Stacey Pigg (a second year PhD student in the Rhetoric and Writing program here at MSU) and I (Kendall Leon, WIDE Research Assistant), attended the second biennial Rhetoric Society of America Summer Institute.  The institute took place at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, from June 17-June 22, 2007.

Stacey Pigg attended the “Rhetoric, Technology, and Culture” seminar, led by Robert Hariman, David Kaufer, Carolyn Miller, Barbara Warnick, and James Zappen.  Below are Stacey’s reflections on the seminar experience:

Discussion in the "Rhetoric, Technology, and Culture" seminar focused on what roles rhetoricians can and should play in the production and analysis of new technologies and new media texts.  Jim Zappen and David Kaufer's presentations focused particularly on the production side of this question.  In these two seminars, the group discussed how the rhetorical theories of Bakhtin and Burke, as well as an understanding of design derived largely from a cognitive science perspective, might provide new models for thinking about the nature of rhetorical production and rhetorical expertise in new media contexts.  

The "culture" part of the "Rhetoric, Technology, and Culture" seminar was approached almost exclusively in terms of what Robert Hariman (drawing heavily from Michael Warner) called "public culture," observable in the circulation and reproduction of iconic texts.  Carolyn Miller also brought attention to "private cultures" or organizational cultures as she discussed how genres can function in new media analysis.  However, culture outside of either organizational culture on one hand or "public" culture on the other remained pretty absent from the way we talked about what rhetoric can add to the study of technology.  More dialogue with the participants in the "Where in the World" seminar might have been really productive for helping us expand the conceptions of culture that we bring to our examinations of the interplay between rhetorics and technologies.