Critical Literacy in a Digital Era offers an examination of the persuasive approaches used in discussions on and about the Internet. Its aim is to increase awareness of what is assumed, unquestioned, and naturalized in our media experience. Using a critical literacy framework for her analysis, author Barbara Warnick argues that new media technologies become accepted not only through their use, but also through the rhetorical use of discourse on and about them. She analyzes texts that discuss new media and technology, including articles from a major technology-oriented periodical;...

This work contributes to critical thinking about public issues related to technology development. Its aims are to examine how certain values, such as progress and profit, are elevated in such public discourse, while others, such as community and social justice, are displaced. By considering what the spokespersons of the technological elite seek to influence their audiences, this work draws attention to who is allowed to speak, under what conditions, and to what ends. Qualitative descriptive methods are used to examine how such instances of communication are designed. The rhetorical analysis...

No single work is more responsible for the heightened interest in argumentation and informal reasoning and their relation to ethics and jurisprudence in the late twentieth century than Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca s monumental study of argumentation, "La Nouvelle Rhetorique: Traite de l'Argumentation." Published in 1958 and translated into English as "The New Rhetoric" in 1969, this influential volume returned the study of reason to classical concepts of rhetoric. In The Promise of Reason: Studies in The New Rhetoric, leading scholars of rhetoric Barbara Warnick, Jeanne...