In digital rhetoric, “text” isn’t goes beyond printed words. It’s a much broader concept that includes objects, collections, and even contexts. This expanded definition allows for a deeper exploration of how rhetoric operates in the digital age.
Historically, people have see “text” as a printed document or a transcript. But cultural studies and postmodern theory taught us that text can be anything that carries meaning. It’s the collection of arguments, contexts, and connections that give a message shape. Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler offer a starting point for understanding text as a “communicative event,” with criteria like cohesion and coherence. We view text in the digital world in our everyday lives. Simple google searches lead us to the deepest of text, to creating a website for movie reviews, text in the digital world is more complex than just words.
In digital rhetoric, these criteria still apply, but they’re now expanded to include various media and modes. A website, for example, is not just a static document. It is a dynamic, interactive object that responds to its environment. The concept of “spimes”—objects that are location-aware and data-driven—illustrates how texts now behave. These texts are unstable, alterable, and even self-documenting, offering new possibilities for rhetorical study. We are creating websites, everyone’s website will be different, but it will include various text, media and offer new information.
As we define digital rhetoric, we embrace a broader, more fluid idea of what “text” can be. This opens new pathways for studying how rhetoric shapes our digital world.
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