Rhetoric Online Ch 1 and 2

I think this is going to turn out to be an interesting book (besides the fact they talked about 4chan in their first chapter).

The first chapter was focused on how what is public has changed recently. They talk about many different people who have written on the concept of the private space; from the concept of the idea that the public space is made to be a sort of educating forum to the fact that the public space is often a place where many badly represented groups are left out. They connected this idea of public spaces to technology by talking about social media websites, MMOs, and even 4chan (which kind of made my day, because if you went back even a year and told me I would have a text book that mentions 4chan I would have laughed in your face).

I found this interesting because when it comes to a digital space, the idea of what is private and what is public has been something I thought a lot about. There are places like Facebook where I’ve seen both comments from my friend on how ‘this private conversation doesn’t need to be showing up on their feed’ to my dad sending me funny images in a private message that could just have easily been posted to my wall. I think the concept of public and private is something we are still trying to understand on the internet.

In the second chapter they talked about political rhetoric in digital media. They looked at Obama’s campaign and how it used everything from Twitter to Iphone Apps. They even used more advance softway applications such as something called "sentiment" analysis. Above all they talked about how this use of digital media effected the campaign and how this is overall reflected in the study of new media.

I remember being effected by this – Obama had the best run Tumblr blog I’ve ever seen a political person have. It had a very good rhetorical appeal – to have a man who wanted to be my president trying to reach me in a way I normally communicated (I swear this is a case of déjà vu; I think I’ve talked about this for another blog post in one of Wendy’s classes). As digital media gets more and more common I have a feeling this will become the norm. More ideas in the world will find a space online; if they already have not. Everyone - from businesswomen to consumers - have had to find a place online and this is why the rhetoric online has been growing and developing.