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Category Archives: Technology


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Hirsu, Lavinia. Tag Writing as Cultural Script. C&C, Spring 2015. Posted 05/19/15.

Hirsu, Lavinia. “Tag Writing, Search Engines, and Cultural Scripts.” Computers and Composition 35 (2015): 30-40. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.

Lavinia Hirsu writes about the need to examine the process of tagging as a social and cultural process capable of generating community and identity as search-engine users categorize objects, people, and concepts. Composition studies, she argues, has generally relegated attention to tags and search engines to research, in her view taking too narrow an approach to this everyday activity, in contrast to fields like media and information studies and economics (30-31).

To illustrate her claim that tagging can be a source of social action and agency for users, she presents the case of Romania, which, after joining the EU in 2007, found itself the object of ridicule and prejudice. This prejudice was largely circulated through tags that completed phrases like “Romanians are. . . ,” so that an online searcher looking for information about Romania would find negative categorizations at the top of both the suggested search-term list and the search results. Through the advocacy of an advertising agency and a Romanian business, citizens were enlisted to join a campaign called “Romanians are Smart” by replacing the negative characterizations with positive ones. Over time the online references to Romania shifted to create images of Romanians as not just “smart,” but also “beautiful,” “educated,” and “hard-working” (33-34). International media recognized this project as successful, with Business Magazine proclaiming Romania “[t]he first country that changes its image on the Internet” (qtd. in Hirsu 34).

Hirsu discusses both the negative and positive Romanian characterizations as “folksonomies,” a term that contrasts with “taxonomies.” In the latter, the characteristics of the entity being described are “fixed” (32); in a folksonomy, the characteristics are fluid, responsive to user choices that result in “popularity and circulation,” creating a feedback loop as users replicate, tweak, and re-circulate tags (32). Hirsu argues that tags, which create folksonomies, can be applied to many digital objects other than photographs or blog entries. In the Romanian example, tagging functioned somewhat like “Googlebombing,” as one folksonomy replaced another (39).

For Hirsu, the importance of tagging as a cultural and social activity lies in the insights it can provide into the effects of electronic discourse as that discourse becomes a common shared rhetorical landscape. The Romanian project succeeded, she argues, in part because it was so universally accessible; entry into the public sphere did not require complicated technical knowledge or even much effort (36). The existence of folksonomies foregrounds how human action can impact a process like search-engine results that seems to be random or unbiased; Hirsu cites criticism that reveals that search results can be the product of and evidence for “sustained collective user behavior” (32). The use of tags to shift perceptions and visibility of entities and topics enables user agency as people actively build online personas (38). Despite concerns that a single user’s choices are inconsequential, Hirsu provides examples of how such agency can act locally and even extend beyond national borders (39). She argues that user interventions in the ways search engines organize information creates a de facto “alternative public rhetorical education” (36; emphasis original) as people discover how to manipulate processes that may seem “merely functional” but that in fact have the power to reshape culture (32). The study of tagging also illustrates how the power of a discourse may be as much a product of the way it is delivered as of the actual content, as higher-ranked search results tend to be seen as more authoritative (37-38).

For Hirsu, the flexibility that makes tagging a vehicle for cultural discourse also gives it a “fragility” that can result in productive folksonomies losing ground to problematic ones unless users actively sustain their efforts at “training” search engines to avoid simplistic categorization (36; emphasis original). The agency users experience is not necessarily ethical (37); only consistent work to link topics to a range of descriptors can prevent them from coalescing into unreflective stereotypes. Similarly, some tags risk valorizing one referent by denigrating another, as when “Roma” gypsies are contrasted with “Romanians” in order to elevate the profile of the Romanians (36). Other dangers include the ability of search engines to learn and foreground individual search patterns, so that users risk being exposed only to the patterns they have inadvertently created (38).

Hirsu argues that avoiding these limitations is an important reason for students in composition classrooms to investigate the role of such apparently meaningless activities as tagging (38). By examining various tagging trends to see how they shape a conversation, students can become not just consumers of online discourse but can find ways to become what Alexander Halavais designates “an informed user” who is “a producer of media, a willing interlocutor in the distributed conversation of the web” (qtd. in Hirsu 38). In other words, changes in technology’s role in democratic public life mean that agency in the public community involves participating in activities like tagging; composition studies, in Hirsu’s view, should more proactively embrace the task of helping students think about how their engagement in this process “creates content and builds cultural discourses” for which they share responsibility (35).


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Gallagher, John R. Templates in Web 2.0. C&C, Spring 2015. Posted 04/14/15.

Gallagher, John R. “The Rhetorical Template.” Computers and Composition 35 (2015): 1-11. Web. 25 March 2015.

John R. Gallagher addresses the role of the “template” as a component of the rhetorical situation when writing for Web 2.0, a question with implications for the debate over the relationship between form and content. He bases his claim that Web templates can be used creatively, flexibly, and even subversively on his own experiences as well as the responses of students to an assignment designed to increase attention to the role of templates in guiding writers’ actions. In particular, he focuses on Facebook’s “profile” and “cover” photos to illustrate how users of these standard forms can reinterpret the possibilities they offer.

To situate the template in the form/content debate, Gallagher presents the concerns of Kirsten Arola that as a preordained form, templates allow writers to insert content without consideration of the role of form. The form becomes “invisible” (qtd. in Gallagher 1). To address this claim, Gallagher reviews the scholarship of the rhetorical situation, which has historically revolved around the question of whether the situation or the intentions of the rhetor call forth “rhetorical discourse” (2). Gallagher affirms subsequent scholarship on the rhetorical situation that maintains that rhetor and situation are not discrete entities available for analysis in isolation, but rather are components of a process in which situation and rhetor are constantly repositioned by their interactions with each other and with their contexts (3). In this view, no situation is ever self-contained; its final meaning is always deferred as it awaits “another word or idea with which to create a comparison” (3).

