Pushing even further, Ben McCorkle’s Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse looks at the “volatile history of delivery” (2) and makes a case for delivery as a “contact zone between body and technology” (164). That is, as McCorkle writes,

 

examining the changing role of delivery within the rhetorical tradition is a productive route because the human body (and the rules prescribing how that body behaves in performative space) has served as a conduit by which technologies of writing achieve a naturalized state, in our own era as well as in more historically distant ones. (164).

 

In each of these works—from Yancey to McCorkle—there is increasing attention to the particular (and particularly embodied) rhetorical affordances of new media that complicate some of our modern, print-based commonplaces about delivery. Indeed, as Collin Gifford Brooke reminds us, “we are rapidly approaching a time where we can dispense with prefacing discussions of delivery by bemoaning its neglect” (170).

 

What then, specifically, does an embodied attention to delivery look like? Porter’s theoretical framework for digital delivery consists of five components: body/identity, distribution/circulation, access/accessibility, interaction, and economics (208), which work in relationship with one another, much like Burke’s pentad and ratios (Porter 220). These components, or koinoi topoi, writes Porter, “operate heuristically and productively across multiple situations to prompt rhetorical decisions regarding production” (208). Putting these components together creates a synergistic composing practice blending technical knowledge and “practical judgment [or] ethical phronesis—i.e., the ability to ask and answer critical questions about one’s choices” (220). Such synergistic tension opens up spaces to act, write, and perform embodied rhetorical action.