Description:
Examines key moments in the early history of the blogosphere to understand how bloggers use digital media technology to engage in public argument. Explores blogging from a rhetorical perspective, asking how the digital medium of communication changes the conditions for persuasion.
Brief description: Damien Smith Pfister is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Review Quotes:
"In Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics, Damien Pfister tells a compelling and consequential story of the rise of the blogosphere from an obscure technology to a powerful mode of communication capable of unseating senators and revealing the horrors of war. Pfister focuses on key moments in the early blogosphere to explain how it has remade public discourse, reframed emotion, and reconfigured expertise. He adroitly blends contemporary analyses of public discourse with innovative interpretations of classical rhetorical terminology. Pfister's book offers important lessons for scholars in rhetoric, deliberation, and technology studies, as well as anyone interested in learning how the blogosphere has produced a powerful connection between deliberation in public squares and personal computer keyboards."
--Robert Asen, University of Wisconsin-Madison