When the word “text” comes around, one naturally assumes it refers to printed or digital words written in a particular language. However, many experts in the professional writing field argue that texts are more than just a bunch of words together. Douglas Eyman’s Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric explores the different concepts for “text” that other experts have discussed and adds his perspective.
So, what are texts, then?
Johnson-Eilola describes texts as “any object, collection of objects, or contexts can be ‘read’ by tracing and retracing the slipping, contradictory network of connections, disconnections, presences, absences, and assemblages that occupy problematic spaces.” However, if I am being honest, this concept on its own is way too confusing for me. Wolfgang Dressler, on the other hand, defined texts as a “communicate event.” Now, the concept finally clicked in my head.
Based on Eilola and Dressler, I understand texts as any multimedia content that conveys a message, thought, or emotion to a receiving and understanding audience; if the audience doesn’t understand the message, then the text wasn’t rhetorically successful. In the same way, adaptation and re-shaping of texts to a specific platform, especially digitally, will enhance the audience’s receptivity to the message. In these cases, the employment of the platform’s characteristics and features would serve as new rhetorical devices the author could take advantage of.
For this, Eyman and Gunther Kress assure that “text [are] not merely constituted of meaningful symbols but is “the result of social action.”” This view, instructs us that social exchange is the root of an audience’s connection and understanding of a text. Said exchanges, by being participants of different platforms, start to build up from the common knowledge of the platform. This way increases the receptibility of the author’s message through a text.
How to influence an audience’s reception through a platform?
Eyman looks back on “Burke’s theory of entelechy [that] calls “intrinsic persuasion” – an example particularly germane to digital rhetoric is the case of the website, which persuades each user that it is worthy of use, based on design, usability, and accessibility.”” Following this example, for my website Vicoping, I have the power to modify the platform to satisfy the efficient consumption of the content and texts posted in it.
By making my website easy to use with visibility to all new content posted and minimal use of buttons, my audience will have more time to be concerned with the actual content and connections with my texts rather than figuring out of the website works.
Additionally, creating features and plugins to increase interactivity within the website will naturally persuade the audience to engage with the content. Lastly, providing the audience with the opportunity to comment on and create texts will further motivate them to engage with the original content and culture of the website.
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