Journal 3

The three artifacts I chose center around Hip Hop and how it communicates to its audience. Those three artifacts are a documentary (Hip Hop Evolution), an album (Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest), and an interview. These artifacts focus on how rhetoric is all about enacting change within your audience. Rap itself is a form of rhetoric, artists speaking about subjects and finding stylistic ways of communicating that message to an audience. How the audience perceives the message and how they respond is integral to rhetoric. And how the audience responds may come in an evolution of the medium. So even when looking at the artifacts, those who created the artifacts created and enacted change in the hip hop world because they were once the audience to another rapper’s rhetoric.

            There is a trend we can find with my artifacts. They are all about audience enacting change due to the rhetoric. The rhetoric focuses on the environment these artists came from and the audience, whoever they are, responded by evolving the music from what they’ve learned from that rhetoric. How these artifacts were introduced into the environment also plays a part. The circulation of the message to new environments influences the message to a whole other meaning. And how the audience responds due to their environment is exactly what all these artifacts have in common.

 This is what we can conclude about circulation from Edbauer’s article. Circulation comes from the environment the rhetoric is coming from. How the environment influences the rhetoric is how people will respond and spread what’s being said. Inside and outside forces in the environment will warp what the audience comprehends and if it clicks then change will be enacted. That change however will warp the original rhetoric due to the circulation within the environment. New forces will influence the message being circulated and a new version of the same message will be produced. Circulation serves as a way of warping a message to the audience member’s environment. Depending on how the message is transmitted or where it’s being circulated, the message will be warped due to the introduction of a new environment.