I wrote a coda for the talk that won’t be quite as rhetorically effective a few months from now. It took up some questions about polling and algorithms that emerged in the wake of President Obama’s victory, and I had hoped to link my discussion of robot writers to these questions as a way to link my talk to recent events. But the kairotic window is quickly closing on that discussion, so I thought I’d post the coda here. I’ll find some new material for the coda in the spring. It shouldn’t be difficult, given that we are inundated with algorithms, narratives, and databases.

The bulk of my talk deals with the algorithmic journalists developed by Narrative Science, a company that transforms data into narratives by way of software. Many see the emergence of robot writers as a threat to the supposedly “human” realm of writing and narrative. That threat is often quickly dismissed, since robots can’t do what “we” do. However, I see these algorithmic journalists as exposing more than just another iteration of the “robots vs. humans” battle. After all, any piece of writing is the result of an algorithm that transforms data into narrative.

The scope of the data, the complexity of the algorithm, and the angle of the story may all change based on who or what is writing. But we are not all that different from robots. And if we imagine all writing as algorithmic, then we can begin to think of algorithmic thinking as a way to toggle between the worldviews of narrative and database. Lev Manovich famously developed this theoretical pair in The Language of New Media to describe how new media stages a kind of battle between narrative and database. The narrative worldview posits a single path through data, making sense of data by way of selection and exclusion. The worldview of database is more inclusive (though it makes some determinations as well) and allows for more pathways through the data to exist simultaneously.

Algorithmic thinking provides a way to sit in the liminal space between narrative and database, and rhetoric presents a long tradition of algorithms that help us sit in that space. With rhetoric, we can toggle between these two approaches to the world. So, this is the talk in a nutshell. Obviously, I’ve moved quickly through this argument, and I’ve skipped some of the hard work of showing how rhetoric is algorithmic. But I’ll save that for my visit to Milwaukee in the spring. Instead, I want to jump to the coda mentioned previously. While I spend much of the talk on the robots of Narrative Science, the coda took up a different robot:

This robot has served, simultaneously, as hero and villain in recent weeks. Nate Silver, baseball stats geek turned political forecasting geek, has been the target of derision (and celebration, depending on your political leanings) during election season. Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com (and if you’re like me, you have burned Silver’s site into your laptop screen during the past months) examines the vast database of available polling data and combines it with numerous variables (the biases of certain polls, jobs numbers, historical voter turnout numbers) to project election winners. Like Narrative Science’s “meta-writers” (who write algorithms that generate stories), Silver and his team author algorithms which process data and generate narratives. He tells us stories about all of this data, helping us make sense of it. But if the hospitable network enables this kind of analysis, opening up databases to anyone willing to author algorithms that make sense of it, that same hospitality has been extended to those who believe that Nate Silver might be a witch. In the lead up to the election, Silver defended himself against those who for various reasons—partisan leanings and television ratings chief among them—insisted that the 2012 presidential election was a “tossup.” He even bet MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who refused to believe Silver’s projections of a relatively easy Obama victory, $1,000 that his projection of an Obama victory was accurate. Scarborough was just one of many pundits who pitted their “gut instincts” against Silver’s sophisticated statistical models. This was essentially a replay, on a different stage, of the battle between stats geeks and old, crusty baseball scouts. Numbers vs. “the eye test.” As we know, Silver came out on top as his model correctly predicted the electoral vote count.

Two weeks ago, Silver told Charlie Rose that he believes he knows why he is the target of people like Scarborough: “I think I get a lot of grief because I frustrate narratives that are told by pundits and journalists that don’t have a lot of grounding in objective reality.” This is how many of us have understood this controversy in the wake of Tuesday night’s result: Nate Silver uses data. Joe Scarborough uses narrative. The former always trumps the latter. But this draws too clean a line between database and narrative, splitting the two along a human/nonhuman axis. Thus, Silver might be a “witch” because he uses data, and Scarborough was safe (or safer) from being put on trial because he relies on his human instincts. But both Silver and Scarborough author algorithms that transform data into narrative. Silver’s narratives may have been proven more accurate and may have been grounded in “big data,” but we closely watched election returns on election night because the news media had convinced us that the election was close—a toss-up.

