Page 333 - Gabrijela Kišiček and Igor Ž. Žagar (eds.), What do we know about the world? Rhetorical and argumentative perspectives, Digital Library, Educational Research Institute, Ljubljana 2013
P. 333
challenges of rhetoric in the era of “bytes and likes” 333
Originally, European rhetoric was worked out for the discursive practic-
es of the public spaces of the polis where people met, shared ideas, and
influenced each other strategically in the traditional one-to-many rela-
tionships. The textual ideal of rhetoric used to be the “finished and pol-
ished” speech, the formal act of discourse with which someone persuad-
ed many others by means of structure, common places, figures of speech,
and argumentation. Formal oratory was a conservative force preserving
the moral and political values, of the past; its function was to preserve
things as they were. Traditional rhetoric prepared the speaker for win-
ning with words: winning the receiver’s soul and will. Offering the can-
on, rhetoric enabled the speaker to invent topics, arrange them hierar-
chically into structural units, to express them in language, and remem-
ber texts and perform speeches. The rhetorical model, of this tradition,
is that of the well-educated man who is trained to express, in one speech,
the common wisdom of his society. Consequently, rhetoric is to be about
the excellence of the speaker, and about the formality of the situation
and the speech. However, new media widened and replaced real public
spaces and fluidized texts. The operation and usage, of new media, blurs
the border between the roles of the speaker and audience; remediates
discourse (visual and verbal) constantly and accustoms users to the in-
finiteness of messages. New media should be considered to be the com-
plex of new textual experiences; new ways of representation, new im-
pressions and experiences of embodiment, new relations between user
and technology, new ways of expression (verbal, visual, multimedia),
new patterns of organizations, production and control, and new reali-
zations of identity and social relations (Lister, 2003, Fuery, 2009, Mill-
er 2011). “New media” is a convergent notion of convergent and digital
media technologies consisting of the computer, the internet, the mobile
phone, social media, digital television, and so on. In media-lingo, new
media’s most frequently used characteristics are digital, interactive, hy-
per-textual, and virtual. Digital as it is, rhetoric, of the new media’s dis-
cursive practice , was called, also, digital rhetoric.
Kathleen Welch argued (1999: 104) that electric rhetoric is “an
emergent consciousness or mentalité within discourse communities, is
the new merger of the written and the oral, both now newly empowered
and reconstructed by electricity and both dependent on print literacy.
Electronic technologies have led to electronic consciousness, an aware-
ness or mentalité that now changes literacy but in no way diminishes it.”
Screen generations, with that consciousness, form new codes of inter-
Originally, European rhetoric was worked out for the discursive practic-
es of the public spaces of the polis where people met, shared ideas, and
influenced each other strategically in the traditional one-to-many rela-
tionships. The textual ideal of rhetoric used to be the “finished and pol-
ished” speech, the formal act of discourse with which someone persuad-
ed many others by means of structure, common places, figures of speech,
and argumentation. Formal oratory was a conservative force preserving
the moral and political values, of the past; its function was to preserve
things as they were. Traditional rhetoric prepared the speaker for win-
ning with words: winning the receiver’s soul and will. Offering the can-
on, rhetoric enabled the speaker to invent topics, arrange them hierar-
chically into structural units, to express them in language, and remem-
ber texts and perform speeches. The rhetorical model, of this tradition,
is that of the well-educated man who is trained to express, in one speech,
the common wisdom of his society. Consequently, rhetoric is to be about
the excellence of the speaker, and about the formality of the situation
and the speech. However, new media widened and replaced real public
spaces and fluidized texts. The operation and usage, of new media, blurs
the border between the roles of the speaker and audience; remediates
discourse (visual and verbal) constantly and accustoms users to the in-
finiteness of messages. New media should be considered to be the com-
plex of new textual experiences; new ways of representation, new im-
pressions and experiences of embodiment, new relations between user
and technology, new ways of expression (verbal, visual, multimedia),
new patterns of organizations, production and control, and new reali-
zations of identity and social relations (Lister, 2003, Fuery, 2009, Mill-
er 2011). “New media” is a convergent notion of convergent and digital
media technologies consisting of the computer, the internet, the mobile
phone, social media, digital television, and so on. In media-lingo, new
media’s most frequently used characteristics are digital, interactive, hy-
per-textual, and virtual. Digital as it is, rhetoric, of the new media’s dis-
cursive practice , was called, also, digital rhetoric.
Kathleen Welch argued (1999: 104) that electric rhetoric is “an
emergent consciousness or mentalité within discourse communities, is
the new merger of the written and the oral, both now newly empowered
and reconstructed by electricity and both dependent on print literacy.
Electronic technologies have led to electronic consciousness, an aware-
ness or mentalité that now changes literacy but in no way diminishes it.”
Screen generations, with that consciousness, form new codes of inter-
