccer since I was a little kid myself, and I can’t recall watching a soccer game in person or on T.V. Unlike my tenure as a T-ball coach where I could at least claim to be a fan of the game, I didn’t coach soccer out of a love for the game, just a love for my kid. That, and the fact that the league was very desparate for coaches. I’ve finnally learned that at this level the main requirements for youth coaches are for us to be willing and available, to pass a criminal background check, and to know (at least slightly) more about the sport than the kids.

I say all of this to extend the metaphor of how coming to understand genre field analysis for a novice or developing communictor is very much like understanding soccer field analysis for a novice or developing player/coach.

Communication is nothing if not a complex set of interactions, and interactions are what happened with my soccer team. We interacted with non-responsive elements (the boundaries, the goals, etc.) which form the Genre-agents, but also with other responsive elements (the other players – both teammates and opponents) which formed the player-agents. Just being on the same field at the same time didn’t necessarily force interactions, those interactions were limited to tranformitive locales which in our case wasn’t usually far from where the ball was; stopping or changing the direction of the ball or scoring a goal with the ball was the focus of the game. Of course none of this takes place without play scenarios or strategic choices that we made in an attempt to increase the likelihood of us scoring goals.

As a novice coach I found much of my energy early on was to understand the genre-agents – those non responsive elements of the game, the rules of play, the dimensions of the field, etc.  More experienced coaches (especially those with playing experience) could take these for granted, but I couldn’t. As a result, and also because of my lack of experience, I was woefully dificient in the play scenarios. “Kick the ball into the goal!” was about as sophisticated as my coaching (or my players appreciation for the game) ever came.

As a communication teacher, I see the need for us to help our students understand these four elements. We teach various genres of communication (the resume, the persuasive essay, the motivational speech, etc.) but how often is our instruction as simple as “kick the ball into the goal!”

One of my go-to essays in rhetorical theory is Lloyd Bitzer’s The Rhetorical Situation. In his essay, Bitzer defines the rhetorical situation as being defined by exigencies, audiences, and constraints. I’ve always liked this approach better than genre theory, but the more I’m coming to understand genre theory (and these readings were very illuminating), the more helpful it is becoming to me. At any rate, I think of this situation or genre-field as the field in which we operate. In many ways the audience and constraints are like the boundaries of the soccer field.

I guess my take-away from all of this is that Moeller and Christensen (2010) give us a helpful way for analyzing the spaces in which communication takes place. Understanding this framework of analysis can make us and our students more effective communicators.

Rhetoric and Dialectic

It should come as no surprise to those who know me that the sections defining rhetoric and dialectic on pages 29-31 were among my favorite parts of the book. I’ve been familiar with the “rhetoric is the counter-part of dialectic” line since I first opened Aristotle, but haven’t seen it combined in such a clear way before. I’m somewhat bothered by the term “truth” in the definition (mostly because I unconsciously link it with the term Truth), but I like how engaging in a struggle of understanding and conveying the results of that struggle is at the heart of dialectic and rhetoric.

As these concepts are used in the section titled Exigent Rhetoric in Game Developers’ Discourse (beginning on page 92) we clearly see how a rhetorical analysis reveals important things. As social constructs, issues such as values and power are revealed and negotiated through communication and it was interesting to see this at play in the examples cited. Although McAllister rightly points out that these same issues can be seen in any discourse community, I agree that the computer gaming industry is an interesting place to study it. Though the artifacts were limited to just one of many potential discussion boards, it shows the multiple perspectives, backgrounds, and purposes that go into developing computer games.

When I was masters student at Illinois, I knew someone who worked for a local game development company. He was trying to be successful with his humanities degree from a liberal arts college in a highly technical field. He often spoke about his frustrations in having to consistently prove his worth and the importance of his contributions to the game, specifically in the story, character development, etc. I’m not sure what ended up happening to him, but I don’t think he (or the company) was particularly successful.

