How the Internet Changes Rhetoric

The internet has changed the way we do a lot of things such as shopping and the way we communicate, but much of the time, the way rhetoric has changed is often overlooked. I did not fully understand what rhetoric was until just a few weeks ago. The use of rhetoric is traced back to ancient Greeks, from the Sophists to Plato to Aristotle, as defined by Richard Toye. Toye also states that rhetoric is the means of persuasion, but reading situations and applying the elements that will be used most effectively to win over an audience.

I always learned what ethos, pathos, and logos meant in nearly every year of high school, and I assume many other people did too, but rhetoric never really meant anything more than that to me. Just in case, here is a refresher of what those terms mean:

Ethos, pathos, and logos: The three basic rhetorical devices needed to successfully persuade an audience of something.

There is definitely more to rhetoric, such as the five canons (Invention, Style, Arrangement, Delivery, and Memory), but I think that the internet has changed the three rhetorical devices the most, and more specifically, pathos. The internet changes how we react to things, how we feel about certain things, and challenges our beliefs and values quite often.

We are watching the internet change how pathos is used right in front of us.

Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows in which he pushes the idea that the internet, being that it is a different and “new” medium used for communication, will change how we think and write. If the internet is changing how we think and write, then it is also changing how we use rhetoric. The internet is changing how pathos is used in various ways, in some cases to lower emotional appeal such as how internet trolls do, and in others to increase it like in cancel culture.

We cannot turn our emotions off, so, if you have them, you are stuck with them. By using an emotional appeal to persuade an audience, I see it somewhat as manipulative. The emotional appeal of a commercial for instance is never unintentionally made. The ASPCA (a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing cruelty to animals) utilizes pathos to their advantage by creating advertisements displaying one-eyed, trembling, or extremely skinny animals to invoke a feeling of sadness or guilt in you. This is how they convince people to donate to their cause, and it worked and I remember how everyone would talk about the commercial and how sad it was. However, in today's society, I do not think it is enough to provoke those same feelings because the internet has changed how we react emotionally to things.

For example, with the internet, we are given a lot of information in a much smaller amount of time than before when the internet was not available. When we refresh a Facebook, Instagram page, or any internet page, usually there is new content available in a matter of seconds. Real-time updates allow for everyone to see what is going on as something is happening. We are constantly flooded with more and more information, and sometimes it is bad information. Not bad as in inaccurate, which also happens, but bad as in tragic events occurring.

Deaths, bombings, scandals, child loss, and so much more occur so often and are posted onto the internet just as much. We know all these things happen, we read a short article, watch a video, or scroll through pictures and see them happening. Like I said previously though, refresh the page and new content replaces it, or even scroll down and something new replaces it.

The rate that information comes and goes on the internet helps to change how pathos is used. Why put effort into a long and sad video if we can just skip it or find something else to watch? We can easily move on to something different and it seems like we are moving to be less sympathetic.

The way people and companies use pathos to deliver a message or persuade their audience of something has changed. They must know their audience to know what will get through to them, which is what algorithms are for. Part of what rhetoric is, is knowing your audience, but I feel as though the internet exemplifies this aspect. I believe the internet causes people to change their values and beliefs much more often than before because information can be retrieved faster, or things change much more quickly. Influencers play a big part in this and change views and beliefs often.

The quickness of changes in values and even the simple changes in a page refreshing lowers the time we get to process and feel while also subjecting us to more of it. It lowers the effectiveness of pathos ultimately because we become desensitized to certain things to the point that it has a smaller effect on us.

The Beirut bombing that happened a few months ago, I remember seeing it on social media for about two days, and then it was gone. It was replaced with other news and people moved on to talking about other things. When it happened, I of course felt bad for those involved, but there were not many other feelings or thoughts involved after that. I hate that that happened, but I also hate that I had such little response to it even happening.

We have this constant and repeated exposure to the horrible news that we slowly reduce our emotional responses to events such as these. Our emotions are not the same as they once were because of the internet desensitizing us. This reduces the effectiveness of pathos in rhetoric on the internet.

The way that the internet runs and works, through its abundance of information and quickness to relay new information, changes pathos.

Similarly, I think internet trolls have a similar goal of reducing emotions on the internet. They act like nothing is truly serious and purposely antagonize and provoke people for the fun of it.