The algorithms of Scarborough, Hannity, and a host of pundits across the political spectrum generated narratives that persuaded many of us to hesitate before proclaiming the election to be “in the bag.” This is not to say that all algorithms are created equal or that the narratives spun by various political noise machines should be treated the same as those generated by logical claims and sound evidence. In fact, this is precisely the problem. We are struggling with ways to sift and sort these narratives, which are sometimes spun from the exact same data.

And there are narratives that are more accurate than others. Silver, after all, was right. But we should also recognize that Silver’s success was not an indication that “big data” will always triumph or that narrative is flawed and “all to human.” That success was the result of a sound algorithm, an authored artifact that stood as an argument for the best way to move between database of polling data and narratives about the winner of the election.

The very fact that no explanation of data can claim to be the explanation means that citizens and media consumers are in a difficult position. How are these various, competing, conflicting narratives to be judged and compared? Which narrative should be trusted? What choices is an algorithm making when generating a narrative? How might we reverse engineer that narrative and speculate about the what motivates it? How does one oscillate between the competing spheres of narrative and database?

Rhetoricians have spent millennia building a vast library of algorithms that can help us understand the motives at work as data is used to spin narratives. These procedures have not necessarily been put forth as algorithms, but reframing rhetoric as a body of theory that generates reading and writing machines presents us with a particularly useful approach to our contemporary predicament. If our present environment is hospitable to conflicting narratives, then we require ways of sifting through those narratives. Databases grow, meaning that narratives proliferate. Determining how one might judge those narratives is an urgent problem for those hoping to make informed decisions about information. Rhetorical theory, which has always been algorithmic, provides one way of dealing with this struggle.

In a graduate seminar I’m teaching, last week’s reading was an exchange between Steve Mailloux and Diane Davis regarding the hermeneutic dimension of rhetoric. That discussion revolves around the question of whether the category “rhetoric” can be completely collapsed into the category “hermeneutics.” Mailloux argues that we have no choice but to interpret various others and that these interpretations, though they always involve some level of interpretive “ethnocentrism,” offer the possibility for rhetorical exchange between different people and cultures. Davis agrees with all of this. She grants that we have no choice but to interpret others (people, texts, etc.) and that such interpretations are entirely necessary.  However, she also argues that the address of an other to me exposes a non-hermeneutic dimension of rhetoric. That is, the interpretation of the other (inevitable as it is) is not the only portion of the rhetorical situation that we can study.  The approach of the other exposes my exposedness to that other, it communicates communicability.  This exposedness is, for Davis, rhetorical.  She does not argue that we should pay closer attention to the other.  Rather, she argues that we are put into relation with others regardless of any choice on our part and that rhetoricians should consider, study, and “attend to” the approach of the other as other. The approach of the other “brings me more than I can contain,” and it upsets any attempt to collapse rhetoric into hermenuetics.

Now, shift gears.  In an undergraduate course I’m teaching called New Media Across the Disciplines, we recently read a portion of Doug Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”  In that report, he details his various attempts to augment the intellect by way of digital technologies.  This conceptual framework eventually became a technological framework.  Engelbart and his team developed tools and software that are the basis of today’s Graphical User Interface and Mouse. In what has become known as “the mother of all demos,” Engelbart demonstrated the NLS (oNLine System).  That system included a mouse, a GUI, and a chord keyset. Steve Jobs owes a great deal to Engelbart and his team for at least two reasons: 1) They created the interface that we all now take for granted; 2) They (arguably) created “the demo.”  While Engelbart did not wear a turtleneck, it’s difficult to watch Engelbart’s demo without thinking of the iPad rollout (though, Engelbart is not nearly the ham that Steven Jobs is…in fact, he’s clearly nervous as hell).

Engelbart’s demo is available on YouTube, and I’d encourage you to watch it if you haven’t already.  But my focus is on a short moment toward the very beginning of the demo:

The entire demo reveals a nervous Engelbart. He’s clearly feeling exposed. But beyond a mere linguistic hiccup, this responsible/responsive mixup points to difficult and interesting questions of ethics and technology. Engelbart’s suggestion that a computer would be “alive” for you all day does not trip him up. However, when he accidentally posits a computer as “responsible,” he senses that he’s made a gaffe.

