Finished Research Projects

Many of the pieces you'll see on this page will come from recent coursework, but a few will be the result of my own free time (though, like my free time, those pieces will be rare indeed). I'll try to make as much of each article available to read as I feel comfortable. Please keep in mind that I draw a sharp distinction between "finished" and "polished," so some of these could benefit from a thorough round of editing. Interested in the job? Contact me. I'd welcome your edits /comments /suggestions /finger-pointing.

Know Your Genre: A Case Study of Genre Classification Strategies within a Discourse Community of Internet Meme Culture

Abstract: Internet phenomena are a parent category of online cultural artifacts comprising viral videos, memes, image macros and other classifications of digital media, and are best understood by the online users who create, share, and remix them. These users form tightly knit Internet sub-communities with their own heavily intertextual discourse replete with idiosyncratic jargon that may be difficult for outsiders to understand and use. As a result, many scholars may view this rich and culturally diverse collection of digital media as inaccessible to academic research. Many of these artifacts have crossed virtual borders from the inner circles of Internet culture (e.g., 4chan or 7chan) to more mainstream web locales (e.g., Digg, Twitter or the NY Times Online). With this spillover, more attention is turning toward what makes these artifacts compelling enough to share and distribute. But how do sub-communities of Internet users talk about genres of memes?

To answer this, I conduct a case study of knowyourmeme.com, a site of active users who are particularly interested in tracking, researching, and cataloging Internet phenomena as they appear. The site's discussion forum is a rich source of archived negotiations among users and administrators alike, providing an historical record of a discourse community’s attempts to codify genre classification strategies. I analyze key forum threads that reflect the vernacular genre practices of Internet users and classification strategies, showing how discourse communities attempt to define emerging and fuzzy digital genres.

Keywords: Internet meme / genre / discourse community / Internet culture

i'm in ur head, shapin' ur interwebz: Internet Memes, User Agency, and Rhetorical Transmission

Abstract: Viral videos, image macros, Internet catchphrases, and other cultural trends have exploded in popularity in recent years online, thanks in part to the more social, collaborative nature of what is known as Web 2.0. To describe these artifacts, Web users have opted for the convenient, catch-all term “Internet meme.” This problematic label is adapted from a neologism, coined in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard to describe what he saw as a clear link between genetics and cultural evolution. However, the use of a word like “meme” carries with it certain implications about how culture is transmitted from person to person and distributed throughout whole populations; these implications have not yet been seriously questioned or examined by rhetorical scholars.

Additionally, despite the immense popularity of “Internet memes” in the digital public sphere, rhetorical critics have yet to undertake a serious examination of these either. We have left the debate over the validity of the original “meme”—whether online or off— to biologists, anthropologists, and sociologists. In abstaining from the fray, we make three controversial and troubling assumptions: 1) that the original concept of the meme is a fitting analogy for rapidly distributed digital content; 2) that these digital artifacts do not create enough of a rhetorical impact to be worthy of study; and 3) that these objects are indeed not rhetorical but biological, designed to propagate on their own without purposeful human agency.

Therefore, this paper addresses the exigence that exists for a serious investigation into both the rhetorical power of these artifacts and the ontological-rhetorical appropriateness of the term “meme” to describe them. To do so, I first question the biological metaphor as the basis for how Internet phenomena are circulated and then, drawing on elements of fantasy-theme analysis, I argue instead for the idea of “rhetorical transmission” as a way of resituating human agency in the distribution of elements of online culture.

Keywords: Internet meme / rhetorical transmission / Internet communities / viral video / fantasy theme analysis

When "Going Viral" Goes Viral: Internet memes and Wikipedia

Abstract: The term “Internet meme” has come to represent a diverse collection of Internet phenomena. From viral videos to image macros, catchphrases, inadvertent celebrities, and many more, each of these categories includes a dizzying array of bits of cultural information that are passed around and remixed online. Understanding the interest in these artifacts can be difficult, so enter the all-purpose entry portal for public knowledge online, Wikipedia. To explain what Internet memes are and how they came to be, Wikipedia articles have been created for both the general categories mentioned above and countless specific examples from each. However, each of these articles uses assumptions in its descriptions borrowed from biological discourse on memetics to describe the properties of Internet memes. In doing so, Wikipedians are shaping the “terministic screen,” as Kenneth Burke would say, of how the public learns about the nature of the way cultural information is distributed in digital media environments. This comparison can be misleading, largely because it shifts agency away from human decisions and assigns it to the memes themselves. As a result, the misapplication of discourse and metaphor in such a widely accessed digital media environment presents interesting research opportunities for rhetorical critics and Internet studies scholars alike. But just how heavily do Wikipedia entries on Internet memes rely on biological discourse for their descriptions?

To answer this question, this essay presents the results from a discourse analysis that examined more than 25 Wikipedia pages at two levels of scope: a general, more abstract level that includes broader, descriptive categories (mentioned above) and a more specific level that includes multiple examples from each of the abstract levels. Pages were segmented by clause and coded with five descriptors: imitation, replication, variation, mutation, and selection. The analysis shows that while certain categories are more present at one level than at the other, the majority of pages in fact do rely on discourse from biological memetics to discuss the properties of Internet phenomena.

