Jacob Richter is a Graduate Teacher of Record and a PhD student in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design (RCID) program at Clemson University. He teaches first-year composition and technical communication, and was named a HASTAC scholar for the 2018-2020 academic years. His research examines rhetorical theory, composition pedagogy, and writing within social web spaces, and he has presented his work at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Computers & Writing, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and at the meeting of the Association of Rhetoric and Writing Studies. He may be reached on Twitter at @Richter_Rhetor.

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A familiar scene: someone has responded to my writing with some writing of their own in the form of a comment on my written post, though their comment is in the form of a GIF and contains an image that moves repeatedly in repetitive motion. I begin to write back, thumbs pressing on my phone’s screen, but then I switch and begin to type away on my laptop’s keyboard. Suddenly, I realize what the situation calls for is not the conventional, inside-the-lines response I’ve originally concocted, but rather is best satisfied with a link to a television sitcom my friend and I share a common interest in. With a few clicks, a few scrolls, a few words typed, searched, linked, and voila, it is there in front of me: a video written into a comment, linked through code and networks and yes, writing, to my friend’s cellular device in Taiwan—wait, no, she’s on a plane now, en route to Sydney— no, at a layover in Seoul.

Still, I write to my friend, and my friend writes back. But what we’re doing is not quite writing, or rather, it’s something beyond writing, something that a single designation cannot capture or encapsulate, something beyond the scope of writing. It’s perhaps what some might call writing(+), alphabetic writing such as that found in books and on posters, but with added dimensions: links, embedded videos, attached sounds, and all of it connected with exponentially-expanded circulation capacities. Even this seems inadequate, however. In short, my friend and I are participating in a minuscule microcontribution that will nonetheless constitute a tiny addition to the most extraordinary shift in human representational evolution of the past thousand years: the electronic word. Suddenly, we are inventing something new, something not decided a priori before us, but rather something unfurling in front of our eyes, something unfolding and unravelling from our very own finger tips. We are, in short, inventing some of the technological, operational, ideological dimensions of electracy.

Here, in these revolutionary spaces, rhetoric works in new forms: texts are authored by millions of human collaborators, artificial intelligence bots determine the housing market in the suburbs of Toronto, and search results determine the feasibility of extracting oil from a well in Texas. We’re living through, and simultaneously are inventing, the myriad network of practices concerning electrate composition, practices in which the available means of rhetorical persuasion, as William Hart-Davidson reminds us, have become, well, a whole lot more available (xii). It is from this position of extreme, incalculable availability from which a new rhetoric springs forth, a new rhetoric concerned not only with signification and meaning, but also with a-signification, with what rhetorical expressions do. It is in this crucial moment in the history of rhetorical invention that networked composition tools and social media platforms are foregrounded as spaces of meaning making, of knowledge building, of cultural exchange, transformation, and metamorphosis. Just as how the Greeks did not inherit literacy but rather needed to invent it, Gregory Ulmer reminds us, we are now inventing a new practice of electracy (Internet Invention 5). And we are doing so within a vast rhetorical ecology populated by networks of networks, a series of webs and chains constantly reorganizing and rebridinging the gaps, a labyrinth of circuitry in which rhetoric, rhetors, rhetoricians, and rhetoric students play a crucial role in forming hybrid writing as a mode of meaning formation. One speculative conjecture, then, might be that the realm of education emblematized by the rhetoric and writing studies classroom is best conceived of as a laboratory, as a space in which network writing is enacted through investigations, through experiments, through trials in which all participants are simultaneously defendant, detective, prosecutor, witness, and judge. Network writing functions as a heuretic form of invention, helping us as educators and as inventors of the plural apparatuses of electracies to supplement the critical, hermeneutical impulse in our rhetorical repertoires with something more, with something beyond: the impromptu and spontaneous aleatory invention of an uncertain digital future to-be-decided. Electracy is no monolith, is no static entity that can be codified and written into permanence. Electracy, in its technological, material, symbolic, and dynamic potentials, remains perpetually fluid, shifting, and variable. It is meaningful and essential work, then, to renew the process of producing new electracies, especially iterations that engage the social web and the modes of being emerging there.

Ulmer makes clear that “the emergence of a new discourse is not something hypothetical, but a specific process operating in the material forms of culture” (Teletheory 45). We enact electracy, hybrid writing, writing(+), or electronic thinking in the video and tele-visual forms Ulmer identities in his early work, but also in the social media apparatus and in network writing initiatives in pedagogical settings within our classrooms. To ignore or overlook social media composition as only a peripheral space in which a student’s education should happen, rather than a necessary and indispensable tool for cultivating electracies, would do serious harms to students’ rhetorical savvies, citizenships, agencies, and capacities to act digitally in informed, tactical ways. If it is as Ulmer says in Teletheory that “invention always includes an ideological element,” than it is important to reform invention itself though institutionalized practices in the academy, perhaps enacting a move toward “learning how to exploit it [ideology’s inventive capacities] for the benefit of learning and discovery” (Teletheory 22; my emphasis). Teaching our students to augment the critical impulse rewarded by standardized testing and mass curricula in favor of the discovery, trial, experimentation, and potentiality unleashed by heuristically-informed networked composition initiatives might be one step toward cultivating the dynamic aptitudes needed to forge the next iteration of unfolding electracies. If it is as Martin Heidegger tells us, that beginning happens to us through the opposition and conflict of unfolding, that the “thinkers are begun by the beginning,” the An-fang, we would do well to respond by designing occasions in which the beginnings of new electracies might happen to begin in our students (8). Moves such as incorporating network writing initiatives at the forefront of academic discourse and practice might spur the potentiality of rhetoric to invent, to discover, to mobilize the dynamis available to us only now in the figure of that which is still to be invented.

