Journal 3

For project 1, I picked the key term audience. The three artifacts that I chose to center around that key term are an agenda, a movie trailer, and a magazine article. After the activity we did in class, it became extremely evident to me that all three of these artifacts are rhetorical. My artifacts and the reasoning behind why they are rhetorical are mainly based off of Bitzer’s work, but Edbaur’s idea of circulation plays a large role as well.

The first artifact I chose, the agenda, teaches us that there doesn’t need to be a large audience for something to be rhetorical. There doesn’t even need to be more than one person for that matter. At first I didn’t believe that the agenda was rhetorical because I was the one writing in it and I was also the only one reading it, so I was technically the audience. But, there is still an audience and the writing in the agenda is still causing me to have a reaction, even though I’m the one who wrote it. Since Bitzer believes that anything is rhetorical if it creates a response, then the agenda is rhetorical. The movie trailer artifact that I chose also teaches about rhetoric. The trailer is about the new movie, “Patriots Day,” which is about a true, sad story. The video teaches us that rhetoric can also be anything that provokes emotions from the audience. The video meets Bitzer’s idea of exigence, audience, and constraints. The exigence is the need to share what happened on the tragic day, the audience is anyone who decides to watch the video, and the constraints are not being able to show too gruesome of footage. My third artifact is a magazine article, which meets both Bitzer’s and Edbaurs rhetorical theories. Looking at Edbaur, the magazine article is an example of circulation because it’s printed in a magazine but then can be found online at a later date, either on social media or on the magazine website. For example, now snapchat posts magazine articles. This teaches us how quickly rhetoric can transform into something different.

There is definitely a trend between artifacts. Artifacts for Bitzer tend to relate to major events, such as protest, speeches, or movies about big events. While, Edbaur’s artifacts normally relate to social media, because things can easily circulate through technology and the media.

We can conclude that the role of circulation from Edbuar’s article is becoming more and more prominent as technology advances and is probably more accurate in today’s society than it was in the past.