Digital rhetoric explores how digital tools and environments such as social media, interactive texts change how individuals communicate. It involves incorporating not just rhetoric which is like persuasion but new probabilities offered by the digital media world. The text provided by Eyman gave an in depth exploration of digital rhetoric. It was a term introduced by Lanham in the early 1980s. It basically outlines the development of the digital rhetoric theory. It emphasizes the challenges and questions about how rhetoric principles like persuasion or arguments apply in our digital world. Our media has a new rise of hypertext, multimedia communication such as video, audio writing.
My Definition of Digital rhetoric
A personal example that made me understand this was a group project I was involved in last semester. Me and my teammates were using a shared document to write our final paper. Digital rhetoric is obviously a huge role in this play. Instead of me just sharing my information and facts, I am also engaging with everyone’s ideas. Collaborating with them but also building each other’s texts. One of my teammates suggested an idea for one of the slides I was covering. I responded back by adding a point that ties into their suggestion. This interaction like using links to support our claims, choosing specific visuals. Even using graphics for our paper is sort of the example I got from digital rhetoric. We aren’t just writing a paper but we are creating a shared piece through conversations, persuasions and collaboration.
The goal for digital rhetoric is to make something basically informative but persuasive. Another example I believe really connects with this text and outlines the analytical overview is social media. Our generation relies heavily on media and one media that screams digital rhetoric is twitter. We aren’t just sharing tweets but also images, videos and links while responding to others. It’s not just a single individual persuading another but a constant back and forth between one another. It basically shows how it’s not just a one way deal, it’s how we actively create meaning in digital spaces. It’s about understanding the whole purpose so not just images, videos and sounds but also text and argument.
article: Project MUSE – Digital Rhetoric
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