In the article “Understanding and Maintaining Your Privacy When Writing with Digital Technologies” by Douglas Eyman, he introduces Richard Lanham who claims digital rhetoric to be a form of art. As said on page 24, where it states “Lanham’s approach focuses primarily on… artistic and literary forms” and again on page 25 “…he explicitly [evokes] the term ‘digital rhetoric’ as a form of art”. This highlights Lanham’s point of view on digital rhetoric.
Reflecting Back:
Back in my previous blog post “What is Digital?” I wrote about how Eyman explains that digital is more than just electronics and it goes far beyond that. Digital can mean your fingers, printing presses, and clay tokens. This illustrates how not everything can be common knowledge and that there is a deeper meaning to everything. Looking outside the box and testing the limits is something that needs to be done in order to discover new things.
Hypertext:
However, not every theorists thinks alike: Landow thinks that all digital rhetoric pieces are related to the hypertext. A hypertext is a “software system that links topic screens to related information and graphics”. Again, this can be related back to my previous blog where I talk about algorithms and how searching something up so many times can cause more frequency in you seeing that product or similar products. As Landow states on page 25, “…hypertext theory is to connect hypertext to past forms and theories of (print) text. This emphasizes his point of view on digital rhetoric and reinforces how theorists may not always look in the same direction.
Rhetoric (Forms of Appeal):
There are also many things to take into consideration when writing pretty much anything. This would be the rhetoric appeals which are ethos, pathos, and logos. In Eyman’s piece, he only highlights the ethical appeal. Ethos is the the person’s credibility and how well they know the information they are talking about. Yes, they might be telling you something, but do they have the resources to prove that what they are saying is true? On page 31, it points out the importance of ethos and how it is a crucial piece for theorists.
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