Rhetoric Online: Persuasion
and Politics on the World Wide Web
Barbara Warnick
Peter Lang Publishing, 2007
This book is the outcome of 10 years of research into the rhetorical dimensions of persuasion in Web-based environments. The book proposes a program for continued study of online persuasion by rhetorical critics and analysts.
Chapter 1 argues for greater attention to the persuasive elements of online resistive discourse alongside study of institutionalized discourse.
Chapter 2 describes how digitization, media convergence, and technological and social factors have changed the communication environment in which persuasion occurs.
The remaining chapters then each explore online credibility, interactivity, and intertextuality to develop theories of persuasive action adapted to online communication. The theories take into account such factors as coproduction of messages, uncertain authorship, discontinuous modular texts, hypertext structure, and multi-mediated communication as they are found online.