<p>This study questions the way sports fans create (a sense of) community through online conversations. Here, &lsquo;community&rsquo; and &lsquo;internet&rsquo; are seen as invitational terms that suggest an authentic social interaction. By examining the language used by fans to sustain a sense of solidarity in the virtual realm, this study questions the ways in which rhetoric frames the situation. Participation in the virtual space relies on practices of identification derived from physical engagements. By using a rhetorical approach, this study illuminates the way individual participants operationalize a rhetoric in virtual conversations that spiritualize the fan&rsquo;s experience at the base of a sporting hierarchy. </p><p> This study centralizes identification as key to participation and the formation of community identity. The same language practices that work to shape the group also reinforce a sports ideology that spiritualizes fan participation. What emerges as a dominant substance is loyalty as key to identification/participation in the virtual community. This value-based substance offers the fan the ability to re-purpose their role as a profit source in the capitalist sporting structure. Therefore, the individuals focus on loyalty is rhetorical due to the internet space as capitalized communication. This study speaks to the way communication fosters virtual organizations, and points to how our cultured understandings conceal the rhetoric in everyday interactions. </p>

<p> Catfishing - the practice of deceiving others online by creating profiles of individuals who do not exist in the real-world - represents the current moment on the converging timelines of social networking technology and the politics of online self-representation. This type of online deception signifies the culmination of several issues regarding users' relationships to cyberspace: reliance on technology for socialization; increasingly blurred correspondences between offline and online selves; users' propensities to value technological objects over living people; and humanity's predisposition for deception in day-to-day interactions. When all of these strands converge, the result is catfishing, a term coined following the 2011 documentary <i>Catfish</i> that has since spawned a TV show and a tell-all book. My argument moves from an examination of the histories of online hoaxes and social networking to a narrower focus on the social aspects of avoidance rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon to an even more pointed discussion of individual, self-professed motives behind such deception. This project is a call-to-action inviting readers to consider the authenticity of their own interactions - both online and in the physical real - and to champion a stronger correspondence between our offline identities and our online self-representations. In addition, by situating online identity creation as a rhetorical action, I argue that understanding the elements of catfishing can help with teaching first-year writing students about the rhetorical situation, including audience awareness, purpose, convention, tone, visualization, and ethos. Finally, I hope this project will revive a conversation in modern rhetoric and composition theory concerning online identity formation that has subsided within the last decade.</p>

<p>With a surge of digital video content appearing on the Internet in the emerging apparatus of electracy, YouTube launched an archive for new media and steadily grew into a successful global community of individuals who participate by way of commenting, remixing, subscribing, and uploading. Inspired by Gregory Ulmer's notion of digital cognition and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophical approach to the idiot, this thesis reinvents the theory of videocy and chooses to embrace its early association to idiocy. With insight from Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, who take a sociological approach to YouTube, and Sarah Arroyo, who examines participatory composition in video culture, we can envisage YouTubers as producers within a choric (from Jacques Derrida's <i> chora</i>) network. The pedagogical potential of this digital era, as developed by Patricia Lange, and its connection to Tubing, as approached by Arroyo and Geoffrey Carter, will reclaim the "weird" for didactic rhetoric. </p>

<p> Traditionally, the field of rhetoric and composition has valued long-form essay writing, which requires students to engage patiently and at length with revision. In contrast, students today spend much time outside of school producing fast-paced and short posts for social media. This dissertation argues that students&rsquo; social media interactions provide them nuanced, dialogic, and complex rhetorical understandings about writing&mdash;but that students need help developing discursive processes to support transfer of their social media knowledge to other writing contexts, including long-form academic writing. Drawing from two semesters of in-class study, I construct for first-year composition classrooms a pedagogy that embraces and cultivates the rhetorical knowledge students gain from social media; I demonstrate how students can analyze, reflect on, and transfer this knowledge to academic contexts. Citing students&rsquo; social media and academic writing, I draw from students&rsquo; intuitive understandings of the rhetorical concepts medium, context, audience, <i>ethos</i>, and purpose to illustrate how these concepts can productively shift and expand in FYC instruction. To situate this pedagogy within contemporary practices, I analyze leading FYC textbooks and highlight how textbook pedagogies can acknowledge and foreground students&rsquo; expanded rhetorical understandings of social media for richer composing processes in all media and for all contexts, digital and non-digital.</p><p>

<p> Growing polarization of political discourse in America has resulted in a populace and representatives that are ineffective in persuasive rhetoric and are in many cases at an impasse. With more politicians&mdash;and more Americans in general&mdash;using computer mediated social media to discuss politics, these media are no doubt having an effect on the way we conduct our political discourse. This study is an examination of the interactions related to four different posts on the social media Twitter and Facebook. The study includes a rhetorical analysis to determine how social media users engage in persuasive rhetoric according to Aristotle. The ensuing analysis demonstrates how social media have affected users as technological determinism suggests, and discusses behavioral markers and indicators. This analysis increases understanding of persuasive rhetoric and the effect of computer mediated social media. </p><p>

My dissertation is an ethnographic study of Asian-American users on the social network site, Xanga. Based on my analysis of online texts, responses to texts, and participants’ discussions of their writing motivations, my research strongly suggests that examining digital writing through participants’ complex and overlapping constructions of their community and public(s) can help the field reconsider digital writing as a site of Asian-American rhetoric and as a process of constructing and transforming racial identities and relations. In particular, I examine how community and public, as interconnected and shifting writing imaginaries on Xanga, afford Asian-American users on this site the opportunity to write, explore, and circulate their racial and ethnic identities for multiple purposes and various audiences. Race and ethnicity, as many scholars argue, are shifting and unstable concepts and experiences. Therefore, writing about race and ethnicity may be done best in environments that can accommodate complex and multiple acts of racial and ethnic formations. While my research demonstrates how participants “want to be heard” on their own terms, whom they imagine (or want to imagine) as listening/reading significantly informs their writing. That is, participants’ conceptions of their writing goals and their audiences are multiple and simultaneous—these racial and ethnic writing acts are often inflected by intersecting issues of gender, sexuality, class, culture, and intergenerational tensions—and, hence, traditional writing genres that limit such goals, audiences, and complexity do not always reflect how writers conceive of their own racial and ethnic experiences and their writing in the world. This study, then, examines Xanga as a flexible writing ecology that affords Asian-American users opportunities to compose their continuously transforming and complex racial and ethnic identities across multiple niches of representational sites and, specifically, in public and community spaces.