Its beyond the scope of the book, but I can’t help but continue to think about how questions of value and power continue to be part of the ongoing discussion about the field of technical communication. Of course the irony is that of all people, technical communicators should be best able to clearly articulate what we do, and to make the case for our value.

Surveillant Assemblage

Haggerty, K. D. & Ericson, R. V. (2000). The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4). 605-622. DOI: 10.1080/00071310020015280

After building a theoretical framework of survelliance based on the notions of the “telescreen” described in Orwell’s 1984 and Foucault’s discussion of the panopticon, the authors connect those thoughts with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages to document the attributes of what they call the “surveillant assemblage.”  As an assemblage, contemporary surveillance is made up of a wide variety of technologies and institutions. Surveillance is directed toward a person’s body (itself an assemblage with a variety of “flows”) with the goal of turning it into pure information.  Like rhizomes, the connections of various surveillance tools allow for rapid and non-linear growth. In contrast to the traditional top-down version of surveillance, the contemporary model also illustrates how the general public has been able to monitor the elite. In the end, the new surveillant assemblage has led to the disappearance of disappearance; it is nearly impossible to leave the grid.

This article clearly applies the concepts of the Deleuze and Guattari to a contemporary issue and illustrate how thinking through this lens reveals interesting things that may have been missed before. Written a decade ago, it integrates many of the features of the information age, but as online and virtual presences have been increased in the last few years it only points to the growth of surveillant assemblage.  

Disciplining a Discipline

As I’ve been pondering the idea of how the principles of discipline described in Foucault’s Discipline and Punishment apply to an academic discipline I’ve had some interesting thoughts. The first is that we have to figure out what is being “disciplined.” In Foucault’s work, discipline is applied on the prisoner. In academia, it is not so much the teachers or students who need the discipline, but rather the ideas those teachers or students hold. In the same way that an ordered society would like its vagabonds and criminals to live more ordered and controlled lives, an academic discipline would like the thinking and ideas of its discipline ordered and controlled.

Part III, Chapter 1, Docile Bodies suggests a number of ways in which discipline can be applied to individuals, and I was surprised at how easily those seemed to apply to academic disciplines as well. “Discipline proceeds from the distribution of individuals in space.” As we apply this to academic disciplines where ideas replace individuals, we see the same techniques at play. Foucault provides four distinct functions of distributions. I’ll comment on these and on a related fifth function from this section.

1.     “Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself” (p. 141). I’ve occasionally lamented my situation as a primarily communication guy in an English department. Although we probably have much more that connects the two disciplines than separates them, we tend to focus on the differences – those “border cases” where an academic discipline tries to close in on itself to the exclusion of other ideas.

2.     “But the principle of ‘enclosure’ is neither constant, nor indispensable, nor sufficient in disciplinary machinery” (p. 143). I think this is among the biggest challenges facing the field of technical and professional communication. As a fairly new field we are continuing to negotiate the boundaries with older, established disciplines. This section also mentions the monastic cell, and while we don’t necessarily have the physical isolation of cells, each academic is expected to develop their own unique niche – an area of expertise they explore in relative solitude.

3.     “The rule of functional sites would gradually, in the disciplinary institutions, code a space that architecture generally left at the disposal of several different users” (p. 143). I find it interesting that despite the sometimes insular nature of our disciplines there are different users and trains of thought within the discipline, and though they have counter-parts, each deals with their discipline in a unique way. For example, each discipline has administration, research methodology, theory development, literature, history, publishing, and archiving.

4.     “In discipline, the elements are interchangeable, since each is defined by the place it occupies in a series, and by the gap that separates it from the other. The unit is, therefore… the rank” (p. 145). Academic disciplines are certainly hierarchal, we are organized into classes and academic ranks, and even the ideas we explore find themselves organized into “introductory” or “advanced.”

5.     “In organizing ‘cells’, ‘places’, and ‘ranks’, the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical” (p. 148). This line clearly sums up the unique nature of disciplines and the critical nature of “displacement” as part of the structure that brings disciplines into being.