Aristotle is haunting me. As we approach the pilot launch and conference presentations for Harlot, I find myself wondering: Is Harlot employing all available means of persuasion? This is, after all, as much an experiment in digital rhetoric as it is an exploration of rhetoric in digital and other media. We are launching a rhetorical campaign on behalf of rhetorical literacy — circles within circles…
In some ways, this is exactly the sort of “practice what you preach” exercise rhetoricians — and teachers — can really benefit from, in term of new perspective, productive frustration, and heightened critical awareness. Not bad for an extracurricular activity!
But back to Aristotle: how can Harlot take advantage of all her available means as we attract (and hopefully seduce) potential audiences?
I think it’s easy for us to be prone to more technological styles of advertising in this kind of realm or situation, but the low-tech forms can be just as useful sometimes. For instance, there’s this thing called “lost” (and, no, I don’t mean the tv show) where people obtain points for getting other people to join. It’s against the rules to post your address into a random forum, which makes people start leaving their address in random places in the real world– on napkins, mirrors, windows, keyboards, etc etc. Now, it may seem like people would just walk by and not think about it, but this site has actually had a lot of people join and I do think it’s natural human curiosity to look it up. They have a bunch of images at that site http://www.lost.eu/images.php So, perhaps, it would be best not to forget the low tech while exploring the high tech?
Kaitlin – that site was incredible; thanks for the link. Although I despise most of the examples of “guerilla marketing,” I find my thoughts drawn towards it often, and specifically in the context of Harlot. Simple, low-budget and unconventional is a great approach (to a lot of things), and I second the motion we keep those ideas flowing when the “The Great Harlot Media Blitz ’08” starts up. Also, I love the counter-intuitive move to do low-tech promotion for what will be a high-tech site. Thoughts anyone?