Rhetorical Machines: Writing, Code, and Computational Ethics (Rhetoric Culture and Social Critique Series)

Rhetorical Machines provides an extension of current work in digital rhetoric, and helps to add a nuanced and more usable framework than more surface contentions about whether rhetoric and rhetorical agency is limited to humans or can be inhabited and deployed by machines/algorithms/software agents."" - Douglas Eyman, author of Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice ""Rhetorical Machines is a timely, interesting, and important collection of essays that makes a valuable contribution to rhetorical studies as well as to the study of technology-especially in terms of questions of computation."" - Brenton J. Malin, author of Feeling Mediated: A History of Media Technology and Emotion in America

A landmark volume that explores the interconnected nature of technologies and rhetorical practice. Rhetorical Machines addresses new approaches to studying computational processes within the growing field of digital rhetoric. While computational code is often seen as value-neutral and mechanical, this volume explores the underlying, and often unexamined, modes of persuasion this code engages. In so doing, it argues that computation is in fact rife with the values of those who create it and thus has powerful ethical and moral implications. From Socrates's critique of writing in Plato's Phaedrus to emerging new media and internet culture, the scholars assembled here provide insight into how computation and rhetoric work together to produce social and cultural effects. This multidisciplinary volume features contributions from scholar-practitioners across the fields of rhetoric, computer science, and writing studies. It is divided into four main sections: ""Emergent Machines"" examines how technologies and algorithms are framed and entangled in rhetorical processes, ""Operational Codes"" explores how computational processes are used to achieve rhetorical ends, ""Ethical Decisions and Moral Protocols"" considers the ethical implications involved in designing software and that software's impact on computational culture, and the final section includes two scholars' responses to the preceding chapters. Three of the sections are prefaced by brief conversations with chatbots (autonomous computational agents) addressing some of the primary questions raised in each section. At the heart of these essays is a call for emerging and established scholars in a vast array of fields to reach interdisciplinary understandings of human-machine interactions. This innovative work will be valuable to scholars and students in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to rhetoric, computer science, writing studies, and the digital humanities.