Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local: Rhetorical Dynamics across Networked Publics (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

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 shape—and are shaped by—digital writing, reading, and distribution technologies.

Carl Whithaus is a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of California, Davis. He studies writing technologies and digital cultures, edits the Journal of Writing Assessment, and works on a variety of projects related to writing in the sciences, engineering, and agriculture. His books include Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres, Writing across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning, and Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing.