"Yik Yak was simply too open, too democratic, too anonymous, and too ephemeral to survive in the monetization-driven world of social media platforms today. Unlike Snapchat, which we use as counterpoint in this article, Yik Yak appears to have been incompatible at the structural level with what we call corporate kairos."
"Algorithms function as information brokers that manage, control, and direct the content that platform users can search and access; in doing so, they exert rhetorical influence by determining what information matters and is available to researchers, and by providing that information across the many interfaces of the platform."
"Reddit is like a tiny internet: a place full of memes that are often offensive and hilarious at once. A place for activism and knowledge-sharing, shitposting and trolling. A place where mob mentality and anonymity more often lead to abuse campaigns and conspiracy theories than not."
"Weapons of Math Destruction expands our methods and pedagogies for critically engaging with digital platforms and algorithms. The book enables, and urges us, to engage new sites, civic institutions, and new issues, the effects of algorithms on institutions, those served by the institutions, and our democracy which is enabled by those institutions."
"Our new issue features articles on such a range of research, it's hard to write about them all at once. Articles here focus on pedagogy, students’ rights, investigations of public rhetorics, and the political and social impact of rhetorical choices."
"Expanding on this link between the Southern Strategy and neoliberalism, I argue proponents of municipal schools in Shelby County, TN, deployed a small government rhetoric of freedom and a neoliberal framework of self-regulation to codify the boundaries of white flight in the geospatial and discursive realms of the new school districts."
"Media support particular modalities over others, and formally shape and ideologically infuse products based on their affordances. Hence, students must be able to analyze rhetorical contexts while problematizing simplistic definitions of access and efficacy. The concept of a “multimodal home place” provides a tool to help students become more mindful about technology use."
"Programmatic positions statements are a tool for generating and shaping the discourse of a program or, at the very least, making clear what a program’s expectations of writing teachers are so that they have more information about how their responses to student writing might be viewed by those outside the student-teacher interaction."
"A techno-utopian style, the aestheticization of new technology, and the valorization of perpetual revolution represent a shift away from the managerial and risk-oriented realism of prevailing free market discourse towards an unproblematic view of the technological future and works to hasten its arrival"
"It is critical that scholars explore not only the emergent movement to end aging but also the phenomenon of aging itself, and that they do so from humanistic as well as scientific perspectives."
"Just as The Essay wouldn’t be The Essay without LeBron, The Essay wouldn’t be The Essay without NE Ohio. What comes to matter in circulation, as a result of circulation, is that The Essay is marked by its regional appeal."
"Using Michael Warner and Christian Lundberg as a frame, I argue the best Kickstarters mobilize their publics’ affect via meaningful tropes baked into their project’s pitch while using synecdoche to offer that same public the chance to help create the text that binds them together."
"As our bibliography of roughly 200 items reveals, composition has long been readying itself for an encounter with religion. Though religious discourse has presented many challenges to our field’s pedagogical and civic projects, the majority of scholars have refused to dismiss religious concerns and attitudes as mere impediments."
"In the ongoing quest to account for rhetoric’s “dynamic and distributed dimensions,” then, Still Life with Rhetoric contributes a robust new materialist methodology to the burgeoning scholarly reconsiderations of the material, temporal and consequential things of collective life."
"The editors and authors of the chapters included in Multimodal Composing in Classrooms: Learning and Teaching for the Digital World show how multimodal composing has become an indispensible new literacy."
