SubscribeWhat drives my research, I suppose, is a firmly held belief that we must understand digital technology before we can fully engage it critically. Although the delivery mechanisms of passive media had subtle (and occasionally not-so-subtle) methods by which broadcasters and publishers could manipulate our reception of their content, never before has the field been so at-once malleable and rigidly controlled.
Our contemporary system of political communication is built by IT consultants whose design choices affect the exercise and distribution of political power (Howard, New Media Campaigns, 1-5). These consultants design for access and perceived transparency, creating an easier environment for control: information proliferates, but a burgeoning data mining industry provides the means for those in charge to direct which information proliferates. Political consultants within IT teams are making design choices that constrain how and when citizens participate. Consequently, citizens expend less interpretive labor in their political lives because of the ways in which technology limits the content they receive. At the same time, the illusion of control provides a delusion of being informed when expressing political opinion and exercising political responsibility. The resulting lesser amount of actual substance is accompanied by a great deal of spectacle, which oversimplifies information and makes it incredibly easy to shape a Manichean discourse of good and evil, a discourse that works to subvert political debate at the same time that communication and information technologies are capable of providing for its growth.
Websites are increasingly resistant to traditional methods of rhetorical criticism because much of the rhetoric is concealed within the code that governs the appearance and content of the artifact. Those methods assume a rhetorical artifact that - while it "conceals as much as it reveals" (McKerrow 92) - is wholly visible, and furthermore, fixed or stable, even though digital images and text are fundamentally mutable, down to the individual pixel. This dissertation will offer a methodological contribution to the rhetorical criticism of political websites that will allow critics to overcome the limitations of traditional methods as suggested above. My research discusses the ways in which code creates a semblance of virtuality, what that means for critics and viewers, and how the critic can reconstruct the code and content for a much more complete criticism.
