Journal 2

For the rhetorical situation model proposed by Lloyd Bitzer, I would suggest that an example found in pop culture might be the Kanye West/Taylor Swift phone call of a few months ago, wherein Swift signs off on a lyric about herself in Kanye's song "Famous" that was not so flattering to the singer. According to Bitzer, the rhetorical situation would have been Swift's response on social media to the exigence of Kim Kardashian's release of Snapchat videos of the phone call between Swift and West. What Jenny Edbauer wrote about in "Unframing Models of Public Distribution" was that Bitzer needed to take his model a step farther in order to account for how rhetorical situations change and evolve. For Bitzer, the Kanye/Taylor issue is where the rhetorical situation ends, but Edbauer accounts for the changing social landscape afterward. I would say an effective example of her rhetorical ecology would be one of the most popular memes of 2016: the Harambe the Gorilla meme. Though it didn't impact politics, local or otherwise, the way that the "Keep Austin Weird" movement did, it was still an impacting force in a variety of ways. It (supposedly) brought national attention to a humanitarian issue, and it integrated itself into society through marketing like any popular meme does. While Bitzer would have seen the rhetorical situation as the meme's creation in response to the event of Harambe's death, Edbauer looks one step beyond that to see how the initial meme has evolved, and how society at large has shifted and changed because of it. They definitely agree on the initial stuff: an event (exigence) has to happen in order to incite rhetoric, but that's where Bitzer's ends and Edbauer's continues. It changes the way the two theorists look at rhetorical situations and creates quite different responses to those situations.

I'm not sure if I like Bitzer's or Edbauer's theory better. On the one hand, Bitzer's is straightforward and uncomplicated, but I feel Edbauer's encompasses a larger scope that takes more things into account and creates a fuller picture of rhetoric and the rhetorical situation.