Quotes from Syverson

I’m not sure if I’ll even use the quotes below, but they do seem to describe rather well the the framework of the situation Ogas and Gaddam first presented and that fandom generally ended. Certainly, the idea of rhetorical ecology makes far more sense than trying to cram an analysis of the situation into an Aristotelian model of ethos-pathos-logos. The concepts themselves play a role, but in the case of Surveyfail, audience reaction was so widespread that trying to suggest this event was situated is pointless beyond saying it took place on the Web.

(Saying that anything “took place on the Web” is incredibly problematic, since the Web doesn’t have a physical space beyond the fact that it comprises thousands of servers, and there’s no telling which server is playing host to a particular commentary at any point in time. Easier to describe it as a town hall meeting but without the town, the hall or even the meeting. Oh, existentialism — you make my head hurt.)

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Syverson, Magaret A. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Southern Illinois Unversity Press: Carbondale, 1999. Electronic text.

Page 22:

This more complex sense of the historical dimensions of an activity has a direct application to the writing situation, in which relationships among writers, readers, and texts unfold over distinct historical trajectories in a landscape of historical relations—the emergence and reception of genres, styles, and topics; the politics of race, gender, and class; economic cycles; cultural trends; life cycles of writers and readers; particular writing tasks or reading episodes.

Page 23:

Further, each of the properties can be deployed across all four attributes. For example, the social dimensions of composition are distributed, embodied, emergent, and enactive (see fig. 1).

	Physical	Social	Psychological	Spatial	Temporal
Distribution
Embodiment
Emergence
Enaction
Fig. 1. An ecological matrix

Page 25:

It seems that composition researchers, even those working with collaborative composing, are still constrained by some common cultural assumptions about mind, language, and society. Central to these assumptions is the idea of cognition as uniquely the property of individuals, as computational activity of the brain. Second is the assumption that language represents thought, which somehow precedes it. Third is the assumption that a group can be treated simply as a gathering of individuals, who make individual plans, decisions, contributions, and “moves” in enacting the group process. Fourth is the assumption that text composing can somehow be isolated from the physical and material conditions of its production and use.