Application of genre theory allows Gallagher to foreground how Web 2.0 contexts develop through social interaction as users of templates share “standardize[d]” processes and options that are nonetheless open to interpretation and multiple iterations (4). Gallagher argues that users participate in the creation of the conventions that characterize Web 2.0 discourse, including the ways templates can be manipulated. Far from being a stable form that dictates particular responses, Gallagher contends, templates, like genres, “are stable only in their historical and temporal contexts” (4), always subject to updates and new uses in which the actions of writers make the form meaningful (8). While the template privileges certain decisions and choices, Gallagher writes that all forms of media require rhetors to work within constraining boundaries and to explore the possibilities within those boundaries for meeting rhetors’ goals (8).

The developers of templates are also actors within the situation of which the template is a part, updating and revising templates in response to user actions (4). Ultimately, although the template does provide “a baseline series of choices” (4), what the template invites depends on the ways writers find to use it: “A template is never complete without a writer” (8). Gallagher disagrees with Arola: the influence of a template only vanishes when writers fail to think of the template as “a rhetorical tool” (5).

Gallagher provides examples of his own use of the Facebook profile and cover photos as well as the status update template to show that the content inserted into these forms can take on varied and unexpected meanings depending on his individual decisions about selection and arrangement of the standard elements (5-7). He includes a classroom assignment, “Examining the Template on the Internet,” which asks students to take explicit notice of the role of the template as they use it: “to see design, layout, and arrangement as part of content” (9). Reflective writing on this assignment generates discussion on how changes to templates alter rhetorical opportunities, how different templates on different sites affect such opportunities, and how the privacy elements in template use affect decisions about audience (10). Gallagher argues that a fuller awareness of templates as an element in rhetorical situations will make visible the ongoing construction of meaning their flexibility and openness to iteration enable (10).


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Pigg, Stacey. Mobile Composing Habits. CCC 12/14. Posted 3/2/2015.

Pigg, Stacey. “Emplacing Mobile Composing Habits: A Study of Academic Writing in Networked Social Space.” College Composition and Communication 66.2 (2014): 250-75. Print.

Stacey Pigg reports on an ethnographic case study of student “composing habits” (257) as they use technology to pursue their academic work in public spaces. Pigg observed activity at two spaces, a Wi-Fi-equipped off-campus café and an on-campus “Technology Commons” (258-59). Observations were followed by interviews of twenty-one students with diverse majors and at different academic levels; interviews and video-recordings of their processes were transcribed and coded (257). Pigg presents two of her participants in detail, one at the café and one at the commons.

Pigg’s study emphasizes the material aspects of such use of social space to accomplish focused work outside of the classroom. She argues that all students need an external space where they can distance themselves from distractions such as TV, pets, and family and extend their classroom learning, thereby bolstering the academic state of mind that leads to success (270). She explores how the use of public spaces by the two students she features allows them to develop work and mental habits that support their academic goals.

Pigg reviews research that argues that technology has changed the relationship between people and space. Technology expands space by making available knowledge and contacts outside of the immediate surroundings. It also enables control of space by making it possible to use varied spaces as “sites of academic learning” (252), and by providing means of limiting access to social interactions, as public places become specifically adapted to individuals’ focus on their screens. In such spaces, writers can choose their desired degree of social interaction as well as interaction with their devices.

Pigg is concerned that lack of access to spaces outside of the classroom where learning can take place will disrupt the “stability” of a student’s academic experience and degrade “persistence,” which the WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing establishes as key to academic success (269-70). The harder it is for students to continue their learning outside the classroom, the less exposure they experience to the learning strategies Pigg identifies in the two subjects she portrays in detail.

For example, writing and learning, as embodied processes, become associated with memory and imbued with personal resonance: the extended extracurricular engagement with classroom material allowed by the two students’ merging of public spaces with the virtual access enabled by their computers and other devices encourages increased time on task as well as the use of virtual locations like an outline template to insert information into personally meaningful frameworks (263, 268). The two students’ preferred spaces allow the creation of routines that enhance productive “stability” (267) as “they returned to familiar places that had yielded positive results over time” (263).

Pigg emphasizes that her two subjects are not necessarily typical (269); rather, they illustrate how materiality can become an active force in learning, as the material components of scenes in which writing takes place assume an “agentive” function, playing a role in how the writing unfolds (255). Simply urging students to develop study and time-management skills is inadequate when material conditions do not lend themselves to the kinds of learning strategies that make use of the new configuration of space enabled by technology (270). Factors such as a good laptop and easy physical access to spaces outside of the classroom privilege those who have them. Moreover, such spaces need to be not only physically easy to access, but also psychically available, because not all spaces are equally welcoming to all students (262). Writers must be able to appropriate space to accommodate notebooks, books, and computers (268). Environments where studying is the norm also facilitate academic focus (260).

Pigg contends that most scholarship of writing processes has addressed the cognitive, internal aspects of composing and the effects of the devices themselves (254, 268); the effects of student processes may visible, but with the changing landscape, the processes themselves may be lost (271). She argues that increased study of how the negotiation of space and technology interacts with literacy practices can enable compositionists to become more active in efforts to construct appropriate spaces where all students can establish a fruitful version of what Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedburg call a “mobile sense of place” (qtd. in Pigg 253, 270-71).