Keywords: Internet meme / Wikipedia / viral video / Internet studies / digital media

Digital Dispositio: Information Architecture, Arrangement, and Argument on the Web

Abstract: In her book, Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web, Barbara Warnick (2006) proposes that by “taking a broad definition of rhetorical criticism as study of the persuasive dimensions of communication generally…rhetorical critics [should] take up the project of studying online public discourse.” Doing so, she argues, “will require us to rethink and adapt conventional canons of rhetoric and argument analysis” (p. 23). She suggests that we “begin by reconsidering some of [our] assumptions about the nature of textual production of speech and print texts,” asserting that we “must generate new methods for critical study of texts that differ in production and form from those they have studied in the past” (p. 23).

This paper is meant as a contribution to that ongoing inquiry of rhetoric online, offering a new method for critical study that updates our understanding of long-standing rhetorical principles as they apply to the ever-changing face of the Internet. More specifically, it provides a detailed analysis of two divergent ways of organizing information architecture to create rhetorical arguments. My analytical framework is not definitive, however, as the very multiplicity and ephemerality of arguments arranged in hypertextual environments precludes an overarching theory; this paper does not attempt to formulate one. Instead, I, like Warnick, find it important to “describe and analyze how the development of digital and other media technologies have changed the ways in which we communicate” and to “document persuasive forms in new media environments” (2006, p. vi). Warnick examines online persuasive discourse through a framework of credibility, interactivity, and intertextuality. My work here—the case studies presented within— could be seen as an extension of hers into a fourth category of “arrangement,” but without the desire to formalize a rigidly defined addition to her methodology. My analysis will be descriptive, not causal. That is, the observations made throughout about the relative success of each artifact under examination will not be evaluative or not meant as a practical guide for designing information architecture to achieve effective persuasion. In doing so, I assume the role of the rhetorical critic—not the industry professional—and I follow in the long line of scholars who have examined rhetoric through the lens of hypertext.

Keywords: argument / classical rhetoric / digital rhetoric / Obama / information architecture

Cleaving Meaning from the Ether: Virtual Identity as Cyberplace

Abstract: The term cyberspace may have lost considerable currency among theorists in recent years, but a reexamination of the idea with an emphasis on space v. place may invigorate the discussion of how Internet users construct meaningful habitations online. This essay argues that a meaningful sense of place can exist on the Internet through virtual identities on social networking sites. We construct identity, we construct place. On the Internet, these constructions converge through our use of social networking sites, and we employ this convergence through our meaningful and emotional interaction with other users in our networks. Virtual identities aid in the production of this interaction, and they become the stable places we rely on to anchor ourselves as we explore a World Wide Web largely devoid of any significant meaning to us as individuals and us as rabid consumers of digital media.

Keywords: virtual place / space v. place / Internet studies / virtual identity / social networking

Slugging it Out Over "Nothing": Perceptions of Technological Progress and Humankind's Relationship with Virtual Environments

Abstract: What role does cyberspace play as a sustainable arena to enact real world change? In the philosophy of technology, the answer appears to be a battle royale over technology, the future, and virtual environments. In the blue corner, we start with futurists and technological optimists (technoloptimists) like Howard Rheingold, Jaron Lanier, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, or Aaron Walsh who believe that virtual environments can offer steps toward utopian solutions for the physical world. Their opponents in the red corner, an ad hoc platoon of philosophy of technology classicists, Luddites, and otherwise longtime critics of technological progress, view virtual environments at best as an unnecessary distraction, at worst a dystopic poison that causes disillusioned concepts of reality and breeds negative, antisocial behavior. Weighing in as technological critics (technologicritics) against virtual technologies are the likes of Albert Borgmann, Michael Bugeja, Neil Postman, and Jacques Ellul, with many more among their ranks competing for starting positions on the roster. At ringside is seated the general public, passive, lay consumers of technology and curious inhabitants of virtual environments—these are the souls each side is seeking to win over, to convince with powerful and prediction-shattering blows that their own conception of the future of virtual technology is laced with tighter gloves.

Throughout this match I’ll be acting as a referee of sorts, mediating the conversation and mapping the rhetorical ring in which this brouhaha takes place. The rounds are long—each side has considerable stamina and staying power—so don’t expect a quick knockout. When the bout has ended, I’ll throw my own punches at our weary combatants, jabbing my way toward an emerging view—as a budding researcher in the philosophy of technology—of virtual environments, our role in their future, and their role in ours. I’ll leave it to the judge’s scorecard to determine the winner, and although I suspect it won’t be clear-cut enough to render anything but a “no-decision,” I do anticipate this bout will bring more attention to determining our relationship as human beings with virtual environments and our differing perceptions of the future that technology can/shouldn’t bring. Sound the bell.

Keywords: virtual worlds / technological determinism / philosophy of technology

Composition 2.0: Rethinking Web Literacy for the Twenty-First Century Classroom (master's thesis)

Abstract: College composition instructors today face incoming students who are, by and large, addicted consumers of technology. However, instructors often conflate frequency of use with rhetorical faculties, assuming students are already more than capable members of the social writing public of Web 2.0. With a new Web and a new student body comes the need for a new pedagogy of Web literacy, one that recognizes a fundamental difference between functional, critical, and rhetorical levels of knowledge and production of writing online. This thesis introduces a revised theoretical framework for addressing this intersection and offers well-grounded, practical approaches for integrating Web literacy in the twenty-first century composition classroom. (It is also available for purchase at Lulu.com for a very meager sum).

Keywords: web literacy / digital literacy / computers & composition