A quick rhetorical analysis of the Digital Activism Research Project webpage: A design with multiple purposes?

 Let’s begin at the beginning, with the organization name and how the name and the typeface used for it play against each other. “DigitalActivism Research Project” is the name, and it is presented in a clean, crisp, contemporary sans serif typeface in crisp black on a clean white background.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear “activism” I think of sly and scruffy ways of making social or political change; I think of everyday people committing to making change to institutions that would really rather not change, institutions like governments local and national, corporations, hospitals, and universities. Hearing “activism,” I call to mind scruffiness and resistance and long patience and then quick movements to try to change what is well established and deeply ingrained. (And one quick way to do an unscientific poll of the connotations people have with a word is a Google image search: search for “activist,” and you do not see calm, older people at telephones patiently calling their representatives; instead there is anger, action, blood, and police response.)

And when I think about “digital activism,” here in late 2014, how can I not think of the recent protests in the Ukraine, or of the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street; I also call to mind the World Trade Organization protests of 1999, so long ago and yet, like the other events I named, also organized in no small part through digital means, through the digital means that enable everyday, scruffy people to connect and plan sub rosa.

Given all that about “activism” and “activists,” why would someone choose an almost corporate typeface and presentation to offer information about digital activism?

In addition, as we noted in class, the photographs on the Digital Activism Research Project webpage show a smiling child to represent the protests in the Ukraine and show a man in a black jacket (who many of us on first glance took to be a policeman) calmly sharing a computer screen with a woman wearing a keffiyah. None of the photographs on the site match up with the first several hundred photographs that result from a Google image search for “Ukraine protests” or “Arab spring.”

In how it represents itself with its title and with its photographs, the website seems to be working hard to resist being associated with more popular notions of “activism” and “activist.” Its visual organization—the clean, wholesome, organized arrangement we noted in class—also seems to resist being associated with the popular connotations of activism I noted above.

Why might a website about activism be designed to be so apparently corporate and to resist the perhaps expected connotations of “activism” and “activist”?

The Digital Activism Research Project, in its own words down there at the very bottom of the page, is

based in Seattle within the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. We study the effect of digital media on activism in an international context and are motivated by a desire to make political and social change processes more effective and evidence-based. We seek to make our own work processes and products open, collaborative, and inclusive.

The Digital Activism Research Project thus seeks to support activist projects through its studies. Does that make it an activist project itself? Or perhaps the Digital Activism Research Project, being housed within a state institution, has to avoid looking like an activist project precisely to stay safely housed within that institution; perhaps the website needs to make activism look like a tamed, safe object of study in order that the Digital Activism Research Project can continue to receive state support. Or perhaps it is simply a matter of making activism look like a tamed, safe object of study so that it can be researched by folks in the academy who will apply social studies data analysis methods to activist events around the world.

Perhaps the website has been designed to address all of that. Perhaps the website has to look corporate, and has to present activism as a smiling, contained activity, in order that the site look like a location for serious academic research at the same time that the site has to look that way in order to stay safely ensconced within its corporation.

…………

What makes the above a rhetorical analysis?
If we consider the practicalities of rhetorical analysis to be about the purposes, contexts, and audiences for any text, than than the above analysis suggests how the website might have multiple purposes (shaping itself to look solid and reliable, shaping “activism” into a research object) in order to address its context (being in an institutional setting) for audiences that perhaps here “activism” in ways that work against the Digital Activism Research Project being able to do its work within the academy.

There are undoubtedly other purposes to the website (to attract other researchers to its project, to help activists gain new research tools, to change our understanding of what activism is to include researching the effectiveness of different digital tactics) as well as other audiences than the academic audience I’ve assumed in the analysis.

A rhetorical analysis does not have to (and probably couldn’t, anyway!) address every single observation one could make about its purposes, context, audiences, and related strategies. But such an analysis should seek to connect how a particular purpose and/or audience seems to guide strategic choices — or how the strategic choices used in shaping a text help one say something about the audience or purposes implied by those choices.