What we have before us is a realization that electracies will always exist in the plural, and that our unique historical moment is one in which electracy’s invention is a both happening-now and a will-be-happening moving forward. Therefore, an exigence has opened up in which the practices of electracy are being invented with each Tumblr reblog, with each Canva graphic designed, with each torrented file downloaded to a laptop computer. As the work of Ulmer attests to, the missions of the academy and the deployment of electracies are not mutually exclusive. With this in mind, it is vital that we consider the role that institutions in the academy will play in the diffusion of electrate practices into academic curricula as well as the multiplication of those practices as electracies proliferate. There will not be a single, monolithic, institutionalized electracy, but rather there will be interconnected electracies that will proliferate and be invented uniquely with each passing innovation and discovery. Electracy is an emerging social machine that is far from entirely realized, as Scott Sundvall and Joseph Weakland (2019) note. Rather, for Sundvall and Weakland, it is “in need of further invention” and further proliferation, of new iterations and new innovations, to which speculation represents perhaps one generative and inventive pursuit (15-16). This webtext speculates on some of the dimensions opened within electracy by social media tools, proposing electracies cultivated through network writing initiatives in rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) classrooms to be collaborative knowledge-making constructions in which the distributed, coordinating electracies carried by participating stakeholders might be aimed strategically toward the invention of new iterations of electrate ideology. This approach, then, is not to harness or to control electracies as they unfold within and outside of the academy, but to survey them and to explore them, to in Ulmer’s vocabulary “exploit” them for “learning and discovery” in ways generative for future electracies (Teletheory 22). We must remember, and keep remember, that electracy is no static monolith writ in stone, but is a fluid, dynamic unfolding that is mediated across networked writing practices, technologies, and ideologies, all of which rhetoric and writing studies would be wise to probe and explore further.

Making Networked Rhetorics Unfold

Network writing initiatives in pedagogical settings nurture and cultivate:

Social media initiatives in rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) pedagogical designs have a long and complex history when situated within larger contexts of electracy and digital technologies. Douglas Walls and Stephanie Vie (2017) point to the near ubiquity of social media technologies in our culture, calling on network writing initiatives to further promote student learning ecologies, to extend literacy practices, to connect digital spaces with the potential of social change and activism, and to moves away from viewing RWS classrooms as enclosed writing ecologies isolated from the outside world. Similarly, Chris Anson (2017) cites network writing’s ability to connect personal and academic writing practices as a primary affordance of social media initiatives, proffering diversity of perspectives, distributed expertise, worldview-challenging, and transfer between previously unconnected knowledge domains as other advantages offered by network writing. Lilian W. Mina argues social media utilization to be a “paradigm shift” in student learning in the RWS class, going so far as to offer community building, student engagement, and rhetorical awareness as tangible outcomes associated with network writing initiatives (265). Daer and Potts (2014) extend social media use into fields such as technical communication, and Grabill and Pigg (2012) extend social media’s reach in RWS pedagogies into construction of student identity and rhetorical agency. Lastly, a number of quantitative studies have shown social media initiatives to have positive impacts on student rhetorical dexterity, including some of the practices and values-enacting associated with electracy (Faris 2017; Mina 2017).

So, how to design occasions which allow these rhetorics to unfold? The pedagogy outlined in this webtext, designed to maximize electrate invention in first-year composition and technical writing courses, attempts to engage one specific network writing practice I have developed with my courses which uses the software platform Yellowdig to create generative network writing communities. The goals of this pedagogy are not to enact perfectly the above pedagogical ambitions, but rather to set out in designed and improvisational occasions to discover something similar to them through rhetorical experimentation, through compositional trials, and through the probing of technologies, identities, and collective action. Here, participation in a network of habitual, everyday choric-rhetorical invention cultivated some of the values associated with electracy and catalyzed, in my conjecture, a contribution toward one iteration of a poetics for the emerging electrate apparatus.

Yellowdig Heuretics: Inventing Networked Electracies

Our weeks began on Thursdays. My courses and I initiated a network writing practice on the first day of class and kept the digital conversation stirring for the next fifteen weeks. We made use of Yellowdig, a software program easily integrated into most learning management systems, which mimics the look, feel, and affordances of a typical social media feed. While free and non-institutionally supported tools such as Tumblr have been used to quite similar effect in other social media pedagogies, Yellowdig’s unique affordances proved it to be a suitable space for praxis capable of nurturing actions associated with electracy (for practical examples of ways to institute network writing initiatives in lower and upper-division classrooms, see Douglas Eyman’s Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice or Douglas Walls’ & Stephanie Vie’s edited collection Social Writing/Social Media: Publics, Presentations, and Pedagogies for a number of useful examples).

