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Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies
Faking And Conspiring About Covid-19: A Discursive Approach, Rosa Scardigno, Alessia Paparella, Francesca D'Errico
Faking And Conspiring About Covid-19: A Discursive Approach, Rosa Scardigno, Alessia Paparella, Francesca D'Errico
The Qualitative Report
In the more general climate of post-truth - a social trend reflecting a disregard for reliable ways of knowing what is true, mostly acted through massive use of misinformation and rhetoric calling for emotions - an alarming “infodemic” accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting healthy attitudes and behaviors and further lessening trust in science, institutions, and traditional media. Its two main representative items, fake and conspiracy news, have been widely analyzed in psycho-social research, even if scholars mostly acknowledged the cognitive and social dimensions of those items and devoted less attention to their discursive construction. In addition, these works did not …
Leveraging The Rhetorical Energies Of Machines: Covid-19, Misinformation, And Persuasive Labor, Miles C. Coleman
Leveraging The Rhetorical Energies Of Machines: Covid-19, Misinformation, And Persuasive Labor, Miles C. Coleman
Human-Machine Communication
The rampant misinformation amid the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates an obvious need for persuasion. This article draws on the fields of digital rhetoric and rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine to explore the persuasive threats and opportunities machine communicators pose to public health. As a specific case, Alexa and the machine’s performative similarities to the Oracle at Delphi are tracked alongside the voice-based assistant’s further resonances with the discourses of expert systems to develop an account of the machine’s rhetorical energies. From here, machine communicators are discussed as optimal deliverers of inoculations against misinformation in light of the fact that their …