Procedural Rhetoric

Procedural Rhetoric: a practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular. More specifically - the web. As technology moves more into the foreground of rhetorical appeal, the computer is beginning to magnify process and procedures.

These types of procedures are not like the ones in programming, however, they are used in more of a literal sense. As the author discusses, computers and the way that they are programmed can not be altered. Well, obviously they can by the programmer, but that's a different story. When someone wants to return an item to a store, a clerk might alter the procedure for accepting the item back on certain circumstances. However, if you try to return an item to an online store and it is, for instance, beyond the time that it can be taken back, then the server running the website will run a code to check if the item can be returned. If it does not meet a certain qualification - it will say no; no exceptions.

The way that I see the use of process in the web can be both good and bad. It can make a more uniformed society - one that does not create so many exceptions. Or, it can turn people off to the use of technology. A website might expand a company's customer base, but it might lose customers at the same time because they get frustrated with the software.

According to Charles Hill, those trained in classical rhetoric are beginning to understand the quality in the use of visual rhetoric. Images are being used more because they are more vivid than text or speech. They discuss the idea of a hypermedia that clutters websites with an obnoxious amount of hyperlinks, and how the use of them is both helping websites and making them suffer. On one hand, hyperlinks make a page more resourceful; on the other, it makes pages extremely hard to navigate.