Yellowdig allows student and faculty participants to post writing, images, videos, links, GIFs, emojis, audio files, and other multimedia content. Similarly, it allows users to circulate these inventions through hashtagging, upvoting, and the tagging of other participants. Students are encouraged to comment on the posts of others, and are actually incentivized to do so. What sets Yellowdig apart from other message-board and blog-post systems is the application’s gamification system, intended to incentivize and reward participation, sharing, and engagement. Yellowdig rewards participants with points, the value of which were brainstormed collaboratively by the class early on in the semester. The course’s interface design ended up rewarding 20 points for an original written post of 100 words or more, with additional points being awarded for incorporating an outside link, an image, a video, or a GIF into the post. Additionally, participants in the network writing initiative were rewarded with five points for each comment they left on a peer’s post, with one point for upvoting someone else’s post or comment, or ten points for designing and administering a poll for their fellow network members to respond to. By introducing an element of gaming into the classroom discussion, the interface system engages aptitudes of play and of performance that are vital to many electracy theorists (Ulmer 1994; Holmevik 2012). Play has long been a component of designing spaces which cultivate invention, recalling Plato’s invocation of chora as outlined in his dialogue the Timaeus. In many ways, network writing initiatives enact this same venture, spurring invention, discovery, and the creation of something new.

Ours was a private network shared between the 19 students enrolled in the course as well as their instructor. Students in the course were required to achieve at least 100 points throughout each week, while being able to earn a maximum of 120 points in any given seven-day period. These conversation parameters spurred students to be constantly and consistently involved, contributing content, discussion, creative projects, and activities of their own concoction into the conversation. While the weekly point minimum was intended to marshal students to be involved throughout each weekly conversational iteration, the point maximum functioned to prevent too many points from being earned in quick succession, ensuring that participation was sustained, allowing ideas to germinate over the course of the semester and spurring recurring topics to be probed and investigated repeatedly over time. Conversations were encouraged to blend into one another, and though the course’s instructor provided what might appear at first glance as discussion prompts, student participants were by no means required to respond directly to them or to compose in relation to these discussion-starters. In practice, what appears at first glance as a discussion prompt for continuing conversation was instead intended, and this was communicated many times over to students, not as required writing but rather as a heuristic, as a spurring toward the invention of something new. They functioned, in Ulmer’s vocabulary, as a creative means of generating a new artifact from existing theory, using that existing knowledge as a guide toward “generating further thought or insight” (Internet Invention 9). At minimum, they kept the conversation going, and at their best sparked the invention of something new and impactful. Students had full freedom to post, respond, link, and assemble as they desired, and they exercised this agency to full effect throughout the course of the semester. Additionally, many students made full use of the Yellowdig smartphone application, carrying the conversation home with them through their mobile devices over school breaks.

Among the primary import that this network writing practice furnished the course with was the ability for students to animate the action of the conversation with the full assortment of digital tools available at their disposal. Invention as a canon of rhetoric is always connected to technologies. Douglas Eyman (2015) proffers digital invention processes to always involve the “searching and negotiation of networks of information,” the seeking of “materials best suited for creating persuasive works,” and the inventive knowledge of “which semiotic resources to address and draw upon (aural, visual, textual, hypertextual),” including the determination of which technological tools suit particular knowledge-building pursuits best (66). It is important to our collective project to remember that knowledge domains do not come into existence spontaneously, but rather are always invented through a series of small instantiation that are pieced together collaboratively, over time, in spontaneous, unforeseen, and variously meaningful ways. In this sense, in inventing our own knowledge domain and our own knowledge practices through our series of sustained Yellowdig conversations, we are inventing a new poetics for networked electrate practice, and in turn for the dynamic unfolding of rhetoric and networked electracies to occur. To demonstrate this invention practice in-process, I suggest three initiatives drawn from the course’s Yellowdig conversation that showcase the dynamic, fluid exercising of subjects, technologies, and mediating structures that catalyze new knowledge production.

Initiative #1: Designing Occasions for Experimentation & Discovery

Stakeholders in RWS have long theorized some of the ways in which writing is generative beyond simple end-products, but there is ample room to probe speculative possibilities in which the dynamic functions of the composition process might unfold and catalyze generative collective learning situations. In the Grammar of Motives (1969), Kenneth Burke notes that within the process of extended inventive initiatives, such as the writing of a book, “the act of the writing brings up problems and discoveries intrinsic to the act, leading to developments that derive not from the scene, or agent, or agency, or extrinsic purposes, but purely from the foregoing aspects of the act itself” (67). The acts of invention, then, are not limited to simple end-products or to tangbible, codifiable outcomes, but rather spill over and disseminate into the entire processes of composition and invention. Invention is always social, but in networked writing social invention is gathered but not contained, which allows these collaborative locales to facilitate discovery through not only individual composing processes, but also through group knowledge production exceeding simply the sum of individual parts. Throughout the cognitive, symbolic, rhetorical, and increasingly technological processes of inventing systematically across a long expanse of time, the inventive capacities of the gathering of disparate elements are multiplied, stretched, and allotted the space to amplify and aggregate.

