Rhetorical Problems (Part 2)

I just finished reading Joe's "The Marriage Blog: I put a ring on it" where he reflects on the memories of his recent wedding and how social media is changing the way he remembers--the ways ALL OF US remember. I found this blog especially relevant to the (sometimes tense) discussions we've been having about identifying and exploring rhetorical problems through research, reflection and writing.

Honestly, any problem that prompts us to think about the ways we communicate, is a rhetorical problem. 

Any problem or question that can withstand the embrace of Rhetoric, is a rhetorical problem. In this case, I'm talking about Rhetoric as a field of study, just like Math, or Chemistry, or Archaeology  

Think about it this way, if your Math professor asked you to identify a mathematical problem that interests you and try to solve it, what would you do? In this case, I'm asking you to identify a rhetorical problem, explore it through research, write about your discovery process in narrative form, and later propose a solution to it (in the final practical proposal argument).

In Joe's case, he is thinking about how social media is changing the way we communicate with our brains, with our memories, and later on, with our children and grandchildren through different visual or multimodal texts -- photographs, vines, videos -- that are in turn displayed in dynamic online environments where they are given additional meanings by the comments or likes posted by friends and family. He identifies a problem: the way we remember is changing because our memory artifacts are changing. He's concerned by this change and feels like it needs further attention, further exploration. Whether this change is good or bad is another story, a question he has not explored yet. He ends his post with a tentative thesis and a new question (very much like you would in an exploratory narrative): 

It’s weird to think about how my grandchildren will look at my wedding. It’s going to be completely different from my parents and especially my grandparents. Just think about the way social media is influencing our lives and changing the we way record it. How will my grandchildren interact with this vine taken by my good friend Clayton Dean? (my emphasis)

By the end of his exploratory narrative, Joe has found a promising path that may lead to the exit, but he's not quite there yet. The journey continues. That, to me, is the key to exploratory or reflective writing: providing a window into beautiful minds that are not afraid of learning adventures. 

This brings us to one last question: Why engage in exploratory writing? I would argue, like Steven Johnson, that if we engage in exploratory thinking that allows our ideas to simmer and boil over through time; if we commit to writing that records our simmering process and leads to new ideas; if we force ourselves to engage in dynamic collaboration (or "collision of hunches");  then, and only then, will good ideas ever be born.