Wikis and Rhetoric as Epistemic

Since there’s so much going on in Kress’s book, I’ll note one specific way in which I see online spaces such as wikis as rhetorical in how they make meaning/knowledge. I’ve done a small amount of research on wikis and how they distort traditional binaries of author/reader and challenge absolute “Truth” by hosting competing perspectives of “truths.” So to be clear, Kress has helped solidify my understanding of current instantiations of rhetoric as epistemic (which is, in my view, one of the most fascinating issues surrounding rhetoric and composition studies and one that I’m constantly looking to get involved in). Kress notes that currently knowledge is made in online spaces such as wikis, blogs—and we could, I think, add social-networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest. Of the knowledge produced in these spaces, he writes, “When knowledge is made anywhere, by anyone, ‘knowledge’ ceases to be ‘canonical’” (133). Later, in differentiating between knowledge and the circulation of information, he asserts:

a new sense of ‘knowledge’ [has been accepted] that is always made rather than being communicated. What is communicated is ‘information’. Knowledge is produced by individuals according to their interest and their need in their life worlds at the moment of making (Boeck, 2004). Knowledge and meaning, as much as the texts and objects which are their material realizations, are seen as the outcomes of processes of design motivated by individual interest. (134)

First of all, to acknowledge the larger implications of Kress’s discussion, he is using this reflection on knowledge-making, in one sense, to develop his argument for the current definition and uses of design, and its prominent role in contemporary meaning-making. Secondly, Kress frames the emergence of wikis and other aforementioned online spaces in which knowledge is produced against the backdrop of larger social changes: namely, the rise (or emphasis) of individual agency as well as the growing prominence of the capitalist market above—which favors a wide array of individual choices/options—to the state—which, traditionally, favored a top down rule/established convention (133-34). 

For my purposes I want to go back specifically to the design of wikis. I understand them to be rhetorical insofar as they are open-source forums in which knowledge is constantly evolving and being contested by a multiplicity of people who bring to bear their own unique understandings and experiences on the existing information. This effaces the idea of top-down knowledge making in which a few professional produce and disseminate knowledge that the mass of consumers passively accept—or, for the most part. Now, by way of wikis and the like, everyone has the opportunity to be not only consumers but producers, not only writers but editors. (As an aside: I’m not suggesting that there’s no gate-keeping community involved in the knowledge that goes onto wikis, as if anyone could simply post anything and expect it to pass; there is still consensus.) Kress helps with my understanding of knowledge-making as rhetorical by his attention to design, which gets me back to visual rhetoric. Wiki design through being open-source makes clear the contemporary belief that knowledge is fluid, that it is produced socially, that it is very interconnected with other forms/branches of knowledge, and that there are competing ideas of truth. The links located throughout any given page suggest a kind of nexus of knowledge/meaning that you might not necessarily (or as clearly) get the sense of from reading a traditional text book or hearing a lecture. Its open calls for verification (primarily through citations to external links) calls for/provides a richer context in which to frame any given subject, and verification(like everything else on a wiki) can be potentially provided by anyone; no one professional or exclusive group of professionals is needed to authorize or verify anything. Finally, that you can rate the trustworthiness of the page gives a sense of power to the individual; everything is decided by consensus. In summation the design of wikis (and I’ve been considering Wikipedia) argue rhetorically for a certain approach/outlook on the production of knowledge and the important of 1) the individual and 2) the consensus of the given community.