Students in network writing initiatives are clearly not venturing to write books, as in the example that Burke proffers, but within extended invention initiatives, they do collaborate as knowledge-assemblers and meaning-makers to connect previously detached ideas, to gather previously disjointed stories and narratives, and to link isolated statements, utterances, objects, technologies, bodies, and media into a fabric of newly-linked artifacts. In this sense, network writing spaces catalyze the Greek concept of synergia in which the energy contained in a myriad of gathered parts greatly surpass in scope that of their isolated originals. When each stakeholder in a networked gathering is empowered to discover, experiment, probe, and explore, the gathering as a collaborative whole profits. It seems that if we design the right occasions, knowledge generated through active learning can spill over, be shared, and circulate throughout the group with the help of tools assembled strategically and with care.

If we conceive of network writing spaces as a laboratory in which thoughts, ideas, statements, and trans-media articulations are put on trial and always have the potential to fail (or at the very least to not succeed), we begin the process of inventing electracies geared to cultivate a hexis (habit) of invention within an interface-space that rewards risk-taking. To spark a generative approach to writing, network writing initiatives venture to, in Ulmer’s parlance, “invent [a] new poetics” (Heuretics xiii). A version of this new poetics comprising parts of electacy, I contend, might become manifest within any sustained network writing initiative, including that put to practice in the pedagogy outlined here. Ulmer writes:

“The goal of heuretics is not only to reproduce historical inventions (to learn about the vanguard or any other rhetoric/poetics from the inside, through the experience of making works in those styles) but also to invent new poetics.” (Heuretics xiii)

Among the goals of a heuretic approach to pedagogy is not only to reproduce the inventions of prior generations, but to learn from past vanguards and to invent new poetics, such as those which typically are relegated to the participatory electrate sphere of the internet. Part of this initiative, then, is to observe and trace classroom invention of strategies that align electrate poetics with the university education students are typically trained to disconnect these electrate poetics from. Put differently, our sustained network writing is, in a sense, creating something different from what’s been done before. Network composition initiatives allow for sustained, habitual practices that enact the incessant invention required to codify and metamorphoze this new poetics. Throughout a semester of inventions, reactions, responses, and boomerang rejoinders, a version of the new poetics Ulmer calls for can be observed, mapped, traced, and surveyed. As such, in this “experimental humanities” classroom, students learn to forge a new poetics through the acts of doing and making, designing and shaping not so much a collaborative webtext product but rather a conversation about invention itself as it happens, as it is occurring in their very intra-active (Barad) melding of voices within the networked writing performance.

Here, social composition really does manifest as a site of exploration and discovery. If we accept network writing spaces as a choric space of production and genesis, we are able to enact the choral work that Ulmer argues “puts the ‘adventure of knowledge’ under erasure, which is to say that it is only prelusive, a mere beginning, a proposal, an experiment” (Heuretics 33). The educational site can be a space of mutation, evolution, and of metamorphosis if we allow it to be. Metamorphosis does not happen overnight, but requires the habitual practice and nourishment that network composition initiatives furnish. As such, network writing as a space that not only tolerates but indeed thrives on glitch, rupture, and error, and in fact mobilizes them into sites of potential invention, really does manifest a choric space in which iterations of a digital poetics might be generated and observed.

Venturing to design situations in which composition is framed from the start as something with discovery as a primary aim is itself an endeavor of trial, experimentation, and discovery. Here, electrate composition initiatives find a perhaps unlikely friend in the methodologies associated with the French theorist and sociologist Bruno Latour. Latour describes an approach to writing that he teaches his students which foregrounds something curiously similar to Ulmer might call heuretics. In a feigned Platonic dialogue between himself and one of his students in Reassembling the Social, Latour mentions that he is “teaching nothing but writing nowadays” (149). He proceeds to cite his version of successful composition practice as enacting a “place for trials, experiments, and simulations,” bearing a distinct similarity to the approaches outlined by Ulmer in Teletheory and Heuretics. A Latourian approach to composition includes dimensions calling for the addition of a text “to a given state of affairs,” an approach that frames invention as a laboratory in which we’re never sure what will come about, bearing a distinct resemblance to Ulmer’s heuretic approach and to choragraphy as a method of inventiveness (Reassembling the Social 148). Intriguing, both Ulmer and Latour use the metaphor of the laboratory within their work to describe the possibility of composition being enacted in an experimental, generative contexts.

