I aim to deliver an articulation of how digital environments can aid an expansive re-conception of delivery and to provide an example of how such a reconception can be instituted pedagogically. In breif, I argue that digital environments allow us to foreground the complex and unpredictable interpretive and ethical dynamics at play in information exchange.
My presupposition is that delivery deserves better treatment than it receives in most contemporary first-year composition textbooks, in which it is framed as the transmission of invention, arrangement, and style's finished products and very rarely practiced. Whether audience is considered addressed, invoked, or a hybrid combination of the two, rarely does it become “real” or experienced for first-year composition students. Rarely do their compositions, regardless of invented audience, move beyond the teacher. While Barthes might have pronounced the author’s primacy dead over twenty years ago, it seems very much alive in contemporary composition pedagogy. This author-centric attitude survives due to rhetoric and composition’s predisposition toward Aristotelian rhetoric: a rhetoric in many ways suspect of rhetorical persuasion and human potential.
I do not mean to make light of or dismiss the important research on audience done by scholars such Ong, Ede and Lunsford, or Bartholomae. Developing the ability to interiorize and invent audiences is a key component to mastering composition. I do argue, however, that students need to experience what happens when “real” audiences encounter the identities invented for them. The province of digital delivery that I work toward seeks to foil invented audiences against actual audiences that have (or, following Derrida’s spectral future perfect, “could-come-to-have”) response-ability. In this way, digital environments allow students to experience what happens when audiences cease to operate as mere fictions.