The practice and study of rhetoric have transformed with the means of communication that evolved from oral to print to multimodal forms. The technologically augmented and self-consciously performed “secondary orality” (Walter Ong, 1982), has never been more evident than in our increasingly networked digital culture. Sometimes lauded as the agents of freedom and democratic empowerment, participatory social media are also perceived as agents of discord, corruptive influence, and tools for authoritarian regimes. The ubiquity of digital apparatus, as L.M. Sacasas (2019) puts it, has made it almost impossible for us to escape the drama in the town square of digital spaces. This panel discusses rhetorical strategies the new/social media users employ to voice for justice, push propaganda, and create or remix content to amplify visibility in attention economy.

The conceptual root of this panel lies in the scholarships such as Walter Ong’s Literacy and Orality (1982), Neil Postman’s Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), Richard A Lanham’s The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (2006), Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture (2014), and Douglas Eyman’s Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice (2015), among others. To expand the conversation on digital rhetoric and culture initiated by these scholars, this panel has four presenters whose presentations are strictly limited to 12-minutes for each. Introductions will take 5-7 minutes. An unstructured discussion will follow in the remaining 20 minutes after the presentations.

Presentations begin with “Ad Hominem: Identitarian Culture and Critical Discourse,” by Justin Cosner. He discusses the tenacity of ad hominem attack against the opponent in the US public argument even when many aspects of rational discourse are lost in the increasingly digital modes. By extending Postman and Carr’s ideas on persuasive technologies, and by tracing the emergence of what Ezra Klein calls “identitarian media,” Cosner shows how centering identity in our digital lives and collapsing the distinction between beliefs and identity renders good faith debate nearly impossible. He argues for a need to return to a more dispassionate principles of inquiry, including those advocated by bell hooks in “Critical Thinking,” to build resilience and empower truth-seeking in academic discussion.

Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu’s presents a study of critical thinking in her “NFT as a Digital Rhetorical Decolonializing Pl(art)form for Black Female Digital Artists.” She interrogates the community-based participation of Nigerian diaspora in the production of empowering decolonial NFT-centered digital art and DEI-based pedagogical spread of information about black bodies. She analyzes two black female digital artists who earned significant reputation on Twitter or X. In the light of critical digital literacy and decolonial feminism, Akinpelu argues that these women’s digital artwork has served their agenda of pushing past colonially entrenched notions about black female (bodies) on the internet and showcased the decolonizing potentiality of NFTs and the blockchain pl(art)forms.

Likewise, in “Meme as Social Media Whatever-Singularity: Citationality, Politics and the Visual in Meme culture,” Zara Richter studies one of the popular artifacts of digital towns squares—internet memes. Richter points that the unscrupulous citational practice and remix culture of memes transcend the context of their birth and perform the instance of the death of the author. She argues that the meme encompasses a terrain of struggle between material conditions of internet production and what Agamben calls “whatever-singularity.”

Finally, Kevin Artiga, in “Shaping Public Perception: Risk Communication in the Digital Age,” explores the concept of outrage as an aesthetic that shapes the cultural value of political, financial, and cultural objects. He looks at how government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) communicate about risk regarding migration through their social media accounts on platforms like X. Drawing on the procedural enthymemes of social media as discussed by Brok and Shepherd, Artiga argues that the entities like ICE, in their utilization of these platforms to communicate with the public, undergo a transformation from mere government bodies to active participants in media discourse, following the logic of social media interfaces.

This panel forms a diverse team of discussants in terms of career stages, gender, nationality, and content of their presentation. Cosner is an early career Lecturer of Rhetoric at a public university. An alumna of George Washington University, Richter has emerging scholarship on digital humanities, queer studies, and critical disability studies. Akinpelu hails from Nigeria and is pursuing her PhD at University of Alabama. Kevin Artiga, a doctoral student at the University of Florida, has scientific/technical communication and digital humanities as his areas of interest.