Marilyn Cooper (2015) argues that experiments as a framing device for writing in compositional settings are “a way of engaging entities in a trajectory of composing knowledge” (188). Ambitions supported by network writing go far beyond the simple fact that invention is constantly happening, beyond the tracing of a webtext as it is routinely and steadily authored by assembling participants gathering around shared affinities. Rather, knowledge is being assembled, observed, patched together, linked, invented anew and pastiched differently. Further, network writing efforts affirm, in Latour’s vocabulary, knowledge production as a mode of existence, attesting to nonstop, unremitting invention practice’s ability to engage students in acts of experimentation and of discovery. When students share a meme to the network, when they design a graphic with a low-threshold tool such as Canva, or when they post a sound file of a residence-hall guitar recording, the students engage those platforms’ abilities to test the capacities of texts. Indeed, these acts test those texts’ functioning, their circulation, their rhetorical impact, their potential popularity, their impact as well as the responses they’ll elicit. In short, by approaching writing and composition as a laboratory space in which students may enact real trials in the network setting, we normalize practices of everyday invention and creation, contributing modest yet meaningful input toward electracy as enacted and practiced in the RWS classroom. By approaching network writing initiatives such as Yellowdig through a lens connecting Ulmer’s choral work and Latour’s drive to greet new knowledge production as a mode of existence, dimensions of generative practice are opened up for the rhetoric classroom.

Cooper urges writing teachers to allow space in the curriculum for trial and error-type practices, appealing to them to think of composing as “producing new knowledge, not reporting what is known” already (193). In other words, perhaps it’s time to reinvest in R&D (Research and Development) in our classrooms. Network writing executes Cooper’s call to the designed but also spontaneous manufacturing of new knowledge. In other words, there are some considerable benefits to taking our foot off the pedals of arguing the merits and demerits of older knowledge and instead pushing hard toward the production of the new and the next. At the close of a semester, a Yellowdig or Tumblr network composition feed functions almost like a wiki, featuring multimodal communicative import from a collaborating array of authors oriented around affinities that are sometimes concrete and at other times more improvisational, based upon curiosity and upon intuition. Cooper notes that while a critic might attempt to debunk, deconstruct, or attempt to “reveal an underlying reality,” it is a composer’s unique opportunity to make knowledge “by describing and assembling” in forms that are novel and innovative, exactly what is spurred in initiatives such as the one outlined in this webtext. If instructors of rhetoric desire to foreground processes of discovering something previously unknown, however meager, a productive way to begin is by foregrounding the generative potentials of gathering composers together in orderly practice and building through a laboratory-like approach: lots of experimentation, plenty of trial and error, and a hefty appreciation of playing around in low-stakes research and development. One initiative that might realize initiatives of discovery and trial in a classroom setting is showcased in Fig. 3, which is a network writing activity that challenges students to mobilize and respond to search engine results that appear for them uniquely on their computers based upon a simple web search of the word “difference.”

Initiative #2: Catalyzing Curiosity as Network-Method Investigation

Among the primary affordances of network writing initiatives is the ability for a student to bring their whole self to the classroom: their backgrounds, experiences, histories, ethnicities, languages, creativities, their habits, their frames of mind, their natural curiosities. With this affordance in mind, a pedagogy informed by electracy might catalyze student curiosity as an investigation into that student’s subjecthood, into that student’s larger culture, into that student’s community belonging. For example, network writing spaces allow for the application, but also the making visible, of what Hauser (1999) might call vernacular rhetorics. Network writing might provide an opportunity for students to bring their personal histories, languages, heritages, and perspectives into the common space. By not only condoning but encouraging the visibility of vernacular rhetorics, network writing initiatives encourage diverse linguistic and composing practices that might partly eschew composing practices that uphold privilege, dominant ideologies, and white language supremacy (see Inoue 2019; Young 2010; Richardson 2003; Barrett, Young, Young-Rivera, & Lovejoy 2018). Instructors venturing to draw upon electracy theory would do well to create and curate knowledge work in students’ own languages, their own idioms, perhaps even their own course-specific vernaculars arising from the assemblage of persons, backgrounds, voices, course materials, readings, videos, random chance, and the generative gathering of all the aforementioned together in one place.

Pedagogies drawing on values of electracy, then, must also value the personal, affective histories students bring into the classroom, and this includes following student curiosities in directions that are intentionally not predictable or knowable ahead of time. In the pedagogy outlined here, weekly discussion prompts provided by the course instructor are not in any way intended to be followed to a tee, and are not required to even be addressed or referenced in most cases. Rather, these “prompts” are intended to function heuristically. They are meant to inspire the creation of something new. A basic tenet of electracy that extends into educational systems is that it is not enough to regurgitate already-existing knowledge, which is more typical of literacy and the literate apparatus. Rather, the creation of something new is foregrounded in electracy and in electrate pedagogies. Invention is always personal, and can never be separated from particular cultural codes and creative resources channeled through the inventing agent. This pedagogy’s attempt is to draw on diverse and multifaceted cultures, histories, and stories as inventive resources, and part of this is empowering student curiosity as a meaningful creative practice.

