Students in Dr. Nicole Pfannenstiel’s summer 2025 writing seminar crafted blog posts exploring Rhetoric & Composition. Over the next several weeks, we will share their work in this space to bring visibility to their posts and offer a variety of perspectives on pertinent topics within Rhetoric & Composition. These posts are written by graduate students currently in the MA and M.Ed. English programs.
Understanding Digital Rhetoric and Overcoming Misinformation
By: Andrew Robinson
The outsized effect technology has on people dating back to the late 20th and early 21st century has resulted in a new type of rhetoric: Digital rhetoric. Distinguishable from “regular,” non-technology based rhetoric, digital rhetoric is “a digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make claims and provide evidence to support those claims” (Kuhn qtd in Sheean). This more encompassing form of rhetoric allows everyday people to make their opinions heard through text, video, image, GIF, meme, etc. on an instant, on-demand basis. Digital rhetoric is often used on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok. The presence of digital rhetoric has altered the understood meaning and acceptable usage of rhetoric on a global stage. In doing so, it has become imperative that children and adults alike are taught how to engage with digital rhetoric.
Digital rhetoric, like non-technology based rhetoric, can be used in positive and negative ways. Furthermore, digital rhetoric utilizes Aristotle’s ideas of ethos (credibility, expert opinions), logos (facts), and pathos (emotions) (Selber and Ridolfo). At times, these tactics are informative, but at others, they are misinformative. As such, the onus is on teachers to educate students about the dangers of digital rhetoric, both in terms of engagement and consumption. In “Digital Rhetoric: Harnessing the Language of Media in Hispanic Studies, Jacqueline Sheean details how she teaches her students about digital rhetoric through film study – this is a potential starting point to a pathway of education concerning digital rhetoric. Using film and video to teach students about body language, diction, and tone of voice, but also camera angle, lighting, and moe can increase students’ ability to pick out key elements of rhetoric in a digital platform – and how those elements affect the message presented or the audience’s perception of it. Furthermore, film and video (especially video) utilizes ethos, pathos, and logos to present their messages. Teaching through video – whether it be through old political commercials, news segments, cartoons, or something else – can allow students to see how ethos, logos, and pathos are used, thus bettering their chances when they encounter such tactics outside the classroom.
However, things go much further than simply film and video in the classroom, and the use of ethos, logos, and pathos. As misinformation becomes more and more prevalent in the toxic political landscape we find ourselves in today, children and adults alike need to be vigilant in their own education about digital rhetoric and how it is used (plus, how they use it themselves). While all forms of rhetoric inevitably use at least one of ethos, logos, or pathos, simply knowing about them does not prevent the average person from succumbing to misinformation which hold the potential to completely alter one’s thought processes and life trajectory. Case studies involving vaccine skeptics and Donald Trump are cited below. They can be helpful in informing oneself about the underbelly of digital rhetoric; about how rhetoric is used in a digital sense to stoke fear, anxiety, and/or hate.
Overall, digital rhetoric is now widely used, perhaps to a greater degree than
old-fashioned, non-technology based rhetoric. As such, the importance of understanding how to engage with it and all it entails appropriately has never been higher.
Works Cited
Coleman, Miles C., and Will Mari. “An Early Web History of Vaccine Skeptical Digital Rhetorics.” Internet Histories, Mar. 2025, pp. 1–23. EBSCOhost,
https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2025.2483568.
Hayes, Tracey J. “Trump’s Digital Rhetoric of Hate: The Use of Enthymemes in Creating Division.” Journal of Hate Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 14–34. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.33972/jhs.196.
Kuhn, Virginia. (2012). “The Rhetoric of Remix.” Transformative Works and Cultures, vol. 9.
Sheean, Jacqueline. “Digital Rhetoric : Harnessing the Language of Media in Hispanic Studies.” Hispania, vol. 106, no. 4, Dec. 2023, pp. 643–56. EBSCOhost, research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=86310578-305e-3560-b632-dda5ea599f80.
Selber, Stuart A., and Jim Ridolfo. “Stuart A. Selber: What Is Digital Rhetoric?” Argumentation et Analyse Du Discours, Apr. 2024. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.4000/aad.8357