We’re back to Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice by Douglas Eyman, and this time we journey into his interpretation of “text.” Text isn’t limited to printed words – it’s evolving, multimodal (characterized by different modes) of expression by sound, image, and movement. Digital text doesn’t just communicates, it performs. As I was watching the Pixar film Soul, I noticed a connection of what it means to live creatively and expressively.
Throughout the movie, Joe Gardners journey is about rediscovering what makes life meaningful not just playing jazz but feeling it. Similar to what Eyman suggests that digital literacy is, it’s not just consuming and creating content but being part of the whole. As Joe was improvising on the piano, he’s in real time layering rhythm, creating emotion and experience. View digital text the same way, when you compose as a digital writer, rhetor, creator you compose just like this blog post! Through an image, if I could add sound to this text, it would be, “Solfeggio Frequencies: Relief Stress,” and the words I use create a rhetoric performance.
When we view digital texts, it circulates, remixes and evolves through collaboration. It’s the idea that text, gains life through connection and alignment. Tying it back to the movie soul, where its message is that creativity and meaning are relational not solitary.
“Connection” & “Networked”
Eyman calls the “networked” nature of expression. He demonstrates how technology expands, evolves in ways we tell stories, and then that story is circulated through shared experiences. I’ll refer to my classmates blog posts, where she uses the expression, “telephone,” the game that starts with a sentence and may end up completly different by the end.
What does this mean at the end? I believe that both Eyman and Soul challenge us to see beyond what we count as text, literacy, creativity and purpose. If we were to put Eyman’s reading in a movie, we can be able to see the text as alive, dynamic and expressive. In a world where creativity happens across screens, the real soul of digital rhetoric lies in noticing the click, the text summarized or reworded and compose to carry the spark of life.
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