At my middle school there weren't that many special needs programs for students and it was something that i was really interested in, volunteer wise. I persuaded student government at my school to have after school field trips for SPED kids to participate in, at a nearby yacht club that taught them how to sail. At the time, i worked within the constraints to persuade student government (my audience), to remedy the exigence. This is a personal example referring to Bitzer's theory of the rhetorical situation. His idea of the rhetorical situation is centered around a closed system, only the direct situation is taken into account. On the other hand, rhetorical ecologies are better seen as a mixture of processes and encounters. Rhetoric is seen as an ongoing circulation process. The idea of rhetorical ecologies reminded me of the popular "Pepe the frog" meme. It began as a joke with the expression "feels good man". It began to circulate around the internet as a funny meme, and it slowly became a symbol of hatred. Pepe's cartoon began to portray "racist" and political ideas. Pepe was no longer a funny symbol and the creator of Pepe was essentially very upset and began a "free Pepe the Frog" campaign, he was originally supposed to be a funny cartoon and now the media was hating on him. This is an example of how an idea can circulate around the media, and how the meaning can change the more it circulates. I attached pictures of a brief evolution of the Pepe meme.
In my opinion i agree more with Edbauer's idea of rhetoric, but in a sense it is just an extension of Bitzer's theory and they do have a lot of things in common. Her theory just takes into account the idea of circulation and the range of processes and encounters in rhetoric.
I really liked the way you included the story of the Pepe meme to explain Edbauer's theory. Being familiar with the meme it reminds me of other memes or trends that started off good and then quickly went bad or vice versa. A trend like the whip, which in my opinion people only started doing ironically, actually became a trend which people did realistically.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed seeing the Pepe memes at the end of your post. I feel like they helped me connect with Edbauer's theory because it's familiar, seeing as I come across it almost everywhere! It's very true and sad how something that's supposed to be funny can be taken by random people on the internet and spun into something horrible (or just not what the original creator intended).
ReplyDelete