Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy

A “next generation” textbook for online writing and design, Internet Invention supplements existing print and web primers on HTML and graphics production with a program that puts these tools and techniques to work with a purpose.

 Designed as a passage from the more familiar rhetoric of the page to the less familiar one of the screen, this text is a hybrid workbook-reader-theory with chapters divided into the following sub-genres: Studio, Remakes, Lectures, The Ulmer File, and Office. These sections offer a sequence of interconnected Web writing assignments, rhetorical meditations, scholarly discussions, case studies, and pedagogical metacommentary, which together combine to form a truly unique contribution to the body of rhetorical theory and practice in the age of the digital text.

Ulmer uses the invention of literacy by the Ancient Greeks as a model for the invention of “electracy” (which is to digital media what literacy is to print). Internet Invention brings the students into the process of invention, in every sense of the word. The book takes students through a series of Web assignments and exercises designed to organize their creative imagination, using a virtual consulting agency – “The EmerAgency” – as a vehicle for students to discover the potential for the Web to act as a setting for community problem solving.