Digital rhetoric

Join the REx Collective

by Jenn Fishman

REx editors include Jenn Fishman, Joan Mullin, and Mike Palmquist.

The Research Exchange Index or REx  is designed to recognize local, national, and international writing... more The Research Exchange Index or REx  is designed to recognize local, national, and international writing researchers by periodically collecting and publishing information about the research studies they've conducted. All writing researchers are invited to contribute by uploading information about their work. In addition, writing researchers, teachers, and students are invited to help build and shape REx by joining the editorial collective as an acquisitions editor or an editorial reviewer. To learn more, download the attached paper or contact the REx editors: RExchangeContact@gmail.com.

Digital Demagogy: Invoking a Bobblehead Audience

by Jeff Swift

Draft only--written for Ph.D. seminar on "Rhetoric and Digital Media"

The current definition of demagogy provided by rhetorical theory is neither preventing nor adequately explaining the... more The current definition of demagogy provided by rhetorical theory is neither preventing nor adequately explaining the abuse of rhetoric so prevalent in contemporary political dialogue, and while it might not be the job of rhetoricians to do the former, rhetorical scholarship should certainly engage more thoroughly in the latter. I suggest that we need to reexamine demagogy in the context of the digital age due to the unique rhetorical dynamics of the online political landscape. Demagogues have a new and dangerous power online that has not yet been explored in rhetorical scholarship. I begin exploring this new power by tracing the scholarship on demagogy, proposing a new focus for demagogy studies based on deliberation and Edwin Black's idea of “second persona,” examining the digital exigence for this focus, and finally presenting case studies of both traditional and digital rhetoric to test this view of demagogy.

O'Halloran, K.A. (2010) 'Critical reading of a text through its electronic supplement', Digital Culture and Education 2(2): 210-229.

by Kieran O'Halloran

A by-product of new social media platforms is an abundant textual record of engagements - billions of words across the... more A by-product of new social media platforms is an abundant textual record of engagements - billions of words across the world-wide-web in, for example, discussion forums, blogs and wiki discussion tabs. Many of these engagements consist of commentary on a particular text and can thus be regarded as supplements to these texts. The larger purpose of this article is to flag the utility value of this electronic supplementarity for critical reading by highlighting how it can reveal particular meanings that the text being responded to can reasonably be said to marginalise and / or repress. Given the potentially very large size of social media textual product, knowing how to explore these supplements with electronic text analysis software is essential.
To illustrate the above, I focus on how the content of online discussion forums, explored through electronic text analysis software, can be used to assist critical reading of the texts which initiate them. The paper takes its theoretical orientations from the textual intervention work of Rob Pope together with themes in the work of the philosopher, Jacques Derrida.

YouTube and Apocalyptic Rhetoric: Broadcasting Yourself to the Ends of the World

by Dennis Beesley

Disagreement, Confusion, Disapproval, Turn Elicitation and Floor Holding: Actions as Accomplished by Ellipsis Marks-Only Turns and Blank Turns in Quasisynchronous Chats

by Kenneth Keng Wee Ong

Published in Discourse Studies, 13(2), 211-234, April 2011. Please access the paper at http://dis.sagepub.com/content/13/2/211.abstract

This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous... more This study evidences turn actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns as employed in quasisynchronous chats that are not discussed in prior literature. A brief introduction to the research background of ellipsis marks in online chats is followed by a description of the data collected before delving into the actions done by ellipsis marks-only turns and blank turns. Data was culled from multi-party chats among tertiary students during a critical reasoning class. A Conversation Analysis-informed approach is applied in this paper to analyze the preference organization of elliptical turns that illustrates responses signaling disagreement, confusion and disapproval besides initial actions of eliciting responses and holding the floor. More than punctuation marks or paralinguistic restitution of silences, their interpersonal meaningfulness in sequential context and differentness/similarity vis-à-vis temporal silences are demonstratively shown in microscopic and interpretive description of chat excerpts.

Blogging As Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog

by Carolyn R. Miller

Questions for Genre Theory from the Blogosphere

by Carolyn R. Miller

Co-authored with Dawn Shepherd. Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre, ed. Janet Giltrow and Dieter Stein. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. 263–290.

The blog illustrates well the constant change that characterizes electronic media. With a rapidity equal to that of... more The blog illustrates well the constant change that characterizes electronic media. With a rapidity equal to that of their initial adoption, blogs became not a single genre but a multiplicity. To explore the relationship between the centrifugal forces of change and the centripetal tendencies of recurrence and typification, we extend our earlier study of personal blogs with a contrasting study of the kairos, technological affordances, rhetorical features, and exigence for what we call public affairs blogs. At the same time, we explore the relationship between genre and medium, examining genre evolution in the context of changing technological affordances. We conclude that genre and medium must be distinguished and that the aesthetic satisfactions of genre help account for recurrence in an environment of change.

Writing In a Culture of Simulation

by Carolyn R. Miller

Published in The Semiotics of Writing: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on the Technology of Writing, edited by P. Coppock. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols: 253–279.

Expertise and Agency: Transformations of Ethos In Human-Computer Interaction

by Carolyn R. Miller

In The Ethos of Rhetoric, edited by M. Hyde. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press: 2004, 197–218.

La retórica antigua en internet

by Manuel López-Muñoz

Pectora mulcet: estudios de retórica y oratoria latinas / coord. por Trinidad Arcos Pereira, Jorge Fernández López, Francisca Moya del Baño, Vol. 2, 2009, ISBN 978-84-96637-70-2, pags. 1323-1336

From the Screen to Me, 1984-2008: Computer television commercials and three phases of the human-computer relationship

by David Gruber

published in 'Media History,' Aug. 2010

This paper explores Apple and Microsoft television commercials from the last 25 years and argues that they visualize... more This paper explores Apple and Microsoft television commercials from the last 25 years and argues that they visualize three phases of the human-computer relationship through the changing positions of the computer and the human body. The three phases are: disembodied cyberspace, embodied hybridity and ubiquity. Ultimately, what becomes apparent is the extent to which these television commercials demonstrate what Henry Jenkins calls a 'cultural convergence' in relation to the human-computer relationship and why this convergence experienced a shift from phase one to phase two around the turn of the millennium. The paper ends by examining more recent Apple and Microsoft television commercials in order to explore the possibility of a new, third phase in the human-computer relationship.