5. Conclusion
My larger purpose in this essay has been to show how the ethical problems of digital sampling can be addressed productively in the composition classroom. Rice’s (2003) “take whatever you find and use it” method for digital sampling need not lead to the kind of multimodal compositions with which Banks (2011) was concerned, or at least it need not lead to them in vain. I have suggested that one way to address ethically problematic digital compositions, as well as to help Rice’s and Banks’s seemingly irresolvable perspectives on digital sampling find some connection, is through a heuristic of vulnerability that asks students to account for what might seem to be isolated free-association sampling decisions through a lens of caring and/or wounding. Even if the students do not adopt an ethic of care, they will at least begin to develop a concern for how their own rhetorical choices can have ethically profound consequences and can be perceived in terms of caring and wounding. Hopefully, this awareness leads to questioning the ethical frameworks to which they are already committed. One of the main differences between an ethic of care and a rhetorical concern with caring is no doubt intent, which cannot be verified easily. However, by putting the following heuristic into practice, the students will have, at minimum, considered their ethical relation to other communities and cultures they otherwise may have ignored or not even known existed. Author Biographical Statement Jared S. Colton is an assistant professor of English at Utah State University. He writes and teaches about rhetoric, ethics, social justice, digital media, and composition and technical communication pedagogy. He has published in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Enculturation, and the Journal of College Science Teaching.
