The Rhetoric of Facebook

This is going to be the week of super-short (or super short?) posts because I just have tiny gaps of time between classes, meetings, and conferences with students.

In "The Rhetoric of Video Games," Ian Bogost argues that instead of using video games as pedagogical tools, "supplementing and replacing lesson plans for concrete, factual learning, such as principles of chemistry," educators should "consider adopting video games as artifacts to be discussed alongside traditional media in subjects like literature, language arts, history, and art, teaching game playing as an argumentative and expressive practice alongside reading, writing, and debating" (136).

While I didn't do exactly this, and while I wasn't using video games, I led an activity today in my English 102 classes that begins to address Bogost's suggestion, I think.  The class is having a hard time talking abstractly (and even with student sample essays) about the "critical" part of "critical inquiry."  (For background, we have also been talking about—and troubling—the distinctions between "information-based" and "inquiry-based" research.)  So I asked them today how they would describe Facebook to someone who isn't familiar with it (like their parents, although I told them my mom is on Facebook and they were properly horrified [not that I am...love you, Mom!]).  We had fun with this, talking about everything from photos, to privacy settings, to the "What's your stripper name?" application.  Then I moved to a different part of the chalkboard and asked them to begin asking questions about Facebook.  As they began suggesting questions, I—and sometimes other students—worked to complicate them.  So, for example, the question "How do you decide what friends to add?" led into more critical questions about constructing identity, discourse communities, constraints, and the long-term implications of online social networking.

Like I said, it's not exactly what Bogost is suggesting, but I think we were learning from the rhetoric of Facebook, rather than just using it as a pedagogical tool  (although, of course, I was doing that, too).  Whether a social networking site like Facebook would be considered procedural rhetoric is another question.  Like video games, it does seem to call for a new understanding of persuasion, one that is not adequately accounted for by verbal, written, and visual rhetorics (125).  But I haven't yet worked out how I would understand a site like Facebook in terms of process.