Spheres, Styles, and Genres of Digital Rhetoric

Abstract

The report discusses the spheres, styles, and genres of digital neorhetoric against the background of various approaches to digital rhetoric in contemporary literary studies. E-speech is a spontaneous form of e-discourse that follows neither the rules of oral nor of written speech, involves graphics, and demonstrates a specific punctuation, vocabulary, and syntax. The vocabulary consists of substandard urban vernacular with elements of general jargon and frequent obscenities, which makes communication hyperemotional and evaluative. At the rhetorical level, such discourse is intertextual (collective authorship), ironic, and aggressive. Traditional stylistic concepts are inapplicable since this discourse is at the intersection of various spheres of communication. The article introduces a neorhetoric classification of e-discourse as non-oral and non-written, depending on the communicative purpose or sphere, which means that the typology relies on extralinguistic grounds: verbal art, media, everyday communication, etc. Some of the genres discussed are totally new, while others are digitally modified traditional genres. From a sociolinguistic perspective, virtual communication has a different stratification and principles of group communication. Netiquette is different from offline etiquette, but a violation of e-politeness may lead to a ban on communication. From a psychological perspective, e-communication is both personal and public, which affects media socialization.