Zemmels

I think this piece is a 21 page paper on exactly what this class is about. I was honestly a bit confused about the whole depiction of rhetorical criticism and how it relates to the digital sphere, but this paper made me step back and look at the big picture of what this class is about. It is very important for us to be able to rhetorically analyze the digital world that we use so that we can accurately depict what can or can not be trusted in the ways that it interacts with audiences.

Unfortunately, the audience does not usually feel the same way about this. To the untrained user, according to Zemmels, they typically do not care. The indeterminacy of authorship is a challenge to rhetorical analysis, but the audience sometimes believes that in an internet environment, it is not needed and sometimes poses a challenge. When an author of something remains anonymous, they are more likely to express their true feelings on a subject instead of worrying about their appearance in the public eye. Also, in the world of the internet, it is so easy for users to cut and paste any text that they see, so the authors credibility gets lost in the process anyway.

I couldn't agree more with the section on media in the digital sphere. Douglas Kellner believed that the nation is so corrupted with conservative ideologies, that the internet is a way for people to be exposed to different viewpoints and they would then be able to make more informed decisions about government and society. With traditional print media, sometimes people live in areas where every public viewpoint is conservative. I notice this a lot with my hometown. Because it is a farming community, the newspaper is a weekly-run depiction of republican viewpoints from the 1920s. The number of articles about football and hunting has probably tripled any other normal newspaper. But with the internet, my community can [hope to be] more democratic in their thinking.