Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of New Hampshire/Digital Rhetoric (Spring 2024)

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Accounts of the rhetorical tradition typically begin with ancient Greece and figures such as Protagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, whose work on rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, exerts a pervasive influence on the discipline. Concepts like genre, decorum, and doxa are still essential conceptual tools for thinking about rhetoric and covered in introductory rhetoric textbooks and courses. Yet, while rhetoric courses begin with the long-ago work of people who wore togas at public gatherings and wrote on scrolls, contemporary culture features wearable technology and touch screens. One of this course’s central concerns is how traditional rhetorical theories and methods apply in a world of hyperlinks, social media, viral videos, and so forth. Can we employ them as is, or do we need to develop new approaches in order to understand persuasion in new media environments?

And, of course, rhetoric’s long history doesn’t end with the ancients. This course also addresses how less ancient – ie. more recent - rhetorical perspectives might also offer insight into online, networked communication. Circulation emerges as a central concern. Throughout the course we consider how texts move among and between rhetorical contents, how they fragment in soundbites and fuse in remixes, and how audiences play a role in the process, viewing, clicking, liking, sharing, and so on. And at the heart of it all is perhaps the most enduring of rhetorical questions: how does discourse – in this case, online discourse - function epistemically, shaping, and perhaps even creating, our understanding of the world.

As it explores these issues, this course will tackle both rhetorical production and rhetorical analysis. That is, it will ask students to create digital rhetoric in the form of infographics, tweets, videos, and crowdsourced content, as well as analyzing their own and others’ rhetorical productions.