Digital Rhetoric

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Digital Rhetoric

Deepfaking Keanu: YouTube deepfakes, platform visual effects, and the complexity of reception

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110304
Author(s):  
Lisa Bode
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Digital Rhetoric ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Media Creation ◽  
Media Practices

On July 14, 2019, a 3-minute 36-second video titled “Keanu Reeves Stops A ROBBERY!” was released on YouTube visual effects (VFX) channel, Corridor. The video’s click-bait title ensured it was quickly shared by users across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Comments on the video suggest that the vast majority of viewers categorised it as fiction. What seemed less universally recognised, though, was that the performer in the clip was not Keanu Reeves himself. It was voice actor and stuntman Reuben Langdon, and his face was digitally replaced with that of Reeves, through the use of an AI generated deepfake, an open access application, Faceswap, and compositing in Adobe After Effects. This article uses Corridor’s deepfake Keanu video (hereafter shorted to CDFK) as a case study which allows the fleshing out of an, as yet, under-researched area of deepfakes: the role of framing contexts in shaping how viewers evaluate, categorise, make sense of and discuss these images. This research draws on visual effects scholarship, celebrity studies, cognitive film studies, social media theory, digital rhetoric, and discourse analysis. It is intended to serve as a starting point of a larger study that will eventually map types of online manipulated media creation on a continuum from the professional to the vernacular, across different platforms, and attending to their aesthetic, ethical, cultural and reception dimensions. The focus on context (platform, creator channel, and comments) also reveals the emergence of an industrial and aesthetic category of visual effects, which I call here “platform VFX,” a key term that provides us with more nuanced frames for illuminating and analysing a range of manipulated media practices as VFX software becomes ever more accessible and lends itself to more vernacular uses, such as we see with various face swap apps

Embodied Digital Rhetoric

2014 ◽  
pp. 312-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nonny de la Peña
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Digital Rhetoric ◽  
Immersive Virtual Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
Technological Tools ◽  
Pass Through

A new embodied digital rhetoric emerges when using nonfiction narratives built in fully immersive virtual reality systems that take advantage of the plasticity of our sensations of presence. The feeling of “being-in-the-world” as described by phenomenologists, including philosophy of mind, film, and virtual reality theorists, is part of the adaptability that humans show in their relationship to technological tools. Andy Clark's “soft selves” and our “plastic presence” merge as the high resolution graphics of the latest virtual reality goggles and robust audio captured at real events tricks our minds into having an embodied connection with the stories portrayed in these new spaces. By putting people into news or documentary pieces on scene as themselves, opportunities for persuasive and effective rhetoric arise. This chapter cites theory, psychology and virtual reality research as well as the author's specific case studies to detail the potential for this new embodied digital rhetoric that allows us to pass through the screen and become present as witnesses to a nonfiction story.

The Persuasive Language of Action

2014 ◽  
pp. 113-129
Author(s):  
Martin van Velsen
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Digital Video ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Role Playing ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Digital Rhetoric ◽  
Current Generation ◽  
Role Playing Games ◽  
Body Of Knowledge

Besides the visual splendor pervasive in the current generation of digital video games, especially those where players roam simulated landscapes and imaginary worlds, few efforts have looked at the resources available to embed human meaning into a game's experience. From the art of persuasion to the mechanics of meaning-making in digital video games and table-top role playing games, this chapter investigates the changes and new opportunities available that can extend our understanding of digital rhetoric. Starting with a breakdown of the role of choice, workable models from psychology and the untapped body of knowledge from table-top role playing games are shown to allow game designers to enrich their products with a deeper human experience.

Networked Digital Spaces

2016 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Stephanie N. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Composition Classroom ◽  
Digital Rhetoric ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
College Composition ◽  
Classroom Experience ◽  
Composition Classrooms ◽  
Classroom Composition ◽  
Language And Communication ◽  
Digital Spaces

As the landscape for communication changes with new and evolving digital technologies, the format for college composition classrooms must change and adapt as well. If we are moving towards compositions that are created by and mediated through a screen, we must adopt new approaches for talking about and teaching these new forms of language and communication. During the fall 2014 semester, I was given the opportunity to teach a composition class focused on digital rhetoric. As a facet of the classroom experience, my students created and used Twitter accounts for fictional characters. Utilizing Twitter within the composition classroom allowed students to compose as a part of a much larger network of actors that interact with the texts they create. As a form of networked communication, the compositions created by students through this medium demanded interaction and engagement in a way that a classroom composition, shared only between student and instructor, does not.

Digital Rhetoric and Globalization

2016 ◽  
pp. 431-469
Author(s):  
Gustav Verhulsdonck
Keyword(s):  
Activity Theory ◽  
Programming Language ◽  
Continuum Model ◽  
Computer Mediated Communication ◽  
Digital Rhetoric ◽  
Mediated Communication ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Global And Local

Digital rhetoric has been discussed by many theorists as comprising a marked shift from ancient rhetoric's focus on persuasion. For some of the earlier theorists, digital rhetoric defined a novel relationship between literacy and the mechanics of text as computer-mediated communication and changed relationships between consuming, producing and engaging with discourse as information on a screen. Later digital rhetoricians argue different approaches and definitions that are more inclusive of the different types of discourse facilitated by multimodal, interactive, immersive, and computer-mediated communication as semantic discourse at the interface level and encoded through computer programming language, servers, and networks. This chapter focuses on the different modes of digital rhetoric in the context of globalization through a convergence-continuum model approach. The model presented approaches rhetoric and discourse from various levels as loosely based on the models of activity theory, multimodality intercultural theories of globalization and integrates them into a continuum model ranging from global, public modes to individual, personal digital rhetorical modes and practices. Instead of being prescriptive, this model is descriptive in recognizing the fluid natures of digital rhetorical interactions whereby global and local, public and private, group and individual, production and consumption, human and technological, physical and virtual and other discourse contexts merge.

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