Hijacked Identities Within the Rhetorical Situation

Is the rhetorical situation reliant on the authenticity of the rhetor? What if the rhetor is a total fake? How can Grant-davie or even Bitzer himself account for that? Would it change anything?

I chose an article that we were assigned in Stephen McElroy’s WEPO class to essentially re-hijack a website. It’s an article written by a man who made a website for the purpose of impersonating Bill Keller, a prominent editorial and Op-ed contributor for the New York Times. Bill Keller’s original blog where he posts his own Op-eds is http://keller.blogs.nytimes.com/. The fabricated website was http://opinion-nytimes.com. The man who wrote the article posted it on the New York Times forums in reference and spread it as well as he could. People actually believed that the article was by Bill Keller himself. Attached is an html file of the original, fabricated article as we were to hijack ourselves and replace with our own Op-eds.

“As those of you who have followed my turbulent relationship with WikiLeaks and its Guru-In-Chief Julian Assange know, I am first in line when it comes to distancing myself from his brand of transparency without government checks and balances.” As you can see here in the scribd document below, it reads like a blog post. It addresses it’s audience in a sort of nuanced rhetorical situation where the rhetor is not genuine. How does that fact being known or unknown affect the rhetorical situation? First of all, the constraints remain virtually the same, although there is one difference: the rhetor does not need to filter what he or she says for propriety. Considering that they themselves are not going to face the consequences (at least not if they don't get caught), they can say whatever they want to the audience in anyway. But, of course, that might give them away if they did. Bill Keller had a characteristic style, so I think it's safe to assume that the new rhetor would adhear to that. The audience (at least for the most part) will be the same if the hijacker is successful in reaching them. Without this part, the impersonator has essentially failed. What about the exigence? Well, that just depends on the rhetor in this case. The hijacked article is about Julain Assange, founder of wikileaks. Considering that Assange is currently in asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy (read about it here), the rhetor obviously felt called to action to criticize Bill Keller's relationship with Assange in Keller's own words! Well, it looks like the imposter-rhetor functions about the same. He managed to reach so many people partly using blogs as a social action if you will. The new blog culture enabled a simple man to impersonate a more famous man and in doing so, spread his message about Julian Assange far and wide.  "American Culture became obsessed with both making celebrities into regular people...and making regular people into celebrities..." Miller and Shepard (4). This simple man had the opportunity to actually become a celebrity. What a twist! Imagine if you were able to impersonate Bill Clinton successfully, or Obama for that matter. Today it's technically possible with blogs.