Considering all the "possibilities" offered by the ever-changing elements of this website -- theoretical and practical possibilities, both -- the initial question remains: why  have a "Rhetorical Invention Homepage? After all, what does a website provide that traditional media does not? As unlikely as it may be, we could  share syllabi and other similar resources through papertext, snailmail, traditional journal outlets. So, save the addition of being an outlet for native hypertext, all the website provides, really, is a sense of timeliness; ideas are exchanged faster, and everyone saves time.

Not exactly. It is true that the key to the web's success is timeliness, but this conceptualization addresses only our most common Western description of "timeliness," what the Greeks referred to as chronos -- the progression of linear time. What we might -- should! -- focus on instead is the description of time the Greeks translated as kairos -- appropriateness, effectiveness, the moment or occasion of making meaning.

Gorgias formulated his sophistic theory of rhetorical invention upon this concept of kairos, which Kinneavy (1986) has re-introduced to the writing instructor in a somewhat oversimplified way, as meaning, roughly, "situational context." But, as White (1987) points out, we might better consider it this way:

Kairos discovers in every new occasion a unique opportunity to confer meaning on the world. It is, in that sense, an appropriate term with which to [consider] the will-to-invent (p. 14).

Okay, so maybe "kairos" is a good term to describe some of the things that might be available to scholars interacting via website. So what?