The rise of Christianity in the medieval period led to the devaluation of rhetoric (it was seen as pagan and antithetical to the church) until Augustine recognized that the persuasive modes of rhetoric could be very useful for the church; however, the focus of rhetoric during this period was primarily in the development of rules for preaching and legal letter writing (all in the service of the church).

Within the context of computer systems and networks, “digital” refers to the encoding of information in binary digits (bits), which may occupy only two distinct states (on or off, 1 or 0)