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Nostalgic Design: Rhetoric, Memory, and Democratizing Technology. William C. Kurlinkus. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 262 pp. ISBN: 978-0822965527
Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening. Steph Ceraso. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 193 pp. ISBN: 978-0822965336
Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. John R. Gallagher. Utah State University Press, 2019. 193 pp. ISBN: 978-1607329732
Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare. Jim Ridolfo and William Hart-Davidson, editors. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. 262 pp. ISBN: 978-0822945895
To say that our writing lives are mediated by digital technologies is now a truism. As of October 2020, 3.21 billion people used the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger monthly (Noyes), and during the COVID-19 pandemic, online writing activities only grew. For example, nearly 45 percent of Internet users 16-64 years old reported spending more time on social media since March 2020 (Chaffey). This mediation is nothing new, of course. In 1994, Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. drew attention to the computer interface as a site of mediation with significant shaping force on not only our writing but also our world views. And ten years later, in her Conference on College Composition and Communication keynote address adapted for and published in College Composition and CommunicaJames tion in 2004, Kathleen Blake Yancey asserted that all writing is digital writing: "Given the way we produce print-sooner or later inside a word processor-we are digital already, at least in process" (307). Yet digital technologies now extend well beyond the word processor to include website, audio, image, and video editing software; learning and course management systems; blogs, wikis, and discussion boards; as well as social media. While the digital's influence on writing is decades old, the sites of mediation have proliferated.
Moreover, and as seen in the books that comprise this review, the influence of networked digital technologies extends far beyond just the writing process that Yancey references. In their entry in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts in Writing Studies, Collin Brooke and Jeffrey T. Grabill affirm, "Many writing technologies have streamlined the writing process, but the computer network has had a dramatic social impact" (33). That is, digital technologies shape not only how we write but also how we navigate the world, relate...