Week 5: On new wine in old wineskins: A reflection on the first half of Collin Gifford Brooke's LINGUA FRACTA: Towards A Rhetoric of New Media

The ideas presented so far in my reading of Lingua Fracta have been very stimulating for a number of reasons, notwithstanding the writer's adaptation of classical rhetoric and its canon to fit new media forms. The title of my entry, therefore, is as much a puncept, that I hope the contents of my reflection will define and extend, as it is a homage to Brooke's intentionality in the title of his book to reflect the nuances related to the space between technology and rhetoric, new media's crossing of physical and temporal boundaries, and its ability to simultaneously unite and disperse consumers.

To this end, come with me momentarily on a hypertextual[esque] journey to a canon of a different sort, specifically, the Bible, in the book of Luke 5: 36 to 39, where Jesus philosophizes that new wine cannot be poured into old wineskins as an answer to his challengers' questions about his and his disciples' apparent failure to adhere to a spiritual practice in a form that was consistent with tradition. What I wish to emphasize is not the value of the religious practice, but the impracticality of new wine in an old vessel, the danger being that the old vessel cannot adequately contain the new wine due to fermentation, expansion and eventual bursting, and spillage of wine. His response was a call to his challengers to not only acknowledge but also adjust to a changing landscape, instead of viewing his actions as a rejection of what had already been established as a good practice. As such, the wineskin as a vessel is not abandoned, but a new iteration of a wineskin is needed.

In a similar way, Brooke seems to contend that forcing new wine (i.e. new media) into the old wineskin (rhetorical canons seen through the lens of printed text) destroys the intrinsic value of new media, and he instead calls for the creation of new wine skins (i.e. the revisioning of the canons) to allow for the expansion of not only the wine (new media) but also the stretching of the wineskins (the rhetorical canons) themselves. Brooke (2009) notes: "the concerns named by the canons persist to this day, but our means of articulating and fulfilling them changes as information technologies change" (p. xvii). Thus, the relationship between new media and the canon is not static, but dynamic, and the effects are manifested in a variety of ways, each potentially affecting the other.

As it relates to new media, old wineskin can manifest itself in a myriad of ways: strict adherence to readings of new media that value critical reception of the text over production and reader responses; the belief that critical accounts of new media will assist with the design of a rhetoric for it, an assumption that "carries little credibility" as it relates to learning to write in relation to reading "exemplary" texts (Brooke, 2009, p. 15) and remediation as a means to rhetorical ends (p. 21). Brooke (2009) promises a reframing of the canons to suit new media later in the book, a process which begins by shifting from "text to interface (or from page to screen...)" (p. 23).

I offer a final note on this exchange between Jesus and his interlocuters. Rooted in the question which elicited his response was fear - fear of loss of relevance, fear of loss of tradition, fear of new wine (and wineskins). Brooke recognizes, in what I choose to interpret as a decidedly human reaction to change, fear across several ages as it relates to the development of new media and resultant loss of any of the five canons of rhetoric (i.e. invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery). For example, he notes Plato's bemoaning the loss of memory as an inevitable result of the transition from orality in ancient Greece to the 'new media' of the written form. This is not unlike an argument "2500 years later [when] Sven Birkerts (1995)" warns that memory as "historical perspective" would be lost through digital writing (Brooke, 2009, p. 31). I think most will agree (as Brooke also points out) that writing has, in fact, preserved memory in ways that orality could not, the point being that the canon of memory remains, though conceptualized in a slightly different form than Plato imagined. I think now about the latest new media, artificial intelligence, and the fears about the loss of the canon of invention that it engenders. For this reason, I look forward to the second half of Brooke's book, where the revisioning of the canons is detailed.

With the imposition of my biblical analogy aside, allow me one further indulgence to say that Brooke "takes readers to church" with an argument that forces us to consider new media in a more substantial way, one that goes beyond seeing it as a new subgenre within writing studies but as a bonafide part of the continuum of rhetoric which is rooted in classic tradition and worthy of sustained interrogation of its form, function and impact.