An Analysis
Audience: teachers, academic institutions, students, scholars. It discusses changes in the world, particularly related to the field of rhetoric, that are relevant to the individuals and organizations involved in writing and technology.
Design: colorful, modern, nontraditional. It pushes back on the old style of academic texts to explore mediums of color, font, and current trends in visual rhetoric. For example, this issue’s venn diagram of copyright, ownership, and authorship caught my attention. It catered to me, a visual learner, and helped my brain to comprehend the issue’s focus.
Compared to Previous Issues: Going back several years, Kairos made use of color, images, and video. But this recent issue fully embraces current design waves, with resembling night mode and playing with dark, negative space. This style is popular, appealing, and challenges old, traditional designs.
A General Discussion
“As new technologies and ways to use them have emerged, so have new issues involving ownership, authorship, and copyright” (Kairos). This thesis statement immediately sound similar to observations on multiliteracies, how new medias have created new literacies. Kairos studies how the Internet and digital media has exploded, focusing on questions of how ownership and licensing should now exist. Should there be more copyright laws or less? Is authorship praised too much or not enough? How do we keep track of ownership? Kairos‘s editors acknowledge the “fluidity” with ownership, authorship, and copyright, the rules of which were once quite clear. They discuss how these three concepts overlap in many ways.
Kairos acknowledges how the available technological infrastructure sets the framework for how rhetoric is created, shared, distributed, licensed, and traced. Similar to how the explosion of new medias led to new literacies, content on digital media has expanded massively, and it does so quickly, in such a way that its original source is often from a collaboration of authors or lost altogether. For example, when a new slang term is developed, it is spread through posts, videos, messages, hashtags, and other means until it is almost impossible to credit the owner/creator of that term. A side effect is that people who are highly literate in that media learn that term, adding it to their vocabulary, and thereby further grow the world of multiliteracies.
Kairos also discusses how these new medias and changing attitudes toward rhetoric have challenged views on authorship and plagiarism. Copyright is a still a prevalent concept, but there are debates from people who believe that content should be shared more openly, that copyrighting certain materials excludes groups of people or ideas. This is similar to Selfe’s argument, where she revisits academia’s worship of written rhetoric. When one way of learning was the only way available, it created an exclusive education, blocking out women and minorities.
One particularly unique concept discussed in “Copyright, Content, and Control: Student Authorship Across Educational Technology Platforms” questions the usefulness of certain educational technology resources. It suggests that while media is expanding, and academia is utilizing it, students may be disadvantaged in terms of control over the content they create and the copyrights over that content. Put quite simply, “we are concerned that educational platforms that are commonly used for learning and teaching do not facilitate or allow for students to exert ownership and control over their own contributions” (Amidan). This article is designed in a casual blog style, with a text-heavy focus and one image.
Contrary to the article on student ownership, two other featured articles present a very different, multimodal style. “A Perspective on Modding and Ownership” provides text with smaller margins, which is less overwhelming for the reader, and a video that directly relates to the article’s content. Samuel Jackson Fuller discusses the incident that occurred when Nintendo shut down a fan-made version of a Pokemon game. In retaliation, other fans gained access to the game and released it anyway, for they believed that it was content worth sharing. Fuller presents a viable solution to this conflict alongside an intelligent discussion on modding and the conflicts of ownership connected to it. The other article featured, “Collaboration And/Against Copyright: Notes Home from the Technology Revolution Battefield,” shares notes on the problematic power of copyright. It does so in an entirely different style than the other articles: Its landing page consists of only a title and images that require the reader to engage with the visual rhetoric and captioned text. It also bravely includes an informal font and illustration for its heading and title, along with a colorful web page background.
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