Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local

Carl Whithaus is a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of California, Davis. He studies writing technologies and digital cultures, edits the Journal of Writing Assessment, and works on a variety of projects related to writing in the sciences, engineering, and agriculture. His books include Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres, Writing across Distances and Disciplines: Research and Pedagogy in Distributed Learning, and Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing.

Swarms, Viral Writing, and the Local revitalizes our understanding of what writing is and does in the world. The focus of this astute and timely book might be on digital forms of communication, but the case studies and analyses in it have ramifications for our understanding of writing-writ-large. By tracing the ways different forms of writing emerge in situ and in deep interrelation with writers’ sense of agency, audience demands, platform pressures, and the uptake and redistribution of a range of communication activities, Whithaus offers us one of the most sophisticated understandings of how writers write in the world today. As never before, we never write alone. Writing is always already embedded in webs, networks, swarms, and viral redistributions that demand rethinking what writing is and what it means to be literate today.