Thursday, March 19, 2015

Rhetorical Velocity

The Ridolfo and Rife article deals with an activist who had a picture of her used out of context on two occasion following a protest that she was a part of.
The girls name is Maggie and she participated in a demonstration whose aim was to gain the attention of the media to garner further support and coerce the university to get behind their cause. Their aim was to make sure the university apparel was not manufactured in sweatshops.  They achieved their goal and in the end the president of the university gave her support to their association. They executed the protest in a visually engaging way of using dye to write on the snow. Later an image obtained during the protest was used by the university on their website in a completely new context that Maggie couldn’t have anticipated. Her image was used on two occasions to show the university in a positive fun light. No one ever contacted Maggie to seek her approval for the photograph to be used. Her name was also never mention in conjunction with the photo on the website. The piece discusses the grounds on which both sides could be just in their feelings and actions. 
The terms rhetorical velocity, delivery, recomposition, and appropriation were used throughout the reading. The terms are integral to the understanding of the article and the situation that Maggie faces. “Rhetorical velocity is a strategic concept of delivery in which a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text (e.g., a media release) based on how s/he anticipates how the text might later be used.”(229) In Maggie’s case she couldn’t have predicted that her photo would later on be used is such a different way than its original presentation. The later uses of the picture raise the question of the legality and fairness of the way it was newly situated in relation to the university. Appropriation deals with the university stripped the image of its context and original intention to fit their purposes. Which leads into the means of how they presented or delivered the appropriated photograph. Recomposition is also closely linked to the previous two terms. In Maggie’s case they recomposed her picture to mean something opposite from the event that spawned the picture. When thinking about Miller’s opinion of genre I would think that delivery would have the most to do with her theory. Delivery can easily create differences among subjects that seem similar at first glance. It is delivery that can be used as a method to tease out subtleties among ideas. 

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