With this in mind, an electracy-informed pedagogy such as the one outlined here ventures to strategically harness personal curiosities in an effort to continue the process of exploration and of discovery. When education is approached as an investigation, students are introduced to an occasion designed to maximize the inventive potential that those students hone throughout the semester. A primary goal of a networked writing pedagogical initiative is to maximize the chances students have to compose and invent in low-stakes environments, hence the mostly unstructured nature of the Yellowdig discussion. The digital tools channelled here afford easy, low entry-barrier invention tools such as meme generators, graphic creators such as Canva, and already-existing Creative Commons video footage available in spaces such as Videvo. However, putting creative tools in the hands of potential inventors is only part of the equation. Just as important is mobilizing student curiosity and personal passion into the invention of something the student considers to be impactful, poignant, and worthwhile.

Network writing initiatives such as the Yellowdig conversation outlined here allow students to bring their whole selves to the (material and virtual) classroom. This is galvanized in network writing spaces, supporting the development of what some might call learning ecologies. As Jenny Edbauer (2005) reminds us, the “rhetorical situation” model of rhetoric’s happening in the world introduced by Lloyd Bitzer fails to take into account the operation of social links, circulation, the “plurality of exigencies,” and most importantly here the networks of rhetorics existing and circulating alongside one another in a rhetorical ecology (4). There is no perfect sender-text-receiver relationship, Edbauer argues, but rather all rhetorics exist alongside a multitude of other texts, artifacts, and expressions in an interlocking nexus of expressions and inventions. Rhetorical ecologies are never fixed, stable, or separate, but exist as a “circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events” which form a “networked interconnection of forces, energies, rhetorics, moods, and experiences” (9-10). Such an approach to rhetorical ecologies and to networked spaces of invention are actualized within networked writing spaces such as Yellowdig, spaces in which participants are constantly creating, inventing, writing, sharing, linking, and recirculating, as well as responding to the actions of others in a continual rhizomatic inventive chain.

Approaching invention as networked and ecological allows for the cultivation of learning ecologies. Learning ecologies are intimately related to electracies: both rely upon personal affective memory and attempt to assemble personal curiosities, community needs, and public invention into a shared space. Learning ecologies mobilize self-starting and self-guided behavior that suits network composition spaces that allow and accommodate creations in almost any medium. Learning ecologies support the cultivation of distributed expertise, allowing each student to bring their whole self to the discussion, including the experiences, perspectives, backgrounds, and histories they are uniquely equipped to contribute. Each student is an expert in their own way on matters they are passionate about or have a particular interest in, and an electrate pedagogy mobilizes these passions and interests into a central space, into a gathering. Put differently, students are equipped within a network writing pedagogy to furnish the larger whole of the classroom network with their unique experiences and perspectives if they desire to do so. This includes, of course, their personal, affective experiences and memories that conventional pedagogies eschew, but which an electracy-informed pedagogy thrives on. It is important to remember here that memory functions in electracy not as information recalled but rather as information evoked (Heuretics 36). Therefore, it is better to think of knowledge as discovered and then performed rather than as anything static that can ever be found. Curiosity, then, grows into a mode of knowing, and as such we would do better to think of networked writing initiatives such as Yellowdig as performances rather than purely as a discussion or as a conversation. If network writing initiatives are framed as performance-conversations rather than as one or the other within a dividing dichotomy, doors are opened in which curiosity and exploration become useful methods by which participants might explore identities, communities, rhetorics, and the networked relationships shared between them all.

By putting the tools for self-expression and for creativity in the hands of student inventors, we design occasions in which their interior lives and even interior curiosities might be catalyzed into new inventions, new creations, new discoveries both for themselves and for communities that student is a part of. Edbauer reminds us that “rhetorical ecologies are co-ordinating processes, moving across the same social field and within shared structures of feeling” (20). By nurturing distributed expertise among a variety of participants composing, inventing, and collaborating within a networked environment, we as instructors are able to help students to learn from each other in ways not available in previous spaces and with previous practices. Invention may always be social, but social writing initiatives in the classroom can make invention social in different ways, such as for instance when one student asks a question on how to work a meme-generating website or when a student offers constructive suggestions concerning another student’s vlog draft posted to the shared network. Distributed expertise decenters the classroom and elevates participants to equal planes of agency, and allows the community to collaboratively steer the conversation-performance in directions of their own choosing, in the directions of their own curiosities.

