Converging ASS+U+M[E]+ptions
A sidetrack about rhetorical effectiveness and peer-review of new media scholarship.
The use of peer-review systems, in which feedback might have been provided about the soundtrack's lack of rhetorical effectiveness, is one of the critical elements that distinguishes scholarly work from popular work. We fully recognize the role that editors of literary journals play in shaping the work produced in those venues; but our understanding of the editorial process causes us to say that the process is not the same as peer-review. We are not assigning a negative quality to that process; in fact, we might posit that that process should be adopted more often for online journals that want to publish more new media work since such work, as we argue in this webtext, converges scholarly and creative purposes. We label Wesch’s piece scholarly because of its obvious academic (linear argument) qualities and suggest that it is equivalent to the kinds of texts that students might produce in our classes (as the student example we discuss later will show). We will not digress further to discuss the impact of peer review on digital scholarship and only wish to bring it up here to remark on the popular nature of Wesch’s text, which indicates that the lines between our assumptions of “what counts” blur with Web 2.0 work.