Paper Idea

The following is a brief proposal I wrote for the Computers and Writing conference. I am really interested in how multimodality has made what is really scientific and complex information more accessible for the masses and how these websites has really furthered the green movement, in a grass roots movement sort of way.  :

People use computer technologies to make their lives easier. They go online to pay bills, find recipes, check their child’s school progress. They read blogs, join discussion boards and visit websites to forge relationships with other people with similar interests. Going online often works as a strong agent of change to bring people together in forums that, Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd explain, “require a public audience and usually seek as large an audience as possible, the rhetorical aim being to influence opinion or action.” Users‘ daily online experiences broaden social and cultural dynamics and allow people to interact on a global scale, and the sites they visit provide people more accessibility to ideas and practices they otherwise would not. They are similar to a Bakhtinian chronotope, which C.F. Schryer describes as genres that reflect social beliefs in the action of individuals in space/time interactions (84). The current movement to “go green” is one such example of people coming together to learn more about and further their environmental lifestyles.

This presentation examines ways websites like Tree Hugger and Planet Green and blogs like Ideal Bite have made “going green“ more accessible to a wider audience. These sites offer people tips and provide how-to articles that will help them go green in their daily lives. These readers may not totally understand what a carbon footprint is, but they are learning to reduce their own. These multimodal sites offer various media from videos about starting a compost to podcasts featuring interviews with celebrities and their efforts to go green; blurring boundaries by continuously teaching, while entertaining users at the same time. This presentation will be a rhetorical analysis on the ways these sites use multiple media and discussion forums
to build online communities.