F/OSS and Visuals II: Visual Rhetoric
Visual rhetoric underscores many of the digital literacy skills related to the visual. Of particular importance to digital literacy and the visual is Mitchell (1994), who argues that all media is mixed media
in his book Picture Theory. He makes this argument in favor of what he calls hybrid blending
, or compositions that combine two or more of visual, written, and spoken rhetoric. Mitchell's book contains essays that discuss possible inroads for including into English studies visual rhetoric, which has become more and more prevalent for many reasons. One of these reasons is the emergence of the World Wide Web as a place for people all over the world to communicate, from discussing ideas to doing business to merely looking at funny videos and swapping pictures on social networks. The Web, especially with the development of Web 2.0, is a multimodal entity. It is rare to see a page that is just a block of text without pictures, sound clips, or video clips included, and even those pages that are just blocks of text are still employing typographical features such as font, type color, and background color in order to make some kind of rhetorical argument. In the same way that even a picture labeled "Untitled" still communicates some kind of rhetorical argument (for example, is the artist making a statement by refusing to title the work?) every aspect of a composition can be seen to make some kind of rhetorical argument.
These ideas have wide-ranging implications for the composition classroom, and by extension the role of F/OSS. With the advent of means of expression that are unique to the virtual world, including blogs, it is now possible for digitally literate people to engage in discourse in new ways. Composition classrooms can be at the forefront of helping students achieve the digital literacy to use these new means of expression by combining the basics of writing pedagogy with a study of the new forms, and of other forms of writing as well.
For those who choose to integrate technology into the composition classroom, there are questions to consider. To what extent should technology be brought in? How should it be brought in? The first is a decision that should be left up to individuals, and weighed depending on the level of technology that exists in the institution and personal level of comfort. The following sections outline two possible answers to the second question. In the following section, I show how a study of digital images illustrates that images are not always what they seem, teaching both an important facet of digital literacy and emphasizing critical thinking skills. After that, I describe an assignment I undertook that showed me how images, sounds, and other forms of rhetoric could form texts that are just as effective, or even more effective, than written texts.
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