This seems understandable.  We don’t like to think of our machines (digital or otherwise) as being “responsible.”  Rather, we see these machines as tools that we operate, and we see our-selves as the responsible party.  But as any number of posthumanists have suggested, the relationship between machine and human is not so clean.  Human and machine approach one another – this is not a one-way relationship.  Further, this approach points out what Davis calls response-ability. The ethical question here is not about what we should do (i.e. a set of maxims about what is good). That question is an important one, and it focuses on how we should treat each others.  However, while this question has been the focus of Western Philosophy, it tends to rely on a conscious, coherent, Enlightenment subject.  That is, “I” make decisions and act in the world, and I am completely aware of my motives for those actions.  This has also been the focus of rhetorical studies.

We are exposed before our various machines, and this makes Engelbart’s linguistic hiccup more accurate than he might be willing to admit.  The computer is responsible (or response-able), and it approaches us, exposing us as response-able.  What makes this entire situation even more difficult is that nearly all of our machines are networked.  Thus, it is not just the machine to which we are responsible.  In addition, we are exposed and response-able to all of the various others that arrive via the networked.  How do we deal with this ethical predicament that arrives on our doorstep, prior to (or regardless of) any decision on our part? How do we approach the other?

Software is one mediatory figure that we build to deal with this problematic of the other.  Networked software has to, by definition, deal with the question of the other and the question of hospitality.  How software takes up that question has everything to do with our ethico-rhetorical predicament: The other approaches. I must respond. How will I respond? Engelbart’s project of “Augmenting the Human Intellect” is especially relevant here, since he saw the software and hardware that he was building as much more than a mere “tool.”  He saw the GUI as an augmentation to our thinking, and his nervous laughter upon calling the computer “responsible” suggests that the cyborg he had in mind was not a robot or a calculating machine. The augmented human intellect still had to deal with the approach of the other, with issues of ethics, with the predicament of being response-able.

But the question we might ask, given Engelbart’s Freudian slip, is how response-able our hardware and software is.  How do these tools respond to the problem of the other?  How do they sift and sort the various arrivals of human and nonhuman collaborators (or saboteurs)? How hospitable or tolerant are they?  In short, how response-able are are our machines and how might we attempt to understand their ethical dimensions?

What would an object-oriented rhetoric look like?  This question is being asked by a number of scholars, and that is largely due to Scot Barnettâ€s review essay in Enculturation, “Toward an Object-Oriented Rhetoric.” In addition to this essay, Scot organized a Rhetoric Society of America conference panel addressing the topic.  Scotâ€s essay has been examined by many, including Graham Harman, whose work serves as Scotâ€s focus.  That review suggests that an object-oriented rhetoric would attend to rhetoricâ€s “missing masses.”  Beyond examining the rhetorical actions of humans, an object-oriented rhetoric would account for objects as well, and it would no longer consider human activity as the focal point of the rhetorical situation. In his response to my post at The Blogora about object-oriented rhetoric, Ian Bogost suggested that OOR can (should?) address “the rhetoric of objects”:

“Do things like traffic lights and kohlrabis persuade one another in their interactions? What would it mean to understand extra-human object relations as rhetorical? When Bruno Latour suggests that trees also might use us ‘to achieve their dark designs,†does such a use count as rhetoric? It’s a question related to what I call alien phenomenology, but more specific in nature: one that would address how speculation can provide insight into the coaxings of withdrawn objects.”

A Malian woman builds a small tent for her family so that her guests can sleep in the family’s home.

Photo Credit: “Hospitality II” by Arriving at the horizon

In my book project I use the phrase “hospitable code” (this also serves as the title of the project) to discuss software that addresses the problem of the other. But this phrase requires some unpacking, and I’d like to work through that unpacking here. My hope is that readers will respond to this post so that I can continue to refine this idea/concept.

