This article offers a way of thinking about closed captioning that goes beyond <em>quality</em> (narrowly defined in current style guides in terms of visual design) to consider captioning as a rhetorical and interpretative practice that warrants further <em>analysis</em> and <em>criticism</em> from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. A rhetorical perspective recasts quality in terms of how genre, audience, context, and purpose shape the captioning act. Drawing on a range of Hollywood movies and television shows, this article addresses a set of topics that are central to an understanding of the effectiveness, significance, and reception of captions: overcaptioning, undercaptioning, subtitles vs. captions, the manipulation of time, non-speech information, series awareness, and the backchannel.

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Although the `liberatory' approach to new communications technologies has been, for the most part, called into question by researchers in the humanities and social sciences, who now adopt a more critical relationship with technology, it continues to enjoy explanatory power in the popular press and in software design practices and cultures. According to the liberatory approach, freedom from sexism and other forms of oppression is brought about by something as simple and profound as a change in online handle - a practice known as `gender swapping' (Bruckman, 1993). Yet, as some language theorists have shown (e.g. Herring, 1996), communication in cyberspace also reinforces existing social hierarchies, including gender differences found in face-to-face contexts. Unlike traditional, human-centered studies of computermediated communication and gender, this article treats a series of talking software programs as important objects for studying how software design is also implicated in the construction of gender differences. In addition to the programs' databases of gendered utterances and internal models of communicative interaction, these differences are also reinforced and negotiated en route, in the ongoing process of talking about why and how a software program is gendered.

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