Also at work here, is a deep engagement with the most prominent new media theorists and an articulation of how the ideas of McLuhan, Bolter and Grusin and Lev Manovich (and again, etc.) are applied to inform forward thinking regarding conceptions like “media,” and “remediation,” “text” and “hypertext.” In this way, even as Brooke is invoking his own theoretical framework he is doing so with scaffolding from a cast of respected scholarly progenitors. Brooke’s engagement with the difficult theoretical concepts of Manovich or Burke, for example, and the way he takes up the tools that they provide to build his own frameworks gives the author and his ideas a “practice-what-I-preach” ethos. For a book like Lingua Fracta, that ethos is particularly important. As Brooke himself mentions, refashioning the canons is a bold move to make. But the work he does to scaffold and situate his ideas make his bigger moves manageable.
Indeed, despite the density of some of the theoretical constructs at play in Lingua Fracta, Brooke’s book works nicely as an introduction to understanding the function of rhetorical studies in English, and may even serve as a heuristic for revisiting and rethinking through old rhetorical concepts. For example, much of Brooke’s text focuses on the canons of classical rhetoric and includes the proposal that “new media invites us to rethink (or reinvent) the canons . . . understanding them as practices that might, in turn, be used to understand the proliferation of interfaces that surround us” (xiii). He goes on to both rethink and reinvent those canons, but does so in a way that guides the reader back through the canons. By the end of the book, I like Brooks also admits, was reminded of how useful they can be for understanding discourse.
Another reason I wanted to go back and reread was that this was my first encounter with any text that drew on the concept of media ecologies. I’ve heard the term used from time to time, but this was the first time a major project that I have come across uses the term “ecology” to describe a complex system for understanding discourse. I love it. Ecology, he argues, “has become a crucial framework in recent years, particularly for scholars who examine media that, paradoxically, grow increasingly interconnected and global, on the one hand, and ever more diverse and intricate, on the other hand.” (28) For me this is fascinating and potentially very useful in my own future projects. It hints of the Bakhtinian concept of the “heteroglot,” but with, perhaps, a more manageable set of terms and guiding metaphors.
Finally, and very simply put, of the success of the book for me is related to my own desire to take up his ideas and use them in my own work. I already mentioned my interest in media ecologies, but my desire to emulate goes beyond that single concept. The final sentence of the book communicates Brooke’s desire to have made “a strong contribution to our discipline’s efforts at developing a rhetoric of new media” (201). I think he succeeded.