First, let’s tackle “hospitality.” Hospitality is typically considered in terms of the choice to welcome another into our home. Thus, the picture above indicates the hospitality of the Malian people. The photographer describes the image this way:

“When we got to Mohammed’s campement, the women instantly got very busy dragging out cloth and sticks, destined to become a provisional tent. Great, I thought, we get a little tent for ourselves. And a little tent there was, but to my great surprise and embarrassment the whole family — Mohammed, his wife, their six children, and two visitors — moved in there, and left the big tent to us. Then women from surrounding campements came over with beautiful pillowcases and essabbar and other wallhangings, and decorated the tent! I think it was the nicest-looking tent I have ever seen. Desert hospitality at its best. More about it here.”

This kind of hospitality assumes a clean separation between “my home” and “my guest.” ��It suggests a definite threshold, a border between inside and outside. But I am attempting to discuss software in terms of hospitality, and there is no real “home” or clear threshold when it comes to software. So, let me try to explain how I’m using the term hospitality

The hospitality I have in mind is less an intentional, welcoming gesture than it is a predicament. In networked environments, others will continually arrive. This situation has its promises – the crowdsourcing of various problems and the possibility of a more inclusive conversation are two such promises – but it also has its pitfalls. Which others will arrive and when? What are their motivations? Who are they? How do I engage them? What will they do to me or my “home” or my text? Networked software is forced to deal with all of these questions in ways that an application such as Microsoft Word does not. To be sure, other writers can enter and edit my word document; however, this is not necessarily an integral part of the software platform. Word can be a perfectly useful piece of software on a machine that is not networked. Media Wiki, on the other hand, would be much less useful in a non-networked environment. One could use Media Wiki as a kind of content management system or as a personal CVS repository (I myself have used wiki software in this way), but this does not change the fact that the software was designed for networked environments and thus takes particular ethical stances with regard to other users/writers.

My case study in “Hospitable Code” is Wikipedia and its software platform, Media Wiki. Media Wiki is hospitable in that it deals with the question of the other much more explicitly than an application like Word. Whether or not Media Wiki is sufficiently hospitable or whether it welcomes all others is a more difficult question. No software platform teaches a pure hospitality (what Derrida would call absolute hospitality). This is an unreachable ideal. Nonetheless, hospitable code addresses the question of the foreigner in particular ways because the arrival of others is part of its functionality. Media Wiki is just one example of hospitable code. We could consider a variety of software platforms that deal with a similar set of questions: Google Documents, Google Wave, networked videogames, Twitter, Facebook, and many others. Further, given the recent trend toward online applications, it seems that more and more software platforms will be forced to deal with the question of the other. My book is an attempt to think through the implications of that shift and to understand the ethical stances built into software.

But the second part of the concept of “hospitable code” is worth unpacking as well. While this term has been dissected in various places (Kittler’s mediation on “Code” in the Software Studies Lexicon is but one example of this), I’d like to explain the two senses in which I’ll be using the term. My use of code evokes both software (code as ones and zeros) and the idea of an ethical code (code as ethical constitution). Given Lawrence Lessig’s argument in Code that “code is law,” separating these two notions of code is difficult:

In real space we recognize how laws regulate—through constitutions, statutes, and other legal codes. In cyberspace we must understand how code regulates—how the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is regulate cyberspace as it is. As William Mitchell puts it, this code is cyberspaceâ€s “law.” Code is law. (5)

Building upon this definition of code as law, I am arguing that software makes ethical arguments – code establishes ethical codes. Those ethical codes are not the final word, and my project demonstrates how users grapple with and interrogate those codes. Nonetheless, code establishes a groundwork or a context in which we deal with one another, and in this sense code establishes an ethical dwelling (an ethos) in which rhetors/users/writers interact with one another. Those interactions are, in my view, inherently rhetorical.

But it will be necessary to define a couple of more terms as well: rhetoric and ethics. Stepping through the various definitions of rhetoric would be nearly impossible. This term has morphed over and over again over the past 2000 years. At various historical moment, rhetoric has been understood as the faculty of discovering the available means of persuasion (Aristotle), the study of misunderstanding and its remedies (I.A. Richards), the art of speaking well (Quintillian), and “a powerful instrument of error and deceipt” (Locke). This list is by no means exhaustive, but even these few examples exhibits the range of the term “rhetoric,” and the various ways in which it is put to use. However, I would like to indicate that “Hospitable Code” makes use of a modern definition of rhetoric developed by Kenneth Burke. Burke famously expanded the realm of rhetoric for 20^th century rhetoricians, and his framework is particularly useful considering my discussion of how rhetoric and ethics intersect. At its most general level, Burke’s definition of rhetoric encompasses all attempts to make meaning: “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.”

