Enthymeme-ing by Emergence

How to Turn your Wiki into a Musical Instrument

gif animation of a selection from Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage

The rhythms of peer-to-peer rhetorics demand a participatory "response-ability" beyond the traditional, deliberative, rational understanding of audience. Networked writers tune to and with fellow participants, informants, and contingent cooperators in distributed ontologies animated by coordinated multimedia performances. The affective and often neglected sonic register of information creates space for different approaches to sharing and testing the tacit premises and discontinuous "packets" of claims that comprise digital ecologies. As with resonance technologies like the phonograph, radio, and magnetic tape, student rhetors can turn wikis into instruments for playing un-composed sound elements, such as the creative commons-licensed data accessible at the freesound project and soundtransit. Working closely with un-composed swatches of sound, participants experience a shift in composer-performer-listener relations first charted in 20th-century musical practice (Fluxus, sampling, p2p), and experiment with the similar shift in the connections between writer and audience we find in digital rhetoric today, such as the open legislation experiments in this year's broadband bill-writing process.

Participatory experiments in this chaotic art and science of enthymeme-ing by emergence may offer ways to help students learn that they already have an inchoate but intuitive (and therefore reliable) method for listening, for finding patterns of resonance, and making rhetorical choices in peer-to-peer networks of ideation and exchange.