Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local (Hardcover)

Hardcover. Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local examines the social and rhetorical dynamics around emerging writing technologies. Carl Whithaus argues that these dynamics work across networked publics as patterns of behavior and ways of interacting through and with multimodal texts. This rhetorical analysis of the production and reception of born-digital rhetoric shows the ongoing and evolving impacts of online public discourse that can lead to bad restaurant reviews or the subversion of democracy. It is a networked process that gains significance because of the interplay and tensions between the global and the local. As these texts are created, distributed, received, and then recreated and shared again in viral ways, different messages resonate across media ecologies. Whithaus documents how emerging social dynamics shapeand are shaped bydigital writing, reading, and distribution technologies. A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Composition, Literacy, and Culture series. Shipping may be from our Sydney, NSW warehouse or from our UK or US warehouse, depending on stock availability.…