Mattathias Schwartz wrote an article about trolling called The Trolls Among Us, and in it is the story of a middle-schooler who committed suicide, and how the trolls turned it into a joke. Suicide is normally very sorrowful and upsetting, but not in the case of young Mitchell Henderson. On the internet, he was turned into a meme and his death turned into a joke.

While this is not the same thing as being desensitized due to an abundance of information, it still reduces the significance of a tragic event. They are reducing the emotional ties to certain situations. They do this type of thing constantly or try to purposely make people angry or upset, to anyone at any time. Psychological studies have shown that for the most part, internet trolls are very good at understanding what hurts people, but high levels of psychopathy push them towards a state of not caring (from Psychology of internet trolls: They understand what hurts people but simply don’t care).

There have always been people like this, this is not new, but having the ability to hurt people and ruin lives on the internet so easily is still rather new.

They teach us not to care as much. They teach us that not everything is so serious. They make us second guess our own beliefs. They are indirectly changing what it means to use emotional appeals as a form of persuasion.

Cancel culture changes the way pathos is used too but in a different way. The way cancel culture works is based purely on emotional appeal. People get canceled, or shunned off the internet, because of how others feel about something they did/said. It is not based on rationality at all in this case and it is encouraged to act on those feelings. If someone did something socially unacceptable before there was easy access to the internet, an apology would be given, and people would eventually move on. Now, someone says something even slightly offensive, and thousands of people come together to demand that they be canceled.

Justine Sacco, a woman with 170 followers on Twitter, made this tweet while on her way to Africa:

She hadn’t even landed yet and her tweet went viral, and she was ridiculed and ruined by everyone who thought her tweet was offensive. Jon Ronson interviewed her for his book, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and she claimed that her tweet was in no way meant to be racist, but just a joke. This joke, because she published it on the internet where everyone could see, ruined her life. People recognized her from this tweet, she was fired from her job, and her whole life had changed.

Cancel culture is very serious about taking the internet seriously, opposite of what the internet trolls are doing. Those involved want people to use their emotions to make decisions and lower the reasoning and rationality of thought. Being canceled is something so different than we have seen before and it feeds on raw emotion. It has created a state of cautiousness for internet users and has led to the term “snowflake”, referencing the people who are easily offended and overly emotional.

Being in a state of exaggerated emotions changes how pathos can be used. It makes the use of pathos easier because then nearly anything has an emotional appeal and persuasion is much easier.

Most simply too, the internet changes pathos through miscommunication problems. Communicating over video or chat is not the same as talking in person. People misinterpret tone often and misunderstand intentions, so I feel as though this changes pathos too. If things are often being misinterpreted, people tend to get aggravated more easily and the emotional aspect that you get by being in person is just not there.

There are no real emotions or values while on the internet. Emoji have become an integral part of how we use the internet now, but it still does not match real emotion. People can fake who they are and what they value too because they do not have to be real. There is typing in all caps too that insinuates more feeling, but even then, they have mixed interpretations too, according to linguist Gretchen McCulloch.

With the increasing use of the internet, emotional aspects of rhetoric are changing and will continue to change.

There are variations in our values and how we use emotion to make a point because of the internet. I think that the internet is making us become, overall, less emotional, except in the case of cancel culture.

We do not convey the same emotions, we continuously lack emotional reactions to certain things, and values and beliefs are constantly changing. These changes have and will continue to result in a change in rhetoric. We cannot use the same actions as we used to in order to convey a message or convince an audience of something because the internet has changed our perceptions and views. For better or for worse? Well, everyone has a different internet experience so it affects them differently, so that answer is up to you.

My references:

Carr, N. G. (2020). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. New York City, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

March, E. (2017, July 13). Trolls understand what hurts people but they simply don’t care. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-13/trolls-understand-what-hurts-people-but-they-simply-dont-care/8701424

McCulloch, G. (2019). The Meaning of All Caps-in Texting and in Life. Retrieved December 01, 2020, from https://www.wired.com/story/all-caps-because-internet-gretchen-mcculloch/

Ronson, J. (2016). So you’ve been publicly shamed. London: Picador.

Schwartz, M. (2008). The Trolls Among Us. The New York Times. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html

Toye, R. (2013). Rhetoric: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.