The artifacts that I have chosen for project one are a documentary (HBO's Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief), a podcast (Oh No Ross and Carrie!), a website (the official Scientology website), and/or, possibly, a musical (A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant). The documentary is created by people that have escaped Scientology and by cult experts. The podcast is developed by investigative reporters who look into fringe science, religion, spirituality, and the paranormal by joining the groups for themselves to learn about them from the inside. The Scientology website is developed by people actively involved in the religion of scientology and who believe in it. The musical is developed by people who have written other musical, but have no other prior personal expierence with the religion. My key term that I will referring to in the project is audience, so, all of these artifacts will be working together to show the information differing is dependent upon the audience that it's being targeted towards. What this will be teaching us about rhetoric is that persuasion techniques vary between audiences even if the information given in theory should be the same facts every time because each "speaker" has a different exigence.
The trend with my artifacts is that I chose artifacts all surrounding the same topic (this topic being Scientology), but that are attempting to reach out to different audiences. Additionally, a trend that can be seen between the documentary, the podcast, and the website are that they all are attempting to persuade their specific audiences. What we can conclude about the role of circulation from Edbauer is that since she is viewing rhetoric as ecological instead of situational text continuously is transforming. What we can conclude about the role of design coming from Wysocki's article, The Multiple Media of Texts, is that the design of a text influences an audience just as much as the text itself may and can be just as important. This feels like a different way of rephrasing and reexplaining Marshall McLuhan's idea of the medium being the message and being as just as important, if not more important, than the text itself.
I like how diverse your artifacts are. It feels like it could be hard to link such different modes of rhetoric but you smoothly connect them to different types of audience. This shows me that even though your audience is completely different, you can still convey a message to them through different types of rhetoric.
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