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.
Rhetoric for the New Age
By: Marissa Farmer
As social media and digital platforms continue to evolve and become essential in our lives, digital users and writers must understand the complexities of digital rhetoric. While rhetoric is mainly studied in traditional academic structures of the written word and speech, online rhetoric introduces digital text that embraces multimedia and interaction to support arguments, messages, social change, and more.
Circulation is a key component of digital rhetoric as it explains how media is shared and reinterpreted as individuals interact with the content. Circulation often leads to a collective agreement, opinion, behavior, understanding, or action taken in response to the information spread. Social media platforms promote circulation as algorithms push content to users, with texts becoming viral, trending, and commented on by a global audience. As a result of circulation, assembling publics are spheres that are created to respond to events or experiences, laying the groundwork for other publics to emerge. Assembling publics creates connections through intersectional oppressions, allowing people to come together to understand an arrangement concurrently and across time.
Assemblage works to persuade others by making connections through the use of previous texts to reach a new meaning or understanding that is a response to circumstances or experiences, laying the groundwork for other publics to emerge. Through the use of culture, shared experiences, and education, individuals on the internet use assemblage to build community. An example of an assemblage would be the Black Lives Matter movement, where individuals responded to ongoing systematic oppression against Black individuals by creating a campaign that educated others on the struggles faced by Black communities to build community and promote social change.
Through the use of assemblage, digital rhetoric works to repurpose digital texts to build an understanding of social issues and discourse to encourage interaction, shared culture, and action. The evolving field of digital rhetoric relies on individuals applying rhetorical practice to digital media, interacting with each other and texts to persuade, inform, or solve a problem, and shaping relationships through conversation and discourse.
Works Cited
Cole, Monique. “Composing in the Age of Social Media: Using Social Media Within An
Assemblage and Circulation Framework.” (2021).
Hess, Aaron, and Amber L. Davisson, eds. Theorizing Digital Rhetoric. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
James Jasinski. Sourcebook on Rhetoric. SAGE Publications, Inc, 2001. EBSCOhost,
research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=9a03b3c5-6df9-30d5-a1ae-b113c8eb0852.
LeCourt, Donna. Social Mediations: Writing for Digital Spheres. University of Pittsburgh Press,
2024.
Reid, Alex. “Exposing Assemblages: Unlikely Communities of Digital Scholarship, Video, and
Social Networks.” Enculturation 8 (2010): 1-13