Initiative #3: Civic-Participatory Action

Of primary importance for rhetoric and writing courses venturing to utilize multimedia tools is marshalling students into participatory action, into extending the knowledge-work of rhetoric into some tangible, public-participatory action. Among the goals of pedagogies informed by electracy is likely to be the extension of student knowledge into making and into doing, initiatives in RWS that have traditionally foregrounded writing and the production of print texts. Sarah Arroyo, in Participatory Composition: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy, connects video production and other multimedia invention in writing classrooms with important conceptual underpinnings for the project of inventing civic action in the digital sphere. Arroyo draws on Henry Jenkins in her discussion of participatory culture, extending his definition into digital video production and into an ecological approach within her own pedagogy that privileges active learning through collaborative creation, community production and community revision, and social-cultural critical-invention within a classroom blurring of “page, screen, and participation in networked culture” (10). Arroyo’s emphasis on invention mirrors and extends that of privileging invention and creation within learning and curricula not as a replacement for traditional values of rhetoric such as critique, deconstruction, and argumentation, but rather as supplemental and impactful push toward the values of electracy. For Ulmer, electracies are invented and exist always in the plural, necessitating involved participants to consider the negotiation between different media, different formats, different expectations, and different audiences in relation to the subject material under discussion. Composition in electacy is, after all, more like discovery than like proof, as Ulmer tell us in Heuretics (56). Just as Mesopotamian and Greek cultures invented writing and the literate apparatus, students within network writing initiatives contribute, link by link and video by video, to the invention of electracy. Part of the rhetorical education characterizing an electrate pedagogy, then, is a foregrounded attempt to engage a new vision for conceiving of audiences and publics who will interact with a text. The “participatory pedagogy” Arroyo offers is one that mobilizes the critical-creative skills students may have developed in the past, transferring them into the classroom to collaborate with others.

Importantly, Arroyo draws on on Ulmer and on Deleuze and Guattari to assert the argument that “in electracy, the writing subject is reconceptualized, almost turned inside out and back again because of the constant interface with and melding of desire and the social” (32). This is a seminal juncture in Arroyo’s vision for a pedagogy of electracy, a central goal of which is to put power and tools in the hands of student participants and to ask them to engage the publics outside of the academy in ways that are complex, multifaceted, and varied. This initiative is foregrounded when students are asked not simply to use filmmaking tools, but to create something with them. Here, students inch steadily closer to the role of the public civic participant, composing, as Laurie Gries calls it, with an eye to “assemble publics” (331).

Part of discussing multimedia production is giving renewed attention to the traditionally-neglected rhetorical canons of delivery and memory, and introducing changing developments in rhetoric’s functioning among various publics, such as circulation and rhetorical velocity (see Gries 2015; Ridolfo & DeVoss 2009; Ulmer 1994). Delivery, memory, circulation, and velocity are all foregrounded in the interactions of digital texts, and pedagogical initiatives in which networks are located squarely at the forefront of classroom practice, these rhetorical functions are made an explicit consideration of the works that are created and invented, whether they circulate only inside of the classroom network or stray outside of it into larger, more public networks. Part of the approach in the particular network writing initiative outlined here is to invent the “new social machine” Ulmer foretells, in which the rhetorical canons of delivery and memory will be emphasized and highlighted (Heuretics 38). Discussion and performance of delivery, memory, circulation, and rhetorical velocity factor heavily in network writing, both when student inventions are animated only inside of classroom networks, and also when those inventions are moved into public networks, perhaps even those directly connected to the digital-civic sphere rapidly unfolding in social web spaces.

The final major potentiality that this essay proffers is the expanded scope which network writing initiatives offer electrate conceptions of social justice activity and civic-participatory action. The apparatus of electracy necessitates not just the ability to engage, critique, and debunk, but also to construct ideologically-responsible epistemological domains within collaborative knowledge ecologies.  Many of these knowledge ecologies facilitate and reward collective action, cooperative assemblage, and especially distributed coordination of agencies, texts, and performances. When we ask students to “plug in” to a network to compose collaboratively for strategic socio-political aims, we nurture and cultivate rhetoric’s ability to function as not only a unifier, but also as an assembler of diverse agents capable of acting rhetorically in collaborative ways toward the possibility of social change. We enact in many ways what Johnson-Eilola (2005), drawing on Robert Reich (1991), might call symbolic-analytic work. Participants engaged in symbolic-analytic work engage collaboratively on deep and active levels with information, especially in identification, (re)arrangment, circulation, abstraction, and brokering translations, especially online with the help of digital tools and typically outside of direct organizational supervision (255). Similarly, as Pigg (2014) notes, symbolic-analytic work such as that actualized by network writing initiatives can spur collaborative problem-solving, community decision-making, and multiple forms of coordinative efforts, especially in the negotiation of meaning and in the generation of rhetorical statements across a variety of digital, analog, and material spaces. Clay Spinuzzi (2007) uses the term distributed work to describe the” coordinative, polycontextual, crossdisciplinary work that splices together divergent work activities (separated by time, space, organizations, and objectives) and that enables the transformations of information and texts” (266). Social media usage in RWS projects like the one outlined here are not geared toward the production of some tangible artifact such as a wiki, a collaboratively-constructed dictionary, or a textual compilation of any sort, but participants still engage in knowledge laboring that can be aimed in collaboratively-constructed directions which nevertheless might work strategically towards social justice causes.