But Burke’s definition goes further than this by redefining rhetoric in terms of identification. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke explains this framework: “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not jointed, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so” (20). Thus persuasion is happens (whether the result of an intentional effort or not) through identification, but this identification is not one of fusion or communion. When ‘A’ identifies with ‘B,’ they are substantially one, but each remains a unique individual locus of motives, joined and separate” (20). By understanding persuasion, and thus rhetoric, as identification, we can begin to see the relationship between rhetoric and ethics. Rhetoric as identification implies that we are simultaneously joined and separate from various interlocutors, and any understanding of this predicament will have to engage questions of ethics and how we relate to one another. Persuasion involves “the use of stylistic identifications to establish rapport” between rhetor and audience (46). That rapport is in constant tension as we make and break various identifications and as we deal with various others. We are consubstantial with one another, but we are never fused in any final way.

Understood as identification, rhetoric becomes the indissociable from how we relate to one another. Any time we are making meaning, any time we are attempting to communicate, we are in the realm of identification and we are determining how we can or should relate to one another. Questions of rhetoric and ethics are thus intertwined. This would seem an odd claim given certain definitions of rhetoric. Given a definition such as Locke’s(an instrument of “error and deceipt”), rhetoric is decidedly unethical. And certain rhetorical moves are indeed unethical. However, following Burke’s lead, I see no communicative act that is not shot through with rhetoric. And thus I see no way in which communication does not imply questions of ethics. The study of ethics is the study of how we treat the other (that other can be human, but it does not have to be). The question of the other is the question of ethics. In Derrida’s terms, the question of the “foreigner” (the foreigner here is a kind of metaphor for all of the various others that arrive on our various scenes…or on our desktop) is the question that continually presents itself to us. How we engage the foreigner is directly tied to how (or whether) we identify with the other. The difficulty here is that we do not always choose our identifications. As persuader or persuadee, we are constantly dealing with various, conflicting identifications. We are persuaded (or, better, persuadable) over and beyond any decision to agree or disagree, and we our own acts of persuasion entail identifications that we may or may not have “stylistically” deployed. In this sense, we persuade and are persuaded more (and less) than we ever intend. Thus regardless of whether we are in the “sender” or “receiver” slot, we are in an ethico-rhetorical predicament.

So, hospitable code is rhetorical and ethical; it makes ethical arguments. To some extent, all software makes ethical arguments and determinations. But the networked software that I am most interested in must explicitly address the question of the other. In networked environments, the question of the other is part of the software’s design. When we enter the rhetorical dwelling of a space like Media Wiki, we are put into relation with various others. Those various relations are rhetorical and ethical.

There is much, much more to say here (thankfully…if there wasn’t, then I’d be hard pressed to turn this into a book-length argument), but I’m hoping this can be a starting point. I’m hoping that some readers can help me continue to refine this set of ideas. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome.

Photo Credit: “Cool Runner” by Nirmal Thacker

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of rhetoric, writing studies, and rhetorical theory in the emerging field/subfield of software studies. Software studies was launched by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media, fleshed out by Katherine Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer, and then extended by scholars like Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Matthew Fuller, Matt Kirschenbaum, and various others. Kirschenbaum provides my favorite description of this emerging subfield:

“What is software studies then? Software studies is what media theory becomes after the bubble bursts. Software studies is whiteboards and white papers, business plans and IPOs and penny-stocks. Software studies is Powerpoint vaporware and proofs of concept binaries locked in time-stamped limbo on a server where all the user accounts but root have been disabled and the domain name is eighteen months expired. Software studies is, or can be, the work of fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories, and the cultivation of the critical discipline to parse those histories against the material matrix of the present. Software studies is understanding digital objects are sometimes lost, yes, but mostly, and more often, just forgotten. Software studies is about adding more memory.” (153)

While Kirschenbaum’s version has definite “book history” feel to it, I think it helps us think of a broad range of methods that fit under the software studies umbrella. Software studies allows scholars across a broad range of disciplines to examine the far-reaching ramifications of code. Kirschenbaum’s focus is on mechanisms and Wardrip-Fruin’s is on computational processes. As I see it, software studies can be a big tent.

