Rhetorics and Communication Media across Cultures

Recent developments in contrastive rhetoric have looked at a variety of cultural, linguistic, historical, and social factors that influence the complex acts of acquiring and demonstrating second language (L2) writing competencies. These developments, however, focus almost exclusively on writing. The present paper suggests that other communication media--such as orality, email, and hypertext--can similarly influence cultural and rhetorical patterns. Just as each rhetorical tradition has a distinct relationship to communication media, the use of each communication medium in a particular rhetorical tradition can also influence the textual and organizational patterns of writers from that rhetorical tradition. This paper first overviews the debate about media-culture relationships, and then explores how orality, writing, email, and hypertext relate to three major intercultural values: individual-collective, universal-particular, and high and low context. This section draws on intercultural and cross-cultural studies, showing that contrastive rhetoric and EAP scholars could benefit from understanding L2 literacies from a cross-cultural perspective.