According to the teachers in the article, the difference between traditional rhetoric and digital rhetoric is the perception of an immediate audience. Students who grew up writing and posting online view their audience as an immediate consequence of posting. This means immediate feedback and, potentially, criticism. While the digital space, the freedom and the access it provides to people, is a benefit, it’s also a source of genuine, understandable anxiety.

Some of this anxiety is related to a writer’s understanding of who their audience is. It’s not just inconceptual strangers– the audience are personal friends, family, and peers. Students realize that what they post online can affect their personal relationships and their professional opportunities. This can give writers anxiety about posting online, because what they say can have massive damage on their lives. That is, if they’re received wrong.

Modern Digital Anxiety

The authors of the article are looking for way to allieve their students of this anxiety. The main concepts around helping students navigate their anxiety involves teachers gaining a better understanding of digital spaces, themselves. Much of their advice for navigating the anxiety that students have of writing online is in recognizing that anxiety. There’s also a lot of focus on social media in the article. In part, because it has played a large part in forming this public, generational anxiety.

What’s interesting is that this article was clearly written over a decade ago. The digital landscape has changed drastically since then, yet it’s still much the same. However, the anxiety around posting online is both worse and better. Since the recent rise of “cancel culture” and Lockdown leaving students with a lack of social skills and confidence. Many students don’t just have anxiety about writing online, they have anxiety around having and asserting their own opinions.

This generation faces a chronic lack of confidence and self stability.

This is where the author’s idea of understanding the digital enviornment is even more true. Through teaching Digital Rhetoric, teachers can help students to view social media as a tool. This puts students back in control of their own lives, which can help manage their anxiety. Social media and the internet seem to have dominated our way of life, but that’s inaccurate. The internet is full of people, the technology is a tool. The best why to manage anxiety is to gain an understanding of what the tool is and can do. To take control over it and to adopt a healthy degree of separation from it.