John Jones

John Jones, March 2009
The University of Texas at Austin

This video contains a portion of my presentation at SXSWi in March 2009. The text below is a slightly longer version of that talk.

In the rhetorical canon, arrangement referred to the practice of ordering the elements of a text in the most effective manner. Due to their reliance on speech as the as the primary means of communication, classical rhetoricians treated arrangement in a very static way. This was possible because when speaking, the speaker has a great deal of control over the way in which an audience accesses information. Before the invention of recording equipment, there was only one way to consume spoken text: in the order in which it was spoken.

Because speakers were in absolute control of the order in which information was consumed, they were under a great deal of pressure to provide their listeners with an effective and easily manageable way of consuming information. As a result, the typical arrangement pattern recommended by Cicero and adopted by other classical rhetoricians—"say something before addressing the case, then set forth the case, after that prove it by establishing our own arguments and refuting those of our opponents, then conclude the speech" (De Oratore 2.307)—was for many years the primary means of organizing oral communication. This rigid, temporal structure helped ensure efficiency and clarity in communication.

Writing, and later printed texts, eliminated the temporal dominance of speech in communication, and, consequently, the need for the presenter to be in absolute control of the flow of information. Printed texts gave readers a measure of control in that they could reread difficult portions of a text or set a text down and return to it later. While authors still had control over a text's arrangement—the standard for books and other printed materials is for them to have a sequential order—they were no longer in control over the way a reader consumed the text. The sequential order of a book is no guarantee that it will be read straight through from page 1 to page n. Rather the arrangement of a book suggests a path that the reader can follow. Many of the major developments in fiction in the 20th century—stream-of-consciousness, postmodern game-playing, hypertext fiction—attempted to incorporate in writing the reality that there is no single path through a text by offering multiple ways of interacting with textual products.

Writing, and especially print, did however provide authors with a major new means of arrangement: spatial arrangement. While authors were no longer in control of the temporal consumption of information on the part of their readers, they did have a great deal of control over the spatial arrangement of that information. Print provided texts with a great deal of fixity, meaning that the printed pages were difficult to alter, and therefore tended to stay in the same order. Further, authors, typically in collaboration with others, could provide new channels of information to their texts in the design of textual elements. The choice of a typeface, the placement of illustrations and graphics: these elements all provide the author with new opportunities for sharing information with an audience, but the integrity of that information often depended on the fixity of print. The increased communication power of a graph can be rendered useless if the image is separated from accompanying explanatory text.

To briefly sum up: whereas oral arrangement was designed for and around the temporality of speech, print arrangement takes advantage of the control the author has over the fixity and spatiality of printed texts.

Digital texts, particularly those accessed on the internet, disturb both the temporal arrangement that is the hallmark of oral speech and the spatial arrangement of print. With digital texts readers are in control of both the order in which they consume texts as well as the formatting and display of those texts through creating custom style sheets.

Let's look at the example of Twitter. Twitter allows a certain kind of temporal arrangement, similar to oral speech. New tweets are added in a temporal sequence to your personal Twitter page, as well as to your follower's pages. However, like a printed text, readers can read those tweets in whatever order they choose, and it is likely that that order will be reverse-chronological.

Perhaps more significantly, Twitter texts, like other social media texts, upset the spatial fixity—the sense of permanence—that is the hallmark of print arrangement. While print arrangement has always been self-destabilizing to the extent that print texts could be published in multiple formats—a book is published in hardback, then slightly differently in paperback; it could have multiple editions, or be excerpted in a magazine—Twitter guarantees this destabilization by automatically publishing every tweet in multiple venues via the API.

Social media, then, present an arrangement challenge that is a hybrid of oral and print. This fact suggests that the arrangement methods common to speech and print are unlikely to be very effective in many social media contexts.

The idea of fixed arrangement can be loosely associated with to the term topoi, which is related to our words 'topics' and 'topography'. In rhetorical theory, topoi refer to fixed "places" that can be returned to by the reader and author. In oral texts, these topoi were ideas that were shared throughout a culture (for this reason the term is often translated as "commonplaces" in rhetorical texts). With writing, and later print, the fixedness of ideas had a direct counterpart in the fixedness of the text. It no longer became necessary for a culture to share an idea, because that idea could be placed in a text and shared physically.

While social media allows for a kind of fixity in place, in that individual parts, like tweets, can be linked to, these units are often too small to matter. The text that matters on Twitter is the stream, not the individual post, and that stream has no fixity. There is no guarantee that any other Twitter user will see a group of tweets in a similar spatial arrangement as you did or in the same order you saw them. Your Twitter-stream is fundamentally different from everyone else's Twitter-stream. From an arrangement standpoint, it's as if everyone had a personalized edition of the newspaper, delivered the sentence-level.

Social media arrangement, then, can't rely on either temporal or spatial fixity. As a Twitter user, I can't control the order in which you encounter my text, or ensure that what you return to will be the same as either of us left it. I can return repeatedly to your Facebook profile or Twitter stream, but it will always be different. In this context, topoi is replaced with chora.

Chora is an alternative to topoi, replacing the image of a fixed place with that of the container. Rather than a rigid, chronological order designed specifically for one type of communication, choral arrangement seeks flexibility and openness in order to suit multiple means of interaction.

As Greg Ulmer writes with regard to chora "do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings" (Heuretics 48). Similarly, we could say that the most effective compositions in social media—the most interesting Twitter users, for example—don't compose for a single understanding or way of interacting with their texts, but rather they compose for many different kinds of interaction. Therefore the most effective rhetorical techniques allow for modularity and reuse. You don't compose a single text; you compose for all possible texts.

In practice, this leads to a lack of transitions and other features that are commonly associated with a text's "coherence." However, one benefit of this change in textual production is that it renders those texts more open. While transitions may make a long-form text easier to read, they have a tendency to cement the elements of that text in a fixed spatial relationship, making the current sentence depend on the previous one, for example. This may be necessary for long-form writing (and may even be necessary for the communication of some complex ideas), but it is not clear that such dependence on holistic coherence is necessary for all communication.

In oral communication, listeners depended on the speaker to provide an order to the text that made it intelligible. In print texts, readers no longer required this ordering because they could read the text in whatever order they chose. However, because printed texts were difficult to rearrange spatially, they required writers to provide them with spatial coherence: elements had to be in a clear relation to each other while transitions and other relationship markers were necessary so that readers could determine the meanings created in the juxtaposition of those elements. Just as print eliminated the need for temporal control on the part of the speaker in an oral environment, social media doesn't require the spatial control that is typical of print. Rather that locking down the parts of a text in a rigid structure—both physically in the form of the printed page and metaphorically through the use of coherence devices—social media creates modular textual components which can be easily reused or repurposed.

In that sense, the most credible (perhaps even ethical) way of writing for social media is by creating texts that facilitate the creation of new texts. Social media writing, then, defers to openness. It depends on modular components. And, by default, provides for remixability.

If you want others to be receptive to your ideas, you allow them to do what they want with those ideas.

To sum up, arrangement for social media is about giving up control and attempts at controlling that characterize oral arrangement, as well as the attempts at coherence that characterize print arrangement. The print features of social media texts ensure that readers will engage them at their own pace, and their modular components will allow those readers to provide their own coherence to this form of communication. This releasing of control, and the arrangement it makes possible, is choral, seeking fulsomeness rather than a strict, single path. In this sense, social media has shifted the power of arrangement—and the interpretation that it allows for—away from the author into the hands of the reader.