I hope webtext shows the rich opportunities digital environments provide us for reconsidering (without abandoning) our classical hertigage and for testing more contemporary theories. Delivery needs more robust theorization than strictly Platonic or Aristotelian conceptions of rhetoric allow. I have attempted to argue that Derrida's concepts of the specter and the archive provide us with rich launching points for retheorizing the province of delivery in the digital age.
Derridian spectrality seems to me ever more appropriate in a time that sees the rise of the wiki—a destabilized encyclopedia openly formed by the body public. And full of risks. The contemporary explosion of digital environments, in addition to new media concerns regarding the conflux of medium and message, create a particularly kairotic time for re-evaluating Landow's hypothesis. As rhetoric and composition instructors, we can begin to incorporate discussions of what it means to write in these spaces into our pedagogy, to have students experience these spaces, to use digital technologies to have them write not only for an external Ideal Judge, but also for the body politic in which they form a part (and by which they are, at least in part, formed).
Finally, I hope my Visual CoOperative suggests how archiving student work can help students encounter and negotiate dynamic and multiple senses of audience. Anyone interested in implementing such an environment (or using other available digital spaces such as Drupal, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, etc. for a similar end) should feel free to consult my assignment sheets for the projects (scroll down to Project One, parts C & D) or to contact me directly.