The Gifting Logos: Expertise in the Digital Commons provides an extensive analysis of knowledge and creativity in twenty-first century networked culture. Analyzing massive projects like the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive, and the Creative Commons licenses, The Gifting Logos responds to a fundamental question, What does it mean to know something and to make something? With the idea of a gifting logos, Hartelius integrates three habits of a rhetorical epistemology: the invention of cultural materials such as text, images, and software; the imbuing or encoding of the materials with the creator’s experience; and the constitution and dissemination of the materials as gifts.
E. Johanna Hartelius is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Expertise as well as numerous scholarly essays.
"E. Johanna Hartelius brings fresh life to those weighty Greek words logos and kairos for our moment of digital perplexity. Language is both a given and a gift, she shows, but its blossoming depends on the fullness of time and the flourishing of the commons. In the beginning was the logos, it is said, but Hartelius shows that it is also at the end, and even more importantly, in the middle, where all the real work gets done."—John Durham Peters, author of The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
"In this timely, smart, and sharply argued book, Hartelius investigates the politics of expertise across the digital commons. By merging theoretical, historical, and focused analytical work, Hartelius illuminates what is new about expertise in the digital age. And in showing us a gifting logos, we are given a fresh perspective for thinking anew the value implicit in inventing and circulating digital epistemic material."––Thomas Rickert, author of Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being
"What are we doing when we 'do' the internet? Hartelius's answer—that we are gifting expertise—offers critical purchase on the emergent digital commons. This carefully argued book contributes to transdisciplinary conversations about epistemic rhetoric and cultural politics under conditions of digitality."—Damien Pfister, author of Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics
226 pp.6 x 9
9780520339637$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Sep 2020