User:MiguelAngelFimbres/sandbox

Adding to the existing Wikipedia Article on Digital rhetoric under the heading of "scope of influence"

Politics
The increase in digitalization of media has amplified the importance of digital rhetoric in politics as it has introduced a new relationship between politicians and the citizenry. Digital communication platforms and social networking sites (SNS) are means of allowing citizens to share information and engage in debate with other people of similar or distinct political ideologies. The topics and ideas communicated through digital rhetoric have been shown to influence and predict the political behavior of individuals outside the digital world. Politicians have been known to use digital rhetoric as a tool to communicate information to the citizens. Likewise, digital rhetoric has enabled  increasing political participation. Theoretical political research on digital rhetoric has attributed to the increase of political participation to three models; these include the motivation model, learning model, and attitude model.


 * The attitude model proposes that digital rhetoric has decreased the opportunity costs of participating in politics since it makes information readily available to the people.
 * The learning model established the increase in political participation to the vast amount of political information available in the internet which increases the inclusion of the citizens in the political process.
 * The attitude model extended from the previous two by suggesting that digital rhetoric has changed the perception of citizens towards politics, particularly by providing interactive tools that allow people to engage in the political process.

Social media incorporates numerous characteristics of interactions between people in the public sphere. Social media is not characterized as an ideal public sphere because it fails to provide equitable access to information and participation for women and minority groups. Nevertheless, social media has shown to be useful in the propagation of digital rhetoric for political campaigns as shown in Obama's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns in which digital rhetoric made its first successful appearance at a U.S presidential  election — which marked a guideline for future elections. The presence of digital media companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Twitter has been well established in the promotion of digital rhetoric for political purposes. These firms have influenced the political process by providing strategic information about people demographics, behaviors, attitudes, and interests, all of which have increased the efficiency of political discourse — especially for political campaigns. In 2013, Twitter released a manual targeted towards politicians that outlined the main features of their platform and how they can be used to increase political communications. In 2018, Facebook devoted $62,500 dollars to create a space for politicians to learn ways in which they can use digital rhetoric in Facebook to increase the impact of there campaigns. Steir (2018) conducted a study to analyze the different types of rhetoric that took place in social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter; during the 2013 election campaign for the German Bundestag, he found that the types of information that politicians share on both platforms varied — Facebook was found to be the preferred medium for campaign rhetoric while Twitter was mostly utilized for rhetoric regarding political debates, infrastructure discussions, and  law and order.