When you swipe right on a dating app or scroll endlessly through TikTok, you’re not just passing time—you’re participating in a carefully designed interaction shaped by Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and digital rhetoric. These moments may feel casual, even automatic, but beneath the surface, powerful systems are guiding how you move, feel, and decide online.
Douglass Eyman, a man who has guided us throughout this entire semester, keeps a reminder of digital environments not being neutral. They are designed spaces for persuasion, where meaning is created through interaction. In this space, HCL and digital rhetoric meet. Think of it as HCl asks: How can systems be designed so people can use them efficiently, effectively, and safely, and with satisfaction? Digital rhetoric asks the deeper, more insightful questions: What are these systems persuading us to do and why? Forming this mass architecture of our everyday digital lives.
Dating in the 21st century
We’ve heard of dating applications such as Tinder. Dating apps couldn’t be clearer of HCl and digital rhetoric working together. Each swipe is efficient and intuitive. But rhetorically, it frames human connection as fast, gamified, and disposable. Each swipe mimics a reward system, offering intermittent validation that keeps users engaged. Relationships are now seen as content, and people as profiles. You’ve been positioned less as a creator of connection and more as a consumer of possibility
Social Media: Empowerment or Illusion
Scholar Skeen notes that both HCL and digital rhetoric are concerned with user empowerment. Social media platforms give users the tools to create, share, and express themselves, but those same platforms employ persuasive design to keep users scrolling. The notification bell, the infinite feed, and the “just one more video” feeling are usability features and rhetorical devices. An example is those who use social media to upload all the bad things that are happening in the world. They empower us to create, but only within systems that are optimized for engagement, data extraction, and what captures the attention of users.
Stream of Consciousness
This is where clicking into consciousness matters. Understanding HCl and digital rhetoric helps us recognize when we are acting as digital consumers – reacting, scrolling, swiping, and when we step into the role of digital creators, making intentional choices about how we engage, post, design, and disconnect.
The next time you can’t put your phone down, ask yourself:
Is this just good design? Or is this persuasion disguised as convenience?
HCl and digital rhetoric should be mutually beneficial, as Dougle Eyman suggests. Enhancing usability and meaning. Balance becomes possible when we see the systems shaping us and choose how we want to shape them in return.
Start clicking with intention. Where are you going next from here?
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