Journal Two

The difference between rhetorical situation and rhetorical ecology sound extremely similar, but there are slight differences. The best way to see those differences is through example.

 One example form my own personal experience comes from a Tweet I recently posted concerning my recent bike ride to school. I said I looked like I ran a marathon and I was sorry to anyone who I sat by in class. If we look at this rhetoric from Bitzer’s point of view, we would see the situation in which the rhetoric/tweet was made necessary. For example, I was biking to class in the first place because my class was in the middle of the day and I knew I would not be able to find parking on campus. That shows more of the situation behind the exigence. If we look at it from Edbaur’s perspective of ecology we would not only see the exigence, we would also see the wider context and public circulation of the rhetoric. For example, someone replied to my Tweet, so we can see how it influenced the audience that read it and the effects it had. One of the replies to my Tweet was from my roommate and it said, “Let’s bike to Greece!” because we have been planning to go to Greece together. By seeing how the rhetoric affects its target audience, we see not only the situation of the rhetoric, but the ecology as well.

Now we can also look at this method from a real world example. In a Tweet by Donald Trump, he stated that he was bringing jobs back to the U.S. even before taking office. The situation for this rhetoric came from Trump’s recent election to president and his desire to do as he said he would in his presidential campaign, but the ecology of the tweet has an even bigger impact. The Tweet had almost 11,000 re-Tweets and from that wider public context we can get a feel for why the rhetoric was necessary in the first place and how it came from personal interactions nation wide.

            

When looking at both Bitzer and Edbaur’s ideas on rhetoric, the ideas of Edbaur seem to be an expansion of Bitzer in a way that incorporates the technological and personal side that rhetoric has developed in the 21^st century. I believe it is the theory closest to how I see and use rhetoric.