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 and Social Media
By: Sydney Gribbin
The emergence of social media’s prominence in our world today brings with it global connectivity like never before. People can share their ideas with just a few taps on their phone and suddenly those thoughts are accessible across the world. The rise in social media brings with it a subset of rhetoric focused on it. This subset, digital rhetoric, has the same qualities that writers like Plato and Aristotle used, but the interactivity present in digital rhetoric has shifted to become something distinct.
In ancient rhetoric, writers/orators utilized rhetoric to convey their ideas to the public. They utilized ethos, logos, and pathos to estabilish credibility, appeal to logic, and utilize envoking certain emtions in order to persuade their audience. The interactivity between these writers/orators and their audience was mostly passive. The audience was primarily there to listen or read, and then be persuaded. One could assume that ideas presented would cause some discussions, but these would be localized to whatever area the writer/orator happened to be in. Of course, ideas eventually spread to wider parts outside of the area of the writer/orator, but it took a long time to do so.
However, the introduction of the Internet, and in turn the rise of social media, the interconnectivity between the author and the audience has grown like never before. The audience now not only can be a passive consumer of content, but also co-authors themselves, often unknowingly. For example, let us say that an influencer on TikTok created a video of them dancing to a fun song. A fan of this influencer loves the dance, and decides to gather a few friends and do it themselves on their own TikTok page. Scenarios like this are happening constantly on platforms like TikTok, and a few obersavtions can be found. The audience of the influencer is no longer confined to the area that the influencer resides in; the fans can be halfway around the world that consume the content the moment it is posted. This leads to ideas spreading extremely quickly online. Futhermore, the fan in this example unknowingly becomes a co-author with the influencer by coping the dance and posting it to their own page and followers. Now, the fan’s friends could recreate the dancing video themselves, also becoming co-authors.
The cycle of interactivity seen in social media platforms is far greater and complex than what has been seen in the past when it comes to rhetoric. Focusing study on this dynamic area of rhetoric is something worth doing in order to become more intentional when it comes to posting on these platforms.
Lee, Sarah. “Digital Rhetoric Essentials.” Number Analytics, www.numberanalytics.com/blog/digital-rhetoric-essentials. Accessed 6 July 2025.