Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network

by Jeff Rice

Since the 1967 riots that ripped apart the city, Detroit has traditionally been viewed either as a place in ruins or a metropolis on the verge of rejuvenation. In Digital Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network , author Jeff Rice goes beyond the notion of Detroit as simply a city of two ideas. Instead he explores the city as a web of multiple meanings which, in the digital age, come together in the city’s spaces to form a network that shapes the writing, the activity, and the very thinking of those around it. Rice focuses his study on four of Detroit’s most iconic places—Woodward Avenue, the Maccabees Building, Michigan Central Station, and 8 Mile—covering each in a separate chapter. Each of these chapters explains one of the four features of network folksono(me), the affective interface, response, and decision making. As these rhetorical features connect, they form the overall network called Digital Detroit. Rice demonstrates how new media, such as podcasts, wikis, blogs, interactive maps, and the Internet in general, knit together Detroit into a digital network whose identity is fluid and ever-changing. In telling Detroit’s spatial story, Rice deftly illustrates how this new media, as a rhetorical practice, ultimately shapes understandings of space in ways that computer applications and city planning often cannot. The result is a model for a new way of thinking and interacting with space and the imagination, and for a better understanding of the challenges network rhetorics pose for writing.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Jeff Rice was born in Lawton, Oklahoma and grew up in Miami, Florida. He is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Campus Writing Program at the University of Missouri. Previously, he was Director of Writing and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Detroit-Mercy and Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University, where headed the department’s Digital Literacy Initiative. He joined the Division of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at the University of Kentucky in Fall 2011.

Professor Rice is the author of The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media (Southern Illinois University Press 2007) and the textbook Writing About Cool: Hypertext and Cultural Studies in the Computer Classroom (Longman 2004). He is also the co-editor of New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy (Parlor Press 2008) and Keywords in Markup: From to A (University of Minnesota Press 2011).

Professor Rice has published over 20 articles and chapters in new media, composition, pedagogy, and rhetoric. He recently finished his second monograph, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, a project that explores a networked rhetoric via the city of Detroit. In addition to his academic work, he blogs at Yellow Dog (http://www.ydog.net) and Make Mine Potato (http://makeminepotato.ydog.net), where he is sketching out a new book project on Web 2.0 and the rhetoric of obsession in the craft beer industry. That project is tentatively titled 'Craft Obsession.'