Volume 36, Issue 1

Social Media have changed the way we communicate privately or professionally. So the users have to understand the structures and specific conditions, the ›logics‹ and ›ideologies‹ of these new communication frameworks, they have to learn new rhetorical skills. On the other hand the users themselves develop and transform these media permanently in a creative way, as a part of their own media culture. This paper discusses various forms and requirements of ›Social Media Rhetorics‹ between persistence and dynamics, between accomodation and innovation - especially concerning Weblogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other phenomena as e.g. so called ›memes‹.

In a datafied and mediatized society, many new topics for rhetoric emerge. The core question of rhetoric, how people pursue certain goals by speech and how to convince other people, is, for example, challenged by technical actors like social bots. Moreover, machine-controlled processes of opinion-forming question the validity and acknowledgement of the principle of discourse. In general, the significance of strategic communication is increasing on the Internet. In this context, we can observe a growing amount of visual content, realtime-publics, a dealing with topics of everyday life and an aiming for »authenticity«. Further to mention is the specific function of data as a rhetorical means. Within this scope, the expertise of rhetoric as a hermeneutic science comes to the fore. It plays an important role as a methodological anchor and allows to arrive at well-justified assessments in relation to the quality and the claim to validity of communication in a multifaceted public sphere.

Digitalization and social media have profoundly changed the way in which we communicate and share knowledge. As a result, traditional formats of situational speech - including the specific case of academic speeches and lectures - have come under some scrutiny and pressure: Today’s digital society calls for innovative formats of situational academic communication that strategically incorporate considerations regarding social media and digitalization. Shedding light on this challenge, this paper takes a closer look at three new formats of academic speech: Slams, TEDTalks, and Science Notes. It shows that for all three formats, cross-media effects are of key importance - with attendees immediately addressed within the original situational setting becoming part of an overarching communicative event that is relayed to a wider audience via digital media. By examining the specific consequences which these and other effects entail with respect to questions of setting and performance as well as textual and content-related strategies, the paper illustrates the challenges and chances arising from new formats of situational communication in the field of knowledge communication. I argue that Slams, Ted Talks and Sciences Notes provide illuminating examples of how to combine the powerful immediacy and fascination of situational interaction with the innovative communicative possibilities of the digital era (by adapting the traditional medium of academic speech to the requirements of today’s digital society). In this sense, digitalization does not appear as heralding the end of situational speech, but rather as a genuine chance for its modernized revival.

The article discusses the tendency of contemporary museum exhibitions to increasingly focus on creative and entertaining production rather than on restricting their presentation to objects and information. The attempt to create a contemporary communicative environment leads to an extensive use of modern media and interactive systems in museums. As a result, offerings like media guides for example, often reveal structures which appear to be comparable to the persuasive aim inherent in the classical composition of speech. Aspects like narrative storytelling and emotional design inspire the visitor to identify himself with the presentation and support his commitment to the museum as economical institution. A rhetoric analysis of the mediating processes of exhibitions show that especially digital media and its mobility and subjective handling offers many opportunities to function as an instrument of persuasive communication. Dialogic interactivity on one hand and subjective feedback on the other cause the impression of autonomous reception and therefore support the visitor’s identification with the presentation. Therefore the persuasive process in digitally supported exhibitions utilizes the user’s illusion of oratorical autonomy whereas the communication is actually controlled by the system or the museum as the programming initiator itself.

The essay will discuss how PowerPoint historically emerged (at the turn of the 1980ies) from the mission statement towards the (back then brand new) Graphical User Interface that would provide a new machine/man metaphor called »Private Computer«. Therein was expressed, as the lecture argues, the self-presentation of a locally bound and fast growing corporate economic culture called »Silicon Valley« represented in its own diagrammatical schemes. The immanent rhetoric of the software - developed under the (much more appropriate) name »Presenter« - unwillingly disrupts the digital brilliance of the computer interface in reinforcing it at the same time - a Silicon Valley style of making progress. However, the disclosure of PowerPoint rhetorics as classical formulaic rhetoric shows the boundaries in which the program can be of only limited use. This mixture between a classical old rhetorical style and the build-in-hope of a fantastical new future might explain why a quarter of a century and ten software versions later Powerpoint has become so overwhelmingly popular (used on more than one billion computers), while at the same time mutated into one of the most scandalous bugbears of the digital.

Nowadays, we live in mediatized environments, which are more and more shaped by visual means of expression. Visual social media platforms, such as Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest and Snapchat, are now the tools of communication and self-representation - especially for the younger generations. How users of these visual social media use hashtags and pictures in a rhetorical way to realize their personal representation is shown in this article by analyzing ›travel-narrations‹ of public accounts on Instagram. After a short theoretical approach, which includes the application of the strategic rhetorical process on the social practices on Instagram, the hashtag and the picture are characterized as rhetorical instruments. The analysis showed that there are specific practices of idealized self-representation as a certain type of traveler and rhetorical-communicative patterns, concerning the way hashtags are applied and pictures are uploaded by the users. The result is that even on a mainly visual platform, like Instagram, pictures as a form of communication are too undefined without the textual component in form of hashtags, which are essential contextgiving resources. Thus, the successful realization of the self-representation includes both communication forms, which dialectically build meaning together.

With his concept of the »design argument«, Richard Buchanan presented a classification system in 1985 that allows us to differentiate different impact goals in analysing design artefacts. In the present article, this system is combined with the method of rhetorical design analysis after the Bernese model. Using a Lego set as an example, it is demonstrated how designers apply rhetorical techniques to achieve affects and how these function. Furthermore, it is explained how the emotions of adult Lego fans are prompted and influenced by building the (and playing with the) Lego Star Wars AT-AT Walker #4483 model. At the same time, this case study makes a contribution to the cultural history of the pop-culture cross-over of Lego and Star Wars.