I teach an art, a field that for much of its history has been exclusively about orality and speech.

My entire time as a graduate student and professional, my value in the field has been determined through how I write very particular formal essays.

It seems odd to me, it always has, how there’s little to no interest in oral rhetoric as a way of sharing serious ideas. The closest we ever get is reading conference papers to one another in small groups in Midwestern hotel ballrooms.

I think that giving a presentation on video and uploading it to the internet has a lot of advantages over traditional academic publishing and should be something that is encouraged in the field. I think this might be the way to solve a lot of old issues with the field of speech-comm derived rhetoric and provide some nice new advantages for the interesting things we have to say and share about research.

Things it would create: A public appetite and interest for rhetorical theory as such (I mean, they already have this appetite; professional scholars choose to ignore it or worse, consider it too pedestrian to bother with) a conversation among a number of figures about ideas that the public can be involved in through comments and responses on the same level as the initial interventions, and the human behind the ideas would be present in all its expressive, emotive glory.

What about the peer reviewed research journal? I am afraid we’ve been performing CPR so long on it we don’t even notice it’s hardly a body. Kept alive by dark means bordering on necromancy, the peer-reviewed journal is not even meeting that basic requirement of being a journal – being read as such. It’s a filing cabinet.

Alternatively peer review standards for online video and audio content should be developed. There’s a market standard now, but that’s hardly fitting. What sort of peer review would be needed for a podcast? For a video? Are there things we can borrow from journalism or documentary filmmaking here to build something for us?

There’s a lot to be considered and it will be difficult to get buy in, but the possibilities of creating a sentiment for what we do, what we think about, and what we make among the general internet-using public is hard to buy. More exposure to what faculty think about and create will only increase interest and understanding, if it’s done well – that is to say, done appropriately for the audience you want to reach.