Research Interests

I study Internet culture and rhetoric, mostly informed by a perspective of digital rhetoric. In addition, my list of supporting interests have included:

  • virality
  • rhetorical theory and criticism
  • the rhetoric of new technologies
  • social and digital media
  • argumentation in digital environments
  • the philosophy of technology
  • virtual worlds
  • space and place
  • Web literacy
  • computers and composition pedagogy

I am especially interested in the new rhetorical challenges presented by the digital information age. Can classical and modern rhetoric help us better understand what happens in these contexts and how people act within them, or does a reliance on these established frameworks hinder our ability to appreciate something as truly revolutionary as the era of print before it? If so, how? If not, why not?

I have approached this problem from a number of different angles, such as: how user communities employ folksonomic genre strategies to organize esoteric content; how dispositio can be adapted from the classical canon to contribute to information architecture as argument on large-scale websites; how virtual identities, especially those constructed on social networking sites, can engender a feeling of place online amidst a vast sea of empty cyberspace through meaningful, emotional interactions; or how we can repurpose 20th century rhetorical theorists for understanding Web 2.0 and social media platforms, like Barthes and Wikipedia or Derrida and Twitter.

Most recently, though, I've turned my attention more or less entirely toward Internet phenomena--viral videos, image macros, Internet catchphrases, mash-ups--and what their proliferation in Internet sub-cultures (and recently in more mainstream Web circles) means for how we understand the way cultural artifacts are appropriated and disseminated in digital environments.

My dissertation research is in its infant stages, but at this point I know at least that I want to focus on the rhetoric of Internet culture. In my attempts to wrangle rhetorical theory into alignment with the lulz, I suspect that kairos, style, and genre will all play significant roles in demonstrating the usefulness of turning to a 2,500 year-old field to understand the future of sharing and shaping content online.

In the more distant past, my thesis--Composition 2.0: Rethinking Web Literacy for the Twenty-first Century--called for a trifurcated pedagogy of teaching Web literacy in the first-year composition classroom. Other conference presentations and papers have also focused on the pedagogical aspect of computers and composition, though I decided to let this research area fall by the wayside for the next few years as I expand further into Internet studies and space v. place.