But Collin Brooke notes in Lingua Fracta that Manovich significantly reduces the role of rhetoric in new media studies, making it difficult to see how rhetoricians might fit with the emerging field of software studies. It’s worth briefly revisiting Manovich’s treatment of rhetoric in The Language of New Media. In a discussion of hyperlinking and the Web’s non-hierarchical arrangement of texts, Manovich argues that “the printed word was linked to the art of rhetoric” (77). Traditionally, Manovich argues, texts have “encoded human knowledge and memory, instructed, inspired, convinced, and seduced their readers to adopt new ideas, new ways of interpreting the world, new ideologies” (76-7). Manovich suggests that this approach becomes obsolete with rise of new media and hypertext. After citing Roman Jakobsen’s reduction of rhetoric to “metaphor and metonymy,” Manovich argues that hyperlinking has reduced rhetoric even further by “privileg[ing] the single figure of metonymy at the expense of all others” (77). While he eventually suggests that a “new digital rhetoric may have less to do with arranging information in a particular order and more to do simply with selecting what is included and what is not included” (footnote, page 77), Manovich still bases this discussion on a particularly narrow definition of rhetoric.

Collin suggests that Manovich’s definition of the rhetorical canon of arrangement (and of rhetoric, more generally) is based on a straw man. On the Web, the argument goes, writers/orators no longer painstakingly arrange things in order to persuade in a particular way; therefore, rhetoric is dead. But Collin argues that “the links that allegedly demonstrate the irrelevance of rhetoric are rhetorical practices of arrangement, attempts to communicate affinities, connections, and relationships” (91). As Collin sees it (and I’d agree), arrangement is not an “all or nothing” thing. Arrangement may be further complicated in new media environments, but it still happens. Rhetoric changes in new media environments, but it’s still there.

We can hardly blame Manovich for this reduced rhetoric. Manovich inherits (from Jakobsen and others) a reduced rhetoric, or what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen would call a “restricted rhetoric.” As Borch-Jacobsen argues, rhetoric’s history is defined by a constant oscillation between “primary rhetoric” and “secondary rhetoric”:

The history of rhetoric is not the continuous and closed story of its progressive restriction, but the discontinuous and indefinite one of permanent tension between two uses of the term: one of extreme generality (and therefore also extreme vagueness), which makes it an art of persuasion (this is its oratorical, pragmatic, or ‘impressive’ pole, corresponding roughly to what G.A. Kennedy calls ‘primary rhetoric’); the other of more restricted scope, which makes it an art of speaking well (this is its literary, poetic, ornamental, or ‘expressive’ pole, corresponding roughly to what Kennedy calls ‘secondary rhetoric’ and V. Florescu letteraturizzazione). Between these two poles there is constant oscillation punctuated by ‘deaths’ and ‘renaissances’ of rhetoric. (128)

Manovich’s rhetoric is still about persuasion, but it is mostly a secondary rhetoric of ornamentation. However, if we accept Borch-Jacobsen’s more complex historical narrative of rhetoric’s constant oscillation, how might we rethink the role of rhetoric in new media studies and, more specifically, software studies? What would a primary rhetoric offer software studies? What does the art of persuasion offer those of us interested in “fashioning documentary methods for recognizing and recovering digital histories”?

I’d like to offer a brief, provisional answer to this question. If rhetoric is bigger than tropes and figures and if it is about how the art of persuasion morphs and changes, then a study of digital histories might trace out the origins and iterations of rhetorical strategies. These rhetorical strategies are shaped by software. Design choices enable and constrain certain rhetorical practices, and a study of these emerging practices would attempt to understand how persuasion and communication can happen in emerging environments.

Let me provide a brief example. The Wikipedia controversy of Essjay is well known, and it is one I dealt with in detail in a recent College Composition and Communication article. That article does not address Wikipedia’s software (Media Wiki) directly, but a consideration of Wikipedia’s code allows us one more way to examine this “scandal.” To recap: Ryan Jordan claimed to be a tenured professor of theology. He used this identity to guide discussion on Wikipedia and to work his way up the Wikipedia food chain. It was eventually discovered (with the help of wiki-critic Daniel Brandt) that Jordan was not a professor, and this opened up a public discussion about how identity operates on Wikipedia.

