1st Edition

Complex Worlds Digital Culture, Rhetoric and Professional Communication

Edited By Andrienne Lamberti, Anne Richards Copyright 2011
    260 Pages
    by Routledge

    246 Pages
    by Routledge

    'Complex Worlds: Digital Culture, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication' is a collection of thought-provoking scholarly essays by teachers and industry practitioners in professional communication and technology-oriented fields. Scrupulously edited for a range of readers, the collection aims to help familiarize advanced students, teachers, and researchers in professional communication, computers and writing, literacy, and sister disciplines with key issues in digital theory and practice. An emphasis on the situations of and audiences for digital communication identifies 'Complex Worlds' as a rhetorical approach.  In an era when globalizing markets and digital technologies are transforming culture around the world, readers should find the collection both engaging and timely. The collections' twelve essays constitute a diverse and thematically coherent set of inquiries. Included are explorations of topics such as cyber activism, digital 'dispositio', citizen and open-source journalism, broadband affordances, XML, digital resumes, avant garde performance art, best pedagogical practices, and intercultural communication between East and West, North and South. The text is especially well suited for advanced courses in professional and applied writing, contemporary rhetorics, and digital culture.  The complexity highlighted in the collection's title is brought into relief by authors who address how the digital is daily unmaking our assumptions about the boundaries between work and school, the global and the local, the private and the public. 'Complex Worlds' offers readers an opportunity to build on their rhetorical awareness by expanding their understanding of the means, aims, and strategies of effective communication--today and in the future.

    Acknowledgments
    INTRODUCTION Digital Divergence, Digital Complexity
    Anne R. Richards and Adrienne P. Lamberti

    PART I: TRANSFORMING ADVOCACY


    CHAPTER 1 Cyberactivism, Viral Flash Activism, and Critical Literacy Pedagogy in the Age of The Meatrix Eileen E. Schell

    CHAPTER 2 Retracing the Footprints from Print to Digital: An Assessment of Textual Structure Adrienne P. Lamberti

    CHAPTER 3 The Fourth Estate in an Era of Digitally Mediated Democracy Leonard Witt

    PART II: SHAPING THE PROFESSIONS


    CHAPTER 4 Gertrude Stein in QuickTime: Documenting Performance in the Digital Age Jason Farman

    CHAPTER 5 Digitizable Cultural Capital: Anticipations of Profit in the Web Market John B. Killoran

    CHAPTER 6 A Case Study of the Impact of Digital Documentation on Professional Change: The WPA Electronic Mailing List, Knowledge Network, and Community Outreach Huiling Ding

    PART III: BUILDING COMMUNITIES


    CHAPTER 7 A South-North Online Collaboration between Professional Writing Students in Tunisia and the United States Faiza Derbel and Anne R. Richards

    CHAPTER 8 Meeting Online Friends Offline: A Comparison of South Korean and U.S. College Students’ Differences in Self-Construal and Computer-Mediated Communication Preferences Heeman Kim and William Faux

    PART IV: INFORMING PEDAGOGY


    CHAPTER 9 Teaching Effective Technology Use in Technical and Professional Communication Programs Based in Colleges of the Humanities Laura McGrath

    CHAPTER 10 Technical Communication Pedagogy and the Broadband Divide: Academic and Industrial Perspectives Rudy McDaniel and Sherry Steward

    CHAPTER 11 Sizing Up Single-Sourcing: Rhetorical Interventions for XML Documentation Aimee Kendall Roundtree

    Biography

    Andrienne Lamberti, Anne Richards