| Delivery Machines theorizes a new media practice (that is, electrate practice) for the rhetorical canon of delivery. Delivery, in both orality and literacy, has traditionally been undertheorized by scholars of rhetoric, beginning with Aristotle's reticence for the practice of delivery as a whole. This makes sense, given that Aristotle was trying to invent delivery practices pertinent to the technology of alphabetic print, and not rely upon the technologies of the body. Our present situation is analogous to Aristotle's: a new language apparatus, electracy (as developed by Gregory L. Ulmer---the skill set necessary to use all the communicative technologies of new media) is emerging, and new practices, or at least theories, should also emerge to make use of new media technologies. While many scholars in rhetoric and composition studies, or even writing studies in general, attempt to fit new media technologies into the existing logic of literacy, Ulmer notes that each language technology works within a unique language apparatus, and so many scholars of "media literacy" are looking in the wrong places, trying to retrofit the logics developed specifically for alphabetic print to work for a technology that uses print, image, and sound, coupled with the digital internet. Thus, scholars of rhetoric, finding the same problem as Aristotle, try to theorize delivery at the dead end of literacy; that is, they look to understand how the visual aspects of writing become aspects of delivery rather than ask what new kinds of delivery does electracy make possible. Delivery Machines, then, does not attempt to recover the canon of delivery as it was before literacy, but to invent delivery practices specifically for the developing communication apparatus of electracy as understood through the lens of grammatology. |
