front cover of Electronic Monuments
Electronic Monuments
Gregory Ulmer
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
While corporations, governmental groups, and public relations firms debated the best way to memorialize the event of 9/11, sites of commemoration could be seen across the country and especially on the Internet. Greg Ulmer suggests that this reality points us to a new sense of monumentality, one that is collaborative in nature rather than iconic. 

From a do-it-yourself Mount Rushmore to an automated tribute to the devastating annual toll of traffic deaths in the United States, Electronic Monuments describes commemoration as a fundamental experience, joining individual and collective identity, and adapting both to the emerging apparatus of “electracy,” or digital literacy. Concerns about the destruction of civic life caused by the society of the spectacle are refocused on the question of how a collectivity remembers who or what it is. 

Ulmer proposes that the Internet makes it possible for monumentality to become a primary site of self-knowledge, one that supports a new politics, ethics, and dimension of education. The Internet thus holds the promise of bringing citizens back into the political equation as witnesses and monitors. 

Gregory L. Ulmer is professor of English and media studies at the University of Florida, Gainesville.
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front cover of The Rhetoric of Cool
The Rhetoric of Cool
Composition Studies and New Media
Jeff Rice
Southern Illinois University Press, 2007
The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media offers a historical critique of composition studies’ rebirth narrative, using that critique to propose a new rhetoric for new media work. Author Jeff Rice returns to critical moments during the rebirth of composition studies when the discipline chose not to emphasize technology, cultural studies, and visual writing, which are now fundamental to composition studies. Rice redefines these moments in order to invent a new electronic practice.
The Rhetoric of Cool addresses the disciplinary claim that composition studies underwent a rebirth in 1963. At that time, three writers reviewed technology, cultural studies, and visual writing outside composition studies and independently used the word cool to describe each position. Starting from these three positions, Rice focuses on chora, appropriation, commutation, juxtaposition, nonlinearity, and imagery—rhetorical gestures conducive to new media work-- to construct the rhetoric of cool.
An innovative work that approaches computers and writing issues from historical, critical, theoretical, and practical perspectives, The Rhetoric of Cool challenges current understandings of writing and new media and proposes a rhetorical rather than an instrumental response for teaching writing in new media contexts.
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