Rediscovering the “Back-and-Forthness” of Rhetoric in the Age of YouTube

Abstract

Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube have made it likely that students participate in online back-and-forth exchanges that influence their rhetorical literacy. Because of the back-and-forth nature of online communities, we turn to the procedural, critical, and progressive qualities of dialectic as a means of accounting for what makes public deliberation effective and how we can teach students to deliberate.