Blog Post #4: Multimedia

One thing I’ve been thinking about as I read Ecospeak and reflect on our past class sessions is the role of multimedia in environmental discourse. When I signed up for this course I was really thinking primarily about written discourse (being in the English department, after all), and I expected a lot of reading and writing with a side of discussion.

Yet within the few weeks we’ve been meeting, we haven’t been using just words. We’ve seen films. We were treated to a slide show about the rhetoric surrounding the Glen Canyon damming, rhetoric which itself included photographs and nonacademic discourse venues such as coffee table books. And as part of the course we’ve already visited places (even so simple a place as the ledge of the building, in the rain, for a picture—and of course, Sandia Man Cave, Dr. Kells’ house, and our field trips).

I was a little offput by the idea of field trips at first (what do these have to do with learning Rhetoric and Writing?), but I’ve come to realize that I really do need to expand my ideas of rhetoric to include field trips and all these other media and venues, because they are at least as effective—or more, and maybe in different ways—than simple written words.

Our films have evoked more strongly and vividly the idea of place than you can get out of reading a description in words. I will remember the slaughterhouse in Killer of Sheep because it is burned into my brain—something that might not have happened if I’d read about it, because I could have skipped the uncomfortable scene or sanitized it in my mental representation.

All the little illustrations in Sand County Almanac enliven the text by counterpoint—long arguments and reflections abutted with images of pure nature, offered without explanation or rationalization, just there to evoke the sense of beauty that Leopold claims is the true quarry of hunters. (“Poets sing and hunters scale the mountains primarily for one and the same reason—the thrill to beauty” 230.)

Michaelann’s presentation brought up the power of song, in particular the folk music of Katie Lee. And my own recent experience at a museum in Farmington made me newly aware of how effective immersive experiences can be as rhetorical devices. The museum in question was showing an exhibit on the mechanics of oil and natural gas drilling—not something I’d normally be interested in learning the details of—but in addition to models and photographs and text the exhibit included what was almost a “ride.” If anyone in this class has had the “Evelator” experience in the Museum of Natural History here in Albuquerque, it was like that. Except that it was an oil well I was descending virtually, while “views” out the side scrolled by and the “captain” of the oil rig narrated what was happening. Regardless of my normal feelings for the subject, the ride was engaging. It worked as a piece of rhetoric even though very little writing was involved in it.

So I guess I’ll heed what Killingsworth and Palmer have been saying in Ecospeak, that environmental rhetoric isn’t limited to written reports—that it’s enhanced by Greenpeace’s “theater” and by Worldwatch’s graphs. I’ll keep my eyes open and see what I can find—and give myself future directions for rhetorical enterprise as I do so.