Via Alex Halavais’ blog feed, I came across this article on the Financial Times web site, “Net prophets,” which is a review article of three different books out/coming out about search engines, including Halavais’ forthcoming book.
It is the sort of thing that would be good to include for English 516, but it’s on my mind this morning in my waning “Blogs as Writerly Spaces” project and the chapter/part on rhetorical situation. Which is itself on my mind since that was the topic (more or less) from last night’s section of English 505. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but I it seems to me that search engines throw a wrench into the role of audience in rhetorical situation, no matter how firmly (Bitzer) of fuzzily (Bisecker ala Derrida) you define “audience” or any other constituent in situations.
I think that Jenny Edbauer is on to something with “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” that isn’t quite talking about the phenomenon of search-fueled audiences and spikes in audiences as a result of searches– as I experienced quite personally with the EMU faculty strike a few years ago.
Anyway, this is all the BAWS thinking I get today. Too much voting, too much grading, and (hopefully) too much celebrating, more or less in that order.