Rhetoric and composition scholars have widely taken up the term new media. This project traces rhetoric and composition’s published research about new media to better understand the term’s position in the discipline. This historical study also contributes to methods discussions in the field, including the various ways historical methods are utilized to select, approach, and analyze a data set. For this dissertation, a specific, historical methods section describes the systematic collection, analysis, and coding of the project’s data (discourse about and using the term new media in articles from four prominent journals in the field). I use inductive coding to analyze the articles, to determine how new media is defined over the past ten years, and to describe what types of scholarly conversations incorporate the term new media.
The results of this study suggest the field has no consensus about what new media means in rhetoric and composition. Scholars have discussed new media in particular threads of published conversations including conversations about what it means to compose in society, in the university, and in the discipline. Subsumed under these conversational headings, new media has often been described by its properties. I argue the imprecision attributed to new media stems from its incorporation of multiple elements (such as modes, digitality, modularity, and interactivity). However, I propose new media is best understood as a conceptual theory of writing as a socially meaningful break from print traditions. The ways in which this term has been incorporated into the discipline suggests rhetoric and composition scholars continually redefine the discipline’s work and purpose.