In Ways of Knowing and Doing in Digital Rhetoric: A Primer by Matthew Davis, Stephen J. McElroy, and Rory Lee, they asked 23 different scholars 10 questions about their research, pedagogy, and scholarly influences. Despite all of their research, they came to the conclusion that digital rhetoric doesn’t have an exact meaning everyone can agree upon. Overall, I found the fact that they couldn’t find a conclusion to be interesting. It seems like a semi-simple concept when you fully break down the words themselves.
My Understanding of “Online Persuasion”
To me, digital rhetoric, once I had taken the phrase apart and split it into its two distinct parts: digital and rhetoric, things started to slowly click together in my head. Digital typically being something that’s done online or with technology where rhetoric is a form of communication. Even more specifically, rhetoric is the use of language to persuade others to see the speaker’s point of view. So, therefore, putting the two definitions together, digital rhetoric is online communication that can be used to persuade. It may even invite others to argue the original point.
Conclusion
This collaborative effort likely explains why those 23 scholars, who were asked about digital rhetoric and giving it a definition could not agree on a single definition for the phrase. Online spaces aren’t just spaces to post an opinion and not expect some sort of criticism or feedback. They entirely change how any arguments that may form as a result of such posts, function. Engagement with a post changes the context of the post’s persuasion entirely. Therefore, digital rhetoric is an evolving multimodal form of communication. In which, the platform actively plays a role in how meaning is made and likely, contested.
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