Rhetorical Velocity and Genre Blending

Way back in the third century BC, the philosopher Aristotle outlined three categories of rhetoric: epidemic, deliberative, and forensic. Aristotle would have been hard-pressed to imagine the multitude of rhetorical situations we have today. Categories of speech type splinter into subcategories, divided further by who is speaking, what they are speaking about, and even where they are speaking. Furthermore, some 'texts' aren't even texts as Aristotle would understand the term. A movie can be a text. A painting or a song can be considered a text. Even a photograph can be a text.
With technology advancing faster than the law can keep pace, a new problem has been discovered: a ‘text’ created for one purpose can be repurposed by someone and turned into something else entirely.
In Ridolfo and Rife’s case study, primary and secondary concerns are outlined.
Ridolfo and Rife warn the potential rhetor to be wary of Rhetorical Velocity, a term coined to describe how an original work could be remediated and remixed until it has a completely different meaning. Rhetorical Velocity and composing a work in the digital age are two of Ridolfo and Rife’s primary concerns. This is outlined in ‘the Maggie case’, where the image of a young student, Maggie Ryan, was reused in an unforeseen way and changed meaning, although it was not because the content had changed-it was the same picture of Maggie in the snow-but because the genre had shifted. What was initially a photograph of a student protest against sweatshops got cropped into a promotional mailer for the university.

The genre of the picture was what changed, not the picture itself. Because of what we, as a social group know of a snowball fight, the genre is shifted from ‘image of protest’ to ‘image of non-threatening fun.’ These genre-shifts are apparent to us because of what theorist Carolyn Miller proposes about genre as social action.
Because the target audience of both the protest and the mailer understands certain social context clues, like picket signs and snowball fights, respectively, the context can be cultivated to create a genre shift in the minds of the audience.

Ridolfo and Rife also argue, as a secondary concern that the adoption of an ‘Orphan Works’ act, or a copyright law that would make it easier to “appropriate texts, images, and sounds that have no owner.” (Ridolfo and Rife, 232)
They argue that this will lead to ‘parent’ figures, such as the university in the Maggie case, to have more control over the more ambiguously credited works that are considered ‘orphan.’ Or even cases that could be considered de minimis in the eyes of the law, could become greater offenses under an ‘Orphan Works’ law.
By creating a commons culture, where creators are aware of the potential reuse of their original works, and take steps to either prevent reuse or to allow reasonable ‘fair use’ of their original work, problems like ‘orphan works’ and unfair appropriation could be solved without multi-million dollar lawsuits.

Works Cited:

Ridolfo, Jim, and Martine Courant Rife. "Rhetorical Velocity and Copyright: A Case Study on Strategies of Rhetorical Delivery." Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom. By Martine Courant. Rife, Shaun Slattery, and Dànielle Nicole. DeVoss. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2011. N. pag. 

References:

Miller, Carolyn. "Genre as Social Action." Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-169