ABSTRACT
Time, place, and space, as this chapter will demonstrate, play important roles in effective writing as do the people among which writing takes place. Writing is an assemblage of things at a particular moment in a particular place for particular people. This assemblage tells the story of writing beyond the text itself. When we write in different places on different surfaces among different people, we have different experiences that are shaped by those very places and surfaces and people, and those experiences in turn shape the very texts we write. To be successful in our writing, we need to have a rhetorical awareness of what is assembled, for whom it is assembled, and why it is assembled. In previous writing classes, readers may have learned about the concept of kairos. While kairos literally means “timeliness” or “the right time” in Greek, rhetorically speaking, it refers to doing what is most appropriate for the given situation, the given moment in time, the given place, the given people you write for. Readers will explore this concept by looking at a number of writing technologies and how such technologies are situated. Particularly, they will consider video games, hyperlinks, and data trackers.
