"For to look to the right, as everybody teaches, and to look forward, depends not merely on rule, but on habit, since, while the child is looking to what follows, he has to pronounce what goes before, and, what is very difficult, the direction of his thoughts must be divided, so that one duty may be discharged with his voice, and another with his eyes" Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory I, I, 34

N. Katherine Hayles (2007) argues that we are now in the midst of a communication paradigm shift, from communications based on deep attention skills to a cognitive style and mode of engagement she calls "hyper attention." "Networked and programmable media" are part of this shift, Hayles argues. Indeed, new and highly distributed media, which depend on both efficient and affective communication strategies, "are part of a rapidly developing mediascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with each other, and perhaps most significantly, how they think." In order to create a compositional consistency in digital ecologies of parataxis, connectionist skills need to go into balance with analytical skills. Writing does not happen in/with new media as much as it happens across and between new media. The rhetorical tradition has always concerned itself with the psychology and phenomenology of speaking aloud and writing, but the dividendia intentio animi (or, attention-splitting) described by Quintilian, on a common (digital) platform, creates a dynamic and collective attention economy where a dazzling array of rhetorical choices and potential contingent cooperators are always available. The available means of persuasion? The information overload that characterizes an attention economy challenges our very thresholds of perception. When applied to these attention economies, Gregory Bateson's cybernetic formulations of perception and difference echo Aristotle's classic definition of rhetoric, as when Bateson explains how "...perception operates only upon difference. All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference, and all perception of difference is limited by a threshold...knowledge at any given moment will be a function of the thresholds of our available means of perception" (Bateson, 2002, p. 26). As rhetorical practice has expanded into what Lawrence Lessig calls the creative commons and Clay Spinuzzi calls our age of “distributed work” to include increasingly refined strategies of technical communication, the rhetorical canon of memory is supplanted by a science of attention management, and the rhetorical construct of pathos requires a more developed morphology of affect. In this seemingly seamless attention economy, networked media, even in the horizontal corporate structures described by Spinuzzi and others, do indeed seem to emphasize movement and transition over stasis and reflection. At the same time, however, as attention races on, parataxis and discontinuity prevail over syntaxis and sustained argument, creating a "hole-y" space riddled with lacunae or gaps where attention can scatter in any direction. This presents teachers and writers working and playing in new media with endless opportunities to amplify our connectionist skills (between media), and to open up our pedagogies to the ways that the affective dimension of communication can also gather attention. These lacunae, which semiotician Scott McCloud calls the gutter or the blank gaps between the frames, are essential untis of composition. In discontinuous ecologies of information, the creative commons has evolved strategies of tagging and emergent classification schemes known as folksonomies. In ways analogous to sound's relationship to mathematics, these practices function to simplify and compress information, and, like any rhythmic practice, they also shortcut and "get in front" of rationalist tendencies and prescribed categories.

As writers, we form habits through repeated performance--simple maneuvers and modifications that comprise a practice, and inculcate informed response-ability in a given environment. It seems that even an "open-minded" method forged with the properties of emergent systems and rhetorical kairos in mind, even a practice situated in self-organizing (open) scenarios such as de.licio.us and wiki, develops through rehearsal and training. Knowing when to apply what ‘rule,’ technique, gesture, or strategy, according to Quintilian (that great collator of rhetorical 'scripts) involves a more rehearsed, habit-formed connection to one's intuitions than it does deliberation and selection. And for Quintilian, those moments of kairos--the experience of resonance with others that we call "good timing"--constituted the whole enterprise of rhetoric:

In the first case of re-mediation that Quintilian considers under the aegis of dividendia intentio animi, the art of effective aural delivery of written text, we know that the reading speaker can, in translation, tap into a rich and under-theorized realm of instantaneous information residing in the tone of voice. New media visual compressions such as leet, emoticons, and even the iconic cultural expressions of tone (lolcatz, for eg) grown at 4chan, ytmnd, and photoshop phriday, would seem as fitting for lightning-like transmissions of complex information, nonsemantic ideas, and feelings as a jazz musician's improvised troping of a refrain into a new riff. While not aural, these forms are quite interactive and musical.

In the process of improvising with a group of performers or mixing and reconfiguring a repository of shared ideas in performance, introducing new ideas (transitions, tropes, sources, movements), often means "going parallel," which calls on us to cultivate rhythmic capacities as required by the art of djiing. In order to entrain two systems of information, we do a dance that involves decompositional strategies of attention splitting, the scattering and gathering rhythms of sanjo, and the caesuras of zero-stopping, just to name a few. Turntablist techniques, such as beatmatching, vividly illustrate the coordination of such gestures.

