Clinamen

The SXSW panel I participated in last week (along with John Jones, Jillian Sayre, Will Burdette, and Trish Roberts-Miller) seemed to go over really well. To our surprise, we presented to a full room at the Austin Convention Center.

In each presentation, a panelist took one of the canons of rhetoric (invention, style, arrangement, memory, delivery) and explained how they were playing out in online spaces like Twitter (though, some of us spoke of the Web more generally). My fellow panelists were predictably brilliant, and the crowd seemed to really dig the conversation. John followed the Twitter conversation that was happening during our panel, and this allowed us to get a good sense of how the audience was reacting.

My presentation was on delivery. I discussed how delivery has often dealt with bodily movement. In my six-minute presentation (we tried to keep the presentations short so that there would be plenty of time for Q&A) I talked about how delivery in the history of rhetorical education dealt with using the body to make meaning. While Cicero thought that teaching delivery in the form of breathing exercises was kind of silly, this didn't stop teachers from showing students the mechanics of delivery. In 19th Century elocution models, such instruction meant that students were shown very specific ways to move their bodies. To bring this discussion to the present, I discussed Obama's delivery. But I also discussed Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video has an example of rhetorical education. All of Beyonce's students (those imitating her on YouTube) are learning to use their bodies to make meaning. Here's the video I showed during my presentation:

Overall, this was a great experience. I think it reminded all of us that we are in a bit of a bubble. Ideas and concepts that we take as commonplace are brand new to most of the world, and the audience seemed to genuinely appreciate that rhetoric offers an interesting way of thinking about communication (online and offline).