In the CCC article, I argue that the Essjay controversy demonstrates how ethos operates in Wikipedia and how this community deals with textual origins. Wikipedia’s rules attempt to outlaw any claims to an ethos of real life (RL) expertise. That is, no one can claim to be the origin of an utterance. Writers are not supposed to dictate discussion by pointing to their RL credentials, and they are not allowed to include “original research” in a Wikipedia article. Instead, Wikipedia’s rules require that a contributor build an ethos of citation. Instead of pointing to his or her credentials, a Wikipedian should be pointing to verifiable sources.

This argument is geared toward an audience of rhetoric and composition scholars who are concerned with issues of writing, argument, and intellectual property on the Web. But a discussion of Essjay’s ethos would shift in a software studies conversation. We would have to account for how Wikipedia’s code allows for (indeed, encourages) the building of virtual identities and actively discourages any claim to RL identities. We would have to track the development of Media Wiki software and a number of design decisions: the creation and maintenance of user accounts, access control settings, security settings, and permissions.

For instance, Media Wiki’s rules with regard to user identities and “anonymity” are quirky (these rules expose what Galloway and Thacker might call an exploit…but that is another blog post). Creating a username on Media Wiki masks that user’s IP address. Thus, I can edit without a user account and have my IP address attached to each edit, or I can create a username that is linked to each edit. Only users with CheckUser access can link usernames with IP addresses. Thanks to Virgil Griffith’s Wikiscanner tool, we can link IP addresses with physical locations. But this still doesn’t provide a clean way of linking edits with particular writers.

Media Wiki’s dealings with user accounts are confusing and counterintuitive. What does it mean to edit Wikipedia anonymously? What can anonymity even mean when an “anonymous” user is more easily tracked than a user who creates an avatar. When Ryan Jordan created the identity of “Essjay,” he was able to create an entire identity. That identity was not necessarily tied to a real world location or a real world person. And he was able to do this because of a particular design decision on the part of those who designed Media Wiki. Contrary to what most will say, this policy with regard to RL identity is not in place for all wikis. In fact, the original wiki, Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, insisted on “RealNames” because “people who use online nicknames care less about what they write.” This is an arguable claim, but for the time being it’s important to note that Media Wiki’s design is but one way of dealing with user identities. This design decision has shaped the rhetorical situation in which each Wikipedian finds herself.

Using episodes such as the Essjay controversy as starting point, we can track the history of Wikipedia’s code. This history will help us better understand code influences rhetorical action and how the ethics and rhetorics embedded in code bubble to the surface as software is put to use. Essjay made particular choices about how to persuade other Wikipedians, and many of those choices involved a strategic deployment of ethos. But that strategic deployment was not only about Essjay’s (or Ryan Jordan’s) “choice.” It was much more about the code that allowed for and encouraged such a rhetorical strategy.

And I’d like to go one step further here. Even this brief discussion of Essjay’s ethos and how it opens the door for a rhetorical approach to software studies only scratches the surface. Beyond a study of rhetorical strategies and how they’re shaped, a rhetorical approach to software studies would also have to be a discussion of how persuasion happens, regardless of or beyond any conscious choice on the part of the digital rhetor. Yes, we should consider Essjay’s attempt to game the system and persuade. But what about all of the persuasion that happens over and beyond such strategic attempts?

In electronic spaces that invite various digital writer/rhetors regardless of credentials, Web denizens are put into contact with various others regardless of any choice to do so. I do not know who is editing “alongside” me when I contribute to Wikipedia, and this opens up a long list of rhetorical questions: How does persuasion or communication happen amongst a group of writers who may not share the same agenda? How does one track the motives of a writer without knowing his or her identity? What kind of community is a text like Wikipedia?

There are more questions to pursue here, but my hope is to open up a discussion about how rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and writing studies might contribute to the emerging field of software studies. I see a number of openings, and I will be looking to pursue many of them in future blog posts.