Stuart A. Selber: What is Digital Rhetoric?

Abstract

The interview conducted with Stuart Selber by Jim Ridolfo in this special issue on “Challenging Rhetorical Traditions” provides an overview of Selber’s innovative and impactful career studying digital rhetoric. From Selber’s award-winning 2004 monograph Multiliteracies for a Digital Age to his newest monograph Institutional Literacies: Engaging Academic IT Contexts for Writing and Communication, we discuss how the literacies and landscapes of digital rhetoric have significantly changed and will continue to change as we wade into an era of increased digital privacy concerns, deep fakes, and Generative AI. Professor Selber’s work is an excellent example of how scholarship in contemporary digital rhetoric is revolutionizing the field of traditional rhetoric and the teaching of literacy, both re–elaborating its basic notions and expanding its future applications.

Keywords

• rhetoric
• pedagogy
• artificial intelligence
• institutions
• multiliteracies
• technology