These logs record how a user’s search strategy leads to a particular text, and how many individuals have accessed a given text.

A recent phenomenon is the rise of companies whose task it is to ensure positive online ethos for their clients.

a spime “becomes an instantiation of identity. It’s named, and it broadcasts its name, then it can be tracked” (2005, 105); and it is in the tracking that spimes (as well as humans) leave traces of their identities, scattered throughout the network. The number of active software agents working on the Internet has increased dramatically as advances in artificial intelligence and the exigence of information overload (both in terms of quantity and speed) have necessitated the development of smarter tools for information acquisition, retrieval, and manipulation.

“the student, the text, the word, the image, and so on are tagged in relationships” and the rhetorical process of arrangement is invoked through the importance of “getting . . . ideas labeled in a variety of ways and delivered to an audience” (64).

A more active form of emergent arrangement occurs through the process of “tagging”—individual users add descriptive tags to links, sites, or media objects that can form an arrangement when many users’ tags are aggregated (this arrangement comes about organically and is referred to as a “folksonomy”).

as the possible arrangements are limited by the number of nodes and the links between

In digital rhetoric, arrangement may be a conscious decision of the writer of the digital text, but it may also be left up to the user, as in the case of hypertext, where the reader creates a new arrangement with each reading.

Casting invention as a process of discovery fits current practices of digital production in two respects: in the most common case, writers seek out materials to inspire—and in some cases to incorporate into—their own digital work; but rhetors also use the capacity of invention-as-discovery to invent new digital forms as well.

as Lauer (2004) indicates when she notes that “interpreters of . . . Roman rhetoricians, discussing their epistemologies, have often described their concept of rhetorical invention as a practical art concerned with the ‘how,’ not the ‘why’” (23).

new media draw upon and reshape older media, claiming that “new media objects are cultural objects; thus, any new media object—whether a Web site, computer game, or digital image—can be said to represent, as well as help construct, some outside referent: a physically existing object, historical information presented in other documents, a system of categories currently employed by culture as a whole or by particular social groups”

flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities.

(print) texts have traditionally “encoded human knowledge and memory, instructed, inspired, convinced, and seduced their readers to adopt new ideas, new ways of interpreting the world, new ideologies”; thus, the printed word (and, I would argue, any material representation of communicative action) has always been “linked to the art of rhetoric”

[I]n a technological age, rhetoric emerges as a conditional method for humanizing the effect of machines and helping humans to direct them. . . . Rhetoric thinks beyond disciplines and “interdisciplinarity”—itself a product of a culture of specialization—by arranging and connecting diverse elements in the pursuit of theoretical questions and practical applications. Rhetoric is a syncretic and generative practice that creates new knowledge by posing questions differently and uncovering connections that have gone unseen. Its creativity does not exclude or bracket history but often comes from recasting traditional forms and commonplaces in new contexts and questions. (103)

If we see digital rhetoric as a productive art, then nearly all digital texts can be seen both as objects of study for analysis (using digital rhetoric methods) and as products of digital rhetoric practices.

stereotyped as distinctly antisocial).

reading-writing machines.

willingly or not, consciously or not