Page 134 →Conclusion
Perhaps more than any other genre, encyclopedias demand the work of a collective in the fullest sense of the term. As the limits of the genre stretched during the early modern era to hold the universe that “universal dictionaries” gathered and sold, so too did the physical books that contained them. By then the known world had grown so large that no single person could hope to master all areas of knowledge, although one could still create a successful career in natural philosophy that combined the arts, craft work, and what would eventually be known as science. Composing a reference text required careful consideration of existing literature and information gathered from one’s contemporaries, recomposition of those gleanings into a new, coherent text, and the creation of a useable information architecture and interface. The nature of this curatorial work demanded that the author relinquish some degree of authority and collaborate extensively with amanuenses, publishers, societies with vested interests, and the craftsmen of the printing house. At each turn humans and nonhumans worked together to produce the material form of a text that was physically large, heavy, and dense.
Not much has changed, and yet everything has changed. Dynamic textual curation of complex information ecologies is no longer the future, as it was when Wells, Bush, and Nelson proposed their plans for a mechanized encyclopedia. Nor is it something that happens only within specialized collectives such as Wikipedia. It is simply what writing looks like now, particularly in large, open, digital texts: real-time collaborative practices that manage expanding and contracting texts with nearly infinite information capacities. It is writing that hums with life as texts are gathered, filtered, and recomposed, as links are made and tightened within a network, and as information structures are erected on constantly unfolding scaffolds. The humans and nonhuman actors that come together in these projects collaborate, argue, facilitate, vandalize, revert, police, send money, print pages, and build interfaces. Above all else they contribute.
At their best they curate, delivering usable, structured information in the best ways they can by working with the tools that they have, creating texts that take full advantage of the possibilities offered by digital environments. Lunsford described this potentiality some time ago in her discussion of the broadened Page 135 →dynamics of digital writing: “It is as though our old reliable rhetorical triangle of writer, reader, and message is transforming itself before our eyes, moving from three discrete angles to a shimmering, humming, dynamic set of performative relationships.”1 Curated texts and the collectives that produce them exemplify these performative relationships, which are centered in the curated product itself, in the functions that networked, informative texts (whether analog or digital) should perform and help users perform. The small and often invisible texts that make websites functional are essential elements that help us realize the fullest potential of digital environments. These aspects of functional digital composition and compositional labor help us better account for the full range of skill and labor in new media writing in our classrooms, in our research, and at our own desks.
Curatorial work challenges comfortable notions of what constitutes authorial agency, autonomy, originality, and authority. By inviting the crowd as collaborators, either through use of prior texts or through direct contributions, curators surrender claims to original genius in favor of the powerful potential of distributed collaboration. The cumulative knowledge and labor of contributors enables exponential development of not just knowledge and texts, but also interfaces and technological actors, which in turn also contribute to the product. This openness brings with it the inevitability of destructive performances, whether in the obvious form of vandalism or in the development of systemic biases, heavy policy structures, and exclusionary discourse that narrow collectives and texts. This distributed authorship disrupts notions of the Author as a distinctly generative construct that brings forth rather than destroys. Understanding agency as the potential to act and be recognized requires acknowledgment of destructive performances and ambivalent, mutable texts that change over time as new performances are layered on top of old. The decentralization of authority within these distributed collectives renders visible the kinetic energy of rhetorical agency. Agency is a potentiality possessed by no single actor, but created through the friction of human and nonhuman actors composing, building, negotiating, reading, finding.
The work and life cycle of nonhuman writers offer a particularly clear demonstration of the ways in which authorial agency is articulated among multiple agents: humans, nonhumans, the community, socially negotiated expectations, the text, and the technology. They also experience recursion, returning to its coder for repairs, updates, revision, and redeployment. Understanding the work of writing an encyclopedia as distributed rhetorical performances by both human and nonsentient agents demonstrates its inherent dependence on interactions that function as points within a larger articulated structure.
Accounting for nonhumans in models of rhetorical action has the potential to enrich our understanding of fundamental aspects of rhetoric itself. Traditionally Page 136 →our discussions concerning rhetoric—even rhetoric and technology—have proceeded from a human-centered approach. This has produced human-centered conclusions, as one might expect. It has also produced questions that have been largely concerned with ways of developing rhetorics of technology rather than asking how technologies themselves affect us, work on and through us, and are themselves persuasive. Shifting the balance toward a more equitable emphasis on the ways that we live and communicate alongside machinery opens space for us to think more broadly about rhetoric itself, the ways it develops, and the ways that it fundamentally functions.