To the Peerless Review. Peering Into The Peer-to-Peer Appearance of Writng in Electracy.
I tell them: Peer review offers our cohort an opportunity to exercise an exchange of in-depth, constructive feedback, which is most necessary for Essay #2 since it’s rooted in your ability to rhetorically analyze other authors’ work, and argue your own analytical perspective, for what-happens-to-be an audience/readership of either higher education learners or soon-to-be college students anyways. So peers. Review. Share that marvelous drafted strings-of-sentences to your IRL audience since the very purpose of assigning this exhaustive, fourteen page peer-review-questionnaire is ‘for you to help each others’ writing advance beyond its current draft, and share insight and critical feedback in order to steer your peer’s essay into a polished, finalized draft that fulfills all the prompt requirements and expresses the ideas clearly and coherent in an organized and revised etc etc…’
You know the one.
But I only tell people what I mean, as dangerous as that may be right now. And. So. I must believe. Writing is never done in a vacuum. Therefore, *returning to freshman* ‘peer reviews remind us that all… that writing is social act. And it is. ‘. Writing is a social act, composed as a moving part of a larger dialogue, and often subject to change based on the response of its intended audience. This has been the purpose and natural process of writing for centuries, and in the internet age, this process is becoming more expedited and accessible to everyone at unparalleled rates.
Follow-up with whatever semi-millennial gland example that sloppily comes to mind:
Okay, so, someone posts a YouTube video essay that criticizes modern television writing by highlighting how a new show on Netflix exemplifies ‘The Decline of Quality and Genuine Interpersonal Dialogue in Popular TV;” and after the video goes viral a day later, the highest ‘upvoted’ comment agrees with the author’s argument and points out how this is happening across other popular network television shows. That night, the video and comment catches the eye of an observant LA Times reporter digging to publish an op-ed piece on America’s opinion of recently premiered television dramas. The LA Times publishes the writer’s story on its blog the next morning which agreed with the video essay’s criticism, and even cites references to the original YouTube video.The blog-ticle is then shared by thousands of local PR agencies and TV devotees by lunchtime, and lands on the desk of a Network TV Producer by dinner who happens to produce the TV show criticized in the YouTube video essay. This inspires a shuffled phone call or snap-o-gram or two — heads-up to the show’s Executive Producers, who then hire a new staff of TV writers for the show’s upcoming season.
I continue on, avoiding that thought of this massive stack of wasted printed ink and paper that basically asks them to re-outline another’s structured alphabetic college essay. Not even reproduce. Which, I guess, my point...
In the digital age of electracy, critical writing and rhetorical analysis has caught-up to instant-gratification culture by taking on a temporal, and sometimes heavily influential, cyclical relationship between writer/speaker, reader/listener, and text/medium — where each has stripped itself of any material gestures of authorial power by using simple platforms like YouTube, which simply invites authorship without feeling all to bothered or concerned about maintaining the invisible lines of power and race-gender-status driven agency of print media; thereby, welcoming a more homogeneous relationship between author and audience in the continuous interplay and balancing act of criticism.
Thus, taking part in one’s writing process, through peer review or any form, synthesizes and perpetuates the contemporary act of producing and critiquing ideas — through writing a traditional or, even, non-traditional essay — as existing within an apparatus of cultural discourse, rather than a didactic plane of presets and (mostly male) coordinates, that you (yes, even you) too are constantly participating in as an equal speaker and listener.
In other words, producing a text of critical or analytical — or any type of — writing, which has always (in some way) existed as “in-response” to another text, is now only produced as a result of responding to other text — or a multitude of texts. Text which only exists in the first place as in response to other texts, which then, in turn, also exist as a response to another text, and another, and.. so on. As a result, writing, in the age of access, has become an act that exists only in response to, or inspiration of, the recycling of intersecting textual ideas that seem to be interminably inflating an infinite, ethernettedly-strung balloon-anthology that fails to recognize boundaries or barriers between platforms or mediums. This ensures the continuous production and reproduction of text in response to text — in a seemingly endless web of words and ideas better known as culture.