As demonstrated here, symbolic-analytic work and distributed work are each capable of coordinating civic-participatory action in digital environments. Digital activism enjoys a long history in RWS scholarship (see Dubisar and Palmeri 2010; Dubisar et. al 2017; Sundvall and Fredlund 2017), but an increased level of direct engagement with electracy theory might help orient future theory, practice, and pedagogy in productive ways. Sundvall and Weakland (2019) suggest that “electracy calls for the re(invention) of a proper metaphysics conducive to emerging technologies in general and, with such in mind, the production of a novel approach to being-with-others in particular” (17). Being-with-others in electracy is inherently different than it is in previous apparatuses, and stakeholders in rhetoric and writing studies would do well to acknowledge and make visible the ways in which electrate reasoning impacts how we compose for civic causes. Inventing networked electracies in social media environments manifests a being-with-others that directly engages the social dimensions of inventing in digital spaces, including facilitating probing of difference, identity, and heterogeneity, each of which can be nurtured and cultivated through strategic RWS instruction.

One way in which a class might consider and then engage participatory action directly through the reasonings of electracy is through the creation of memes, as showcased in Fig. 8. After a discussion concerning the genre and functioning of memes, as well as their circulation and delivery, students are challenged to invent their own memes with their own unique rhetorical purposes in mind. Examples of projects or activities catalyzing civic electracies through meme composition include course-wide production of a meme campaign followed by the collaborative composition of a strategic distribution plan for the memes across various social media platforms. Participants in this sort of electracy activity might benefit from consulting the “Top Social Justice Memes” lists put out in yearly iterations by the Center for Story-Based Strategy, a non-profit group dedicated to improving creative social justice campaign execution across digital avenues (see Fig. 9). Ultimately, as students mobilize the values of electracy that they’ve developed outside strict academic confines and enact them in coordinated, distributed course-wide campaigns, they not only enact an iteration of electracy that engages participatory-civic action in new ways, but also a way of being-with-others that has the potential to be more inclusive, more comprehensive, and more in line with values deemed worth espousing in networked, electrate environments. This sort of distributed, symbolic-analytic work continually invents and re-invents electracies, opening up doors for further deployment of electrate practices in classroom settings, allowing for the construction of new versions of electracy potentially valuable to RWS pedagogies and to understandings of networked writing activism in larger contexts.

Conclusions: Inventing Networked Electracies

As is hopefully clear by now, electracy is no monolith, but rather must be invented and re-invented through a plurality of iterations, one version of which has been outlined and explicated upon here. Indeed, as Ulmer prophesized, electracy will be invented and not be found. The approach to electracy that Ulmer outlines in his work, then, is but one inaugural approach in a larger series that will spark other iterations of invented electracy created through heuretic practice. It is important for us to recall Ulmer’s foretelling that a working premise of electracies is that “an explicit part of the pedagogy is that we are inventing electracy. Electracy does not already exist as such, but names an apparatus that is emerging ‘as we speak,’ rising in many different spheres and areas, and converging in some unforeseeable yet malleable way” (Internet Invention 7). In other words, electracy will continue to come about not in one gigantic step forward, but through a series of small microsteps, a series of seemingly-insignificant instantiations that will continue to unfurl, to unwind, and to expand outward into new networks, new possibilities, new potentialities.

With electracies, there will not be any static entity that will emerge gradually over time which we can deconstruct and clear the dust off of until it shines clearly before our eyes. Rather, the microcontributions are buzzing frenziedly all around us, heuretically multiplying and exponentially proliferating. If the academy’s response is to be an attempt to nurture and cultivate the skills and practices valued in electrate cultural formations, we must respond not by deconstructing practices after they’ve happened, but rather by enacting knowledge as a mode of existence by challenging students to invent electracy not just once or twice each semester, but continually and regularly in modest forms.

Part of inventing electracies is finding ways in which we might renew Basho’s saying, cited many times over in the writings of electracy, not to do as the masters have done, but to seek what they sought (Internet Invention). Through the initiative of network writing, RWS students begin the ongoing process of observing, mapping, tracing, and surveying a poetics for electracy and its unfoldings in the educational sphere. Many students learn best by doing and by making, and a true question for pedagogies over the coming decades to answer will not be what their students are taught to argue, but what they are taught to create. The pedagogy outlined here is not intended simply to be replicated or to be duplicated, but rather is intended to inspire new iterations of connected practices, to animate future pedagogical possibilities, and to galvanized attention to strategically inventing networked practices in new and unforeseeable ways as our disciplines define themselves in coming years.

If electracies as understood in rhetoric pedagogies are to truly be plural, spaces must be opened up and occasions must be deliberately designed in which the electracies students develop outside of institutionalized practice can be imported into the classroom, and in which these practices can be generativity harnessed within coursewide practice. Designing occasions for RWS to augment the critical impulse rewarded by standardized testing and mass curricula in favor of the discovery, trial, experimentation, and potentiality unleashed by heuristically-informed networked composition initiatives constitutes one step toward cultivating the dynamic aptitudes that will continue to shape the next iterations of unfolding electracies. Electracies are fluid, dynamic unfoldings mediated across networked practices, technologies, and ideologies. Rhetoric and writing studies would be wise to probe and explore further how these future electracies will be invented, assembled, and pieced together as electracies proliferate both within and beyond the academy.

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