Research Statement

In July 2008, two software engineers at Google updated the official Google weblog with a momentous piece of news: the company’s archived index of unique URLs had just passed the one trillion mark. Just how big is a trillion? Consider this: if you were to glance at each of those trillion webpages for just one second, it would take you 316 centuries. The Internet, it seems, has grown beyond the capacity of the human mind to comprehend it. The world is awash in texts, and only Google’s computers can read them all.

Which is a pity, really, because rhetoricians love texts. Our work depends on having access to texts, from political oratory to classified documents to the mundane scribblings of everyday life. Whether we embrace a broad or narrow view of what constitutes a text, we must admit that the digital age has produced an unprecedented deluge of them. Every online action taken by every Internet user—every blog post, every Twitter update, every listserv email, every YouTube video—yields another text, another data point waiting to be harvested, aggregated, and interpreted.

The Challenge for Digital Rhetoricians

I believe that the primary challenge for twenty-first century rhetoricians will be to devise methods for collecting, coding, and critiquing digital texts. My research focuses on the ways in which members of virtual communities use rhetoric — either knowingly or unknowingly — to persuade other community members, to govern their online interactions, and to shape their own identities and the collective identities of the communities to which they belong. By examining the role and function of rhetoric in contemporary digital environments, my research demonstrates that rhetoric plays a much larger role in the online lives of Americans than they realize and that, in turn, their online activities are continuously reshaping our rhetorical definitions and practices.

Dissertation Research

My dissertation research lies at the intersection of two concepts that have occupied my thinking throughout my graduate studies: ethos and virtual communities. Scholars in rhetoric have studied and written about ethos for more than two thousand years, yet little work has been done to update our understanding of ethos to account for the massive shifts in discursive practices wrought by emerging information and communication technologies. Likewise, sociologists and technologists have written about virtual communities for at least twenty years, but relatively little attention has been paid to the importance of rhetoric within these communities. Contrary to popular notions that online discourse has “dumbed down” public rhetoric in America, I contend that the explosion of virtual communities and online interaction over the past two decades has fostered a great resurgence of rhetoric, especially among those who would never consider themselves rhetors.

Virtual Communities

Data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project suggests that more than 39 million Americans regularly participate in online discussions. Whereas early websites maintained the traditional distinction between author and audience, most contemporary websites encourage (and even rely on) participation from and interaction among average visitors to the sites. These websites represent a radical shift in the communicative model that links writers and readers, speakers and listeners. As the line between author and audience grows increasingly blurry, the increased volume of online discussion offers researchers a plethora of textual and visual artifacts that demonstrate how argumentation and persuasion operate in online environments. The primacy of language in these virtual communities suggests that the principles of traditional rhetoric will provide a useful framework for studying online identity and group interaction. As I explore the formation of individual and shared identity online, the concept of ethos becomes particularly important.

Ethos

In popular usage today, ethos can mean anything from “credibility” to “personality” to “character” to “spirit.” As Nan Johnson points out, “variations in definitions of ethos correspond to different views of the relationship between rhetorical practice, philosophy, and ethics.” Our contemporary understanding of ethos relies heavily on the ideas of Plato, Isocrates, Quintilian, and Cicero, who see a direct connection between a speaker’s words and his personal ethics. But Aristotle propounds a precise, narrow definition of ethos in his Rhetoric, focused squarely on the speaker’s words: while ethos “depends upon the personal character of the speaker,” the persuasion that results from this proof must reside in the text itself; it “should be achieved by what the speaker says, not by what people think of his character before he begins to speak” (emphasis mine). Hence, the rhetor succeeds not when he is genuinely credible, but when he “make[s] us think him credible” (emphasis mine). Later, Aristotle reiterates that the speaker “must also make his own character look right” (emphasis mine). The distinctions here are subtle but important, especially in the realm of virtual communities, where identity and authorship are always in doubt. Online interlocutors cannot rely on traditional methods of establishing their identity and credibility; they must construct their ethos using the conventions developed and upheld by the communities to which they belong.

Methods and Research Site

Over the past two decades, researchers in fields ranging from anthropology to linguistics to business to rhetoric have begun applying traditional ethnographic research methods to virtual communities. The process of “observing” these communities is, of course, quite different from traditional ethnography, but ethnography offers a helpful framework for making sense of the textual and visual data found in virtual communities. Ethnography also provides a model for thoughtful, ethical approaches to studying human interaction and representing research subjects fairly. As a “virtual ethnography,” my dissertation combines a variety of research methods (observation, artifact collection, surveys, member-checking interviews, etc.) to investigate the intersections of identity, anonymity, reputation, and rhetoric in one virtual community. MetaFilter, created in 1999, is a general-interest group weblog that allows members of the site to post links to other websites, then discuss those websites with other MetaFilter users. The site, which has almost 40,000 members, is moderated by just five people. However, the community has a strong ethic of self-policing, and one sub-forum, called MetaTalk, is designed specifically to allow members to discuss the policies and practices of the larger MetaFilter community. By analyzing archived MetaTalk discussions, surveying active users of the forum, and interviewing moderators and other longstanding members of the community, I hope to illuminate the power and potential of rhetoric in digital spaces.

Summary

My dissertation (1) argues that contemporary online discourse calls for a renewed interest in Aristotle’s definition of ethos; (2) demonstrates the unique methods by which members of virtual communities build, maintain, and damage their own ethos and the collective ethos of their communities, and (3) proposes a typology of ethotic appeals specific to online discourse that can be applied to rhetorical analyses of other virtual communities. I believe my dissertation will make a significant contribution to our discipline’s understanding of how rhetoric functions in digital environments.

Future Projects

I envision my dissertation as one section of a larger book project and companion website tentatively titled RhetorClick. Other sections of the book will explore the role of logos and pathos in virtual communities, and my discussion of these concepts will be similarly connected to virtual ethnographies of other online communities. The RhetorClick website will serve as a clearinghouse for scholars and students interested in the unique rhetorical features of digital discourse and argumentation. My overarching claims in both the book and the website will be that the study of digital rhetoric is worthy of greater attention by rhetoric and communication scholars, and that digital rhetorical research cannot advance without a robust set of methods tailored specifically to working with electronic texts and virtual communities.