RHETORIC & WRITING

Web Rhetorics for a Digital Age: The Medium AND the Message

By Jason Snart, College of Dupage

The medium is the message

| "Rhetorical" and "writing" situations

| What does it mean to be a "good writer"?

| The Web | Common Genres on the Web | Exercises

Exercises

The following exercises are designed to get you thinking about the many different "writing situations" on the Web. You will also have the opportunity to write in these situations yourself.

• Situations • Facebook Rhetorics • Wiki, Twitter, Blog Rhetorics • Choice • Autobiography And Medium • Interactivity • Rhetoric Of "Community" • Customizing • Dynamic Content

The New York Times is one of the most recognizable newspapers in the world. However, the New York Times is much more than just a newspaper these days. There is a New York Times Web site, NYTimes.com. You can find the New York Times on Facebook. And, as with so many news outlets, The New York Times maintains a Twitter feed.

Let’s compare this media “property” across a number of media platforms.

Visit:

http://www.facebook.com/nytimes

http://nytimes.com/

http://twitter.com/nytimes

1. Briefly describe how a particular news items is represented on each of these sites.

2. What, in addition to “news,” does each site provide?

3. How are the sites themselves linked?

4. Cite any benefits that one “version” of the New York Times has over the other versions? Does one digital platform provide something that the others do not?

5. If you had to choose just one format that the New York Times is available in to get your news, which one would it be and why? (Or maybe you get the sense that no single version of the Times is supposed to exist completely alone. Do they seem to depend on one another to function best?)

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