ENGL5377 - War, Ethos, Media and Culture: 2010

This is Jeannie's part of the discussion which will be held on the 6th. While Khouloud and I have our separate discussions, we hope that they will inform one another and build on one another in a productive way. Below are my notes and questions. I have already sent out my readings; if you have not received them or need them again, please let me know and I will send them out again. I will also email you the annotations needed for the class in a separate email. Please let me know if you have not received them.

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My goal for my part of class discussion is more broadly focused around comparing and contrasting the use of cultural models to analyze websites versus the use of ethos to analyze websites. This will marry well with Khouloud’s discussion, I think, as we can focus this broad question by first discussing these models in general, then situate them within Khouloud’s discussion, or vice versa by first discussing Khouloud's nicely focused topic and then work outward to my more broad topic. I think both Khouloud and I get to the question of methods and ethics, so they should go together well.

Notes on the Readings for December 6th
The first three of the following readings for this discussion are provided on the Moodle. We have already read in class, so I did not provide an annotation for them. Please just glance over them for a refresher (focus mainly on the method and conclusion sections). The last two are focused around the use of ethos to analyze and build websites; I have emailed these to you already.
1) Wurtz’s “A Cross Cultural Analysis of Websites from High Context Cultures and Low Context Cultures”
2) Hermeking’s “Culture and Internet Consumption: Contributions from Cross Cultural Marketing and Advertising Research”
3) Callahan’s “Cultural Similarities and Differences in the Design of University Websites”
4) Spoel’s “Communicating Values, Valuing Community through Health Care Websites: Midwifery’s Online Ethos and Public Communication in Ontario”
5) Hunt’s “Establishing a Presences on the World Wide Web: A Rhetorical Approach”

Since we have little time in class to discuss the details of the articles, we will focus on more broad questions that will require us to compare and contrast “culture” vs “ethos” and determine the utility, or non utility, of each. In the first three articles, cultural models drove the analysis of websites in order to determine how culture influences the design of websites and conversely to determine the values of the culture the website was “speaking” to or reflective of. The authors then derived conclusions about the culture under question based on how the website was designed. In the last two articles, the authors used a rhetorical concept of ethos: Spoel to understand how sociopolitical tensions affect the rhetorical construction of the audience and the site, and how the website’s design communicated the professional and communal values of Midwifery and the public; Hunt used ethos to argue for websites to incorporate the values of the Internet, establishing a professional ethos based on communal values. These two were focused around how specific organizations do or should use the Internet and how context shapes rhetorical presence on the Internet, and conversely, how analysis of that rhetorical presence can help us to better understand the context operating on the website, the organization, and the audience (s).
Some questions to consider before class:
1) What types of conclusions do authors relying on cultural models versus authors relying on rhetorical models make?
2) Are Spoel ‘s and Hunt’s use of ethos different from the other three author’s use of culture?
3) If culture and ethos are both based on values, why would we use one over the other, or can we use them interchangeably? How are they the same, and how are they different?

A few Notes for Class
Our entire class this year was devoted to understanding how cultural models are used in intercultural communication, and as we have seen, the use of cultural models in cross-cultural communications situations is not limited to our field. What I think is interesting is that we have, as Technical Communicators, rhetoric as a model and resource. A lot of the research we do, as well as practical models we develop, tend to rely on rhetoric for audience analysis and a host of other things. Why, then, do we rely on cultural models in our intercultural communication work? Why not continue to rely on rhetoric as a resource, and utilize ethos instead?

There are many definitions of ethos, and I have provided you with a few annotations of articles that have really changed and shaped the way we define ethos in the postmodern era. These articles were very formative for my understanding of ethos, and these articles are referred to in the Spoel article you will read for class. This more nuanced conception of ethos doesn’t consider ethos to be an ethical character, or an appeal to authority, but a sort of model of the social context that surrounds each person and exists in a sort of tension or negotiation between the person and the environment and the social aggregate in question. Our ethos is not something we can make up on the fly, but is something that is a complex relationship between the social forces that formed us and within which we operate, it is not something necessarily intrinsic to our nature but a negotiation that goes on constantly between our world and us. While it can have a lot to do with cultural values, and it often does, I think it is often a more nuanced view of someone in a social context. To analyze using ethos requires us to look closely at the values of the situation, but also social factors influencing the person, the situation, the communication act and anything else we think might be contributing to this social negotiation. And all these factors are constantly changing, causing us to reassess across individual contexts. Thus, ethos can not only be useful in a situation, as in the application of a framework to understand human interaction, but it can also be epistemological.

My suspicion is that cultural models don’t always allow for a nuanced perspective that is epistemological. Instead, it appears that cultural models are often used to justify conclusions already reached. I also suspect that cultural models make it easy to generalize, and that they are not as epistemological as ethos can be.

In the end, that is my own perspective, but we must all decide for ourselves this ultimate question(s): As technical communicators and rhetoricians, if we find ourselves in a position where we have to understand a communication act that appears to be cross, trans or inter cultural, will we rely on cultural models as our framework, or rhetorical model, such as ethos? Will we use these as a framework to drive our methods and research, or will we use them as an afterthought to justify our conclusions? Will we use them epistemologically, or to build our credibility?

To focus our discussion, here are some specific questions:
1) As technical communicators, which would be more useful in a given situation, where we need to either understand an audience’s values or where we need to design a website for a different audience?
2) Can we speak of an ethos outside an organization? Can we speak of a culture within an organization? How do ethos and culture relate to one another? What are their respective spheres? I may not ever share your culture, but can I share your ethos?
3) How does all of this speak to Khouloud’s question about the role of the technical communicator in media choices during times of war, or when involved in media choices related to wars in other countries ? Is it more ethical for us, Western TCers having to navigate cultural contexts, to focus our choices based on “culture,” or on “ethos?” Why or why not?
4) Khouloud’s discussion offers many of us an interesting opportunity to determine for ourselves which model is more useful. Many of us probably share a Western perspective on the rhetoric of the war; many of us probably don’t understand the perspective of a Muslim or person who lives in the Middle East. Is it more epistemological for us to use ethos to understand that perspective, or is it more epistemological for us to fall back on a cultural model?

ENGL5377 - War, Ethos, Media and Culture

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Ethos v Culture as competing or complementary lenses

Friday, October 22, 2010