Visual and Digital Rhetoric
Visual and digital rhetoric extend rhetorical theory to images, multimodal texts, and networked digital environments, asking how meaning and persuasion work beyond words.
Definition
Visual and digital rhetoric is the study of how images, designs, multimodal texts, and digital and networked media persuade, construct meaning, and shape audiences, extending rhetorical theory beyond verbal discourse.
Scope
This area covers the rhetorical study of images, multimodal composition, and digital and networked communication. It includes visual rhetoric and the analysis of pictures and design, multimodality and the integration of semiotic modes, digital rhetoric across platforms and networks, and the emerging rhetoric of algorithms and artificial intelligence. It treats how classical rhetorical concepts adapt to non-verbal and computational media.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How do images and visual designs persuade and make meaning?
- How do verbal, visual, and other modes combine in multimodal texts?
- How do digital networks and platforms transform rhetorical practice?
- How do algorithms and AI participate in persuasion and circulation?
Key concepts
- visual rhetoric
- multimodality
- social semiotics
- circulation and networks
- remediation
- procedural rhetoric
Key theories
- The grammar of visual design
- Kress and van Leeuwen propose a social-semiotic grammar of images, analyzing how composition, framing, and modality construct represented and interactive meanings analogous to language.
- Digital rhetoric as field
- Eyman synthesizes digital rhetoric as the application and reinvention of rhetorical theory for digital texts, networks, and circulation, defining its theory, method, and practice.
History
As mass and then digital media reshaped communication, rhetoricians broadened the discipline beyond text. Visual rhetoric emerged in communication and composition studies from the 1990s, drawing on semiotics and Kress and van Leeuwen's social-semiotic analysis of images. The growth of the web and social media spurred digital rhetoric, and recent scholarship extends rhetorical analysis to software, games, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
Debates
- Can rhetoric extend to the non-verbal and computational?
- Scholars debate how far concepts developed for spoken and written persuasion apply to images, interfaces, and algorithms, and whether new media require fundamentally new rhetorical theory.
Key figures
- Gunther Kress
- Theo van Leeuwen
- Douglas Eyman
- Charles Hill
- Ian Bogost
Related topics
Seminal works
- kress2006
- eyman2015
- hill2004
Frequently asked questions
- Is digital rhetoric just rhetoric applied to new tools?
- Partly, but not only. It applies classical concepts to digital texts while also developing new ones—such as procedural rhetoric and the rhetoric of circulation—to account for interactivity, networks, and computation that older theory did not anticipate.