Abstract

If webtext scholarship’s value lies in its potential to implicitly perform complex arguments through design, examining digital technologies’ abilities to influence design development is crucial for understanding webtexts’ rhetoricity.

Based on my data collected from digital autoethnographic recordings, I suggest that “tools” exert five major types of influences on webtext invention: Rethink, Engage, Adapt, Afford, and Limit. Additionally, they exert these influences on webtext design in six main capacities: as image-editing, presentation, web-editing, text-editing, audio-editing, and video-editing software, with differing degrees of influence on the invention process based on their affordances and constraints. From these five tools-related influences, I highlight several implications as takeaways for building professional and pedagogical infrastructures to support webtext composing, invention, and design as a mode of scholarly composing and communication. These implications address material resources as well as habits of mind in practicing invention.

Approaching moments of struggling with tools as “breakdowns” gives a relatively negative connotation applied in retrospect to an idea that did not work, when at the time an idea seemed reasonable or viable based on available knowledge. “Breakdown” thus becomes a retroactive judgment rather than an inherent characteristic of the initial idea. It is only when the idea intersects with tools and pieces in a composer’s experience that it becomes a moment of seeming “breakdown.” I want to highlight the inventive agency exerted in these intersections rather than put the main focus on an experience of failure from the perspective of a human composer. I thus encourage webtext composers to engage “breakdowns” and “failure” not as shortcomings, but rather to embrace them as moments of invention and productive idea generation at the intersections of human and nonhuman agency.