Week 12 - Nish - Pg. 114 -134

This week’s reading talks about Sticky Uptakes and counter uptakes, and the nomenclature for this phenomenon does not signal the meaning in an obvious manner. And I am honestly still a bit shaky on what the essence of an uptake is but I’ll try my best to speak to this topic. I would like to first go over the rhetorical genre theorist’s term called ‘uptake,’ before getting into Nish’s coined terms derived from the root concept of ‘uptake(s).’ My understanding is that uptakes are “complex, often habitualized, socio-cognitive pathways that mediate our interactions with others and the world" (Bawarshi, 2010, p. 199).” Nish performs a case study on sticky uptakes and counteruptakes as it pertains to a social trend called #ChallengeAccepted. Nish describes what uptakes do, found in the text “Uptake highlights the relationship between genres and the ways that people respond to genres.(119 Nish)” Which I think is a bit more digestible and promotes a more comprehensive understanding of what points and connections Nish is intending to make. And that is to track the relationship between social actions/utterance and responses to them by the public. Sticky uptakes shape narratives about social media activity that can overshadow more useful questions and critiques. And the main critiques was that the challenge was a poor example of feminism and/or activism. And one of the Sticky Uptake for the #ChallengeAccepted trend selfies as it broadly characterized the campaign.

Overall, these guiding principles provide a landscape for one to better understand how this challenge and the responses are patterned and impact the schema of social activism online.