What does successful (or unsuccessful) rhetorical work in the information age look like?

Desсrіption: If we accept Richard Lanham’s claim that in an age of information attention is the most scarce resource and rhetoric is a “new economics,” then it seems essential to understand how rhetoric works and how rhetors use their resources to gain economic success. In this assignment, your task is to write a rhetorical analysis of a “text” or groups of “texts.” (By text, I mean any kind of symbolic act, including print, digital, visual, sonic, embodied, etc.). The text(s) you choose will be your “case study.” The choice of case study is yours, but I recommend thinking about texts that participate in economic activity or reveal something about the economic moment. You’ll be using the skills that we developed in Unit 1 (summary, synthesis, argument, analysis), but you’ll be focusing your analysis on the use of rhetorical strategies in your chosen case study. Textual Analysis: Your analysis should include at least some “textual” rhetorical analysis (Selzer). To do this, you might ask yourself: What particular rhetorical strategies is the text using? To what effect? How does it consider audience? What language, style or imagery is used? Are there any kind of argumentative appeals? What does the arrangement of the text reveal? How does the text spur people to particular ideas or action? What do the rhetorical strategies reveal about the beliefs and attitudes of the author and the communities they belong to? Contextual Analysis: Using the readings we’ve discussed in Unit 1, I’d also like your essay to include a “contextual” rhetorical analysis (Selzer), with specific focus on the economic contexts that define the “rhetorical situation” of the case study (Bitzer). For this analysis, I’d like you to draw from the theorists we’ve read—Zelizer, Bourdieu, Brandt, Watkins, Benkler, Stiglitz, Lanham—and the analytical concepts they’ve used (payments, forms of capital, literacy sponsors, against-all-odds, competition, information economy, economics of attention, for example) to help you understand the larger economic conversation that surrounds the text. In other words, you should use the theorists to understand the “cultural environment” of the text(s) and consider how this environment “produce[s] clues about the persuasive tactics and appeals” used by the author(s) (Selzer 283). You might ask yourself: What is being communicated and why? How is this text in conversation with other texts and social practices? How does the text reflect the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the author and communities that sustain them? Ultimately, the goal of your analysis is to break down the rhetorical strategies at work in the text in order to better understand how the text contributes to economic activity. What does successful (or unsuccessful) rhetorical work in the information age look like? How do you know?