Tim Beamish's description of the fundamental dj technique known as beatmatching suggests that beatmatching depends on listening for and then moving towards and then finally with the new mix by entraining what would, for the audience, be the "new" information with the already networked information: "In order to beatmatch, the DJ must use two ears, one listening to the track that the audience is hearing and one listening to the upcoming track. This will require spliting one's attention to accomodate two audio inputs and organizing how things should sound. Most DJs focus on the outgoing track and force the incoming track to follow the beat pattern of the outgoing track. It is common to see a DJ tapping his or her foot to the outgoing track. They are essentially concentrating on the beat of the outgoing track when they do this. Then they cue the incoming track, initializing it to start on a downbeat. When the next downbeat of the outgoing track occurs, they start the incoming track so that the downbeats match. Next they quickly adjust the BPMs of the incoming track so that the beats remain in a constant state of synchronization. This action requires manipulating the speed of the incoming track which requires a device that supports altering the tempo of the track."

The analysis then identifies two distinct techniques. First, "the DJ must start the incoming track at the correct point (a downbeat) and adjust the BPMs accordingly (either faster or slower). Altering the BPMs of a track is a one dimensional continuous task with two directions: faster or slower." The second technique underscores the flexibility of rhythmic assemblages comprised of bodily, sonic, and technological material. "Once an incoming track is cued to begin on a downbeat, starting the track is optimally a one dimensional binary task (whose modes are playing or stopped). However, most physical devices do not support an instant start and instead take a small amount of time to bring the track to its designated BPMs. Thus the DJ must provide a "push" to the track in order to make sure that its downbeat matches that of the outgoing track."

However, when pressed to "unpack" the force of such these simple rhetorical gestures, students are often at a loss for words. (Example, link to spring 1101). And when sequenced or volleyed one after the other, without the introduction of different modes and tempi, these compressions, like emoticons, can lose their rhetorical force altogether. But it's so easy to do so! And it's just as easy to compulsively string together unsupported claims and enthymemes. Therefore, in the second excerpt here sampled from the Institutes of Oratory, where the speaker is not necessarily reading aloud from a text, translating and adding value in delivery, but perhaps working from memory alone, the "one great quality in an orator" trying to keep pace with and interrupt the dynamic process whereby he/she must "turn his (sic) thoughts in various directions, according to different bearings on his (sic) subject." Interestingly enough, though, the only way to manage the cognitive overhead incumbent upon one who must turn one’s thought in various directions would be for said rhetor to clear his/her habituated patterns. How? By radically dissolving the habit structures inculcated by the very rehearsal and training Quintilian prescribes! This is an interesting distinction between Quintilian's scene of composition and the context of composing we find ourselves in online, where our amplified "external symbolic storage" capacities reconfigure human memory/attention and give rise to semantic interoperability amidst what often seems to be, from the perspective of the human participant-observer, stormy seas of asignification. The art of selection in an information economy requires us to remix Quintilian's "dividendia intentio animi," or "divided attention," so as to recast the notion as an aspect of the distributed and collective emergence and convergence of writers and audience. Multimedia composition comprised of sound, image, text, and links provide ongoing opportunities to reconsider dividendia intentio animi and it's pedagogical potential.

But the basic gesture of attaching a word or string of words to a web space and simultaneously sharing a url pointing to this space--the simple, repeatable action known as "tagging" in social bookmarking communities--might best illustrate the value and promise of the "lossiness" inherent in the compressions that arise in media-hopping. A tag, after all is not a juxtaposition of images or a complex ratio of words:images:sounds. A tag is just a word! One of the pitfalls of seriously engaging emergent technologies and their effects on the office of memory is itself a sort of forgetting. We forget the force of words themselves. Beyond their function as meaningful semantic units of discourse and composition as "communication" tools, words are the "audible that clings to the inaudible," according to Anagarika Govinda in his Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (17). Words, like melodies or iconic imagery, trigger "irrational qualities" and elevate our "deepest feelings" so that they "vibrate with others" in ways that reveal a pattern--of information and even of commons-formation (17). Hence poetry and music--and, rhythm and rhetoric--exert special power. Rhythm, in fact, could be said to provide a handle on that power. The affect and force that rhythmically arranged and performed sequences and concatinations of words, moods, ideas, directional shifts and vectors, and so on are "due to this quality," this affect, this "rhythm combined therewith" (17) Persuasion derives and depends on artful and timely immersion in affect, so as to make it sharable. "The success of great speakers is not only due to what they say, but how they say it" (17) Here, Govinda would seem to be imagining or even initializing a sketch of Quintilian's vir boni, the "good man speaking well" (Institutes of Oratory).