Journal 3

Rhetoric is meant to move an audience toward a specific understanding created by the speaker.  Through rhetoric, I believe my three artifacts have the ability to teach us about what they are capable of conveying to an audience.  Since my key term is design, each of my artifacts display elements of design that make the viewer feel a certain way about it.  In addition to feeling a specific emotion, design may be rhetorical enough to make an audience do something.  This example is demonstrated through my first artifact, the layout of the Facebook home screen shows elements of design by the way it is set up, including the structure and colors.  It is rhetorical because the specific design persuades viewers to post a status (with encouraging words), check notifications (with a bright red bubble), and click on posts with interesting content.  With this last artifact, I specifically noticed a trend in Wysocki's artifacts because a lot of them focused on digital visual rhetoric.  It mentions the importance of the strategic use of color, which I believe my artifact, Facebook, uses by keeping a single simple color scheme on the front page. My second artifact, "The Persistence of Memory" painted by Salvador Dali displays a melancholy mood.  It's rhetorical influence on the viewer is that it invokes negative feelings, and might make the viewer feel down or upset.  Another one of my artifacts, a photo of the San Francisco Bridge, shows the intricate aspects of design through architecture.  It's rhetorical in a way that the architecture conveys meaning to the viewer.  I have yet to figure out this specific meaning, but to me the defined structure of the bridge invokes feelings of safety and security.  

The role of design in Wysocki’s article brings me to the conclusion that design is effective in rhetoric by being visually appealing to the audience, and may be culture specific.  From Gladwell’s article, I concluded that materials can give ethos to the author.  Materials are not physical, but exist within the minds of their creators.  Edbauer’s article leads me to conclude that circulation exists within a three-way relationship between the sender, the receiver, and the text.