Rhetorical Snapshots

New materialism, especially the work of Bruno Latour, and posthuman rhetorical theory (e.g., Nathaniel Rivers, Thomas Rickert, and Byron Hawk) recognize digital technologies as significant actors in rhetorical and social activity. A new materialist approach, then, provides a theoretical framework to explain and expand the powerful impact of digital technologies on rhetoric. Such an approach allows me to align pedagogical and administrative practices with a robust, networked theory of action and agency.

Most salient to the discussions of agency under consideration in this chapter, however, we might account for the prevalence of these public actors – as well as the use of the hashtag by politicians/leaders (2 % of coded actors) and organizations (12% of coded actors) – by considering that #BostonMarathon was initially inaugurated as a more official digital space through its association with Boston Athletic Association’s @BostonMarathon in the days and hours leading up the race. This original actor lends a sense of credibility to the tag, and though the tags original purpose is supplanted by a number of competing purposes after the intervention of the bombing, all of the purposes and intentions that follow depend on the established credibility of the tag to build their own.

Analyzing #BostonMarathon's top tweets for the 4 hours after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing

New materialist conceptions of distributed agency and intricately related, infinitesimally small sets of causes and effects offer one way of reading the landscape created by tracing a snapshot of the network associated with #BostonMarathon. To understand the deployment of this network and how it was affected by the intervention of the bombing, I will use the remaining space to sketch a series of moments in the continuing life of the hashtag. In doing so, I hope to illustrate the sometimes conflicting intentions of the members of the network and suggest that no single set of intentions adequately explains the impact of #BostonMarathon.