Digital Rhetoric

From what I've come to understand of rhetoric it is a type of communication that is persuades a person about a type of discourse. Discourse is anything that needs to be responded to; from how we run our government to what a group of friends decide to eat tonight. Rhetoric can be found both in speech, in art, even how buildings are laid out; I always felt that our campus with our many types of buildings was a good example of the different ways architecture and engineering could persuade you to use a building in a certain way or act a certain way in that space.

The term digital brings to mind technology such as email, blogs, videogames, ebooks, and microsoft documents. Basically anything that would not exist without the computer technology that we have today. I've come to have a new understanding of the digital object verses the physical object due to my work in the archives; where we digitize documents but still realize something is lost if we don't have the original.

So combining the two would mean looking at how people respond to discourse and try to persuade people to respond to discourse in a digital space or using digital objects. Specifically this means understanding how different people understand digital objects and respond to them. I think it also means understanding what a digital object communicates besides what is being said or written.