Author: Matthew V. Jacobson

Matthew V. Jacobson is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Oklahoma. You can find him digitally on Twitter: @MakingArguments

Introduction A few months ago, I gave myself a challenge: design a digital rhetoric course that probed the intersections of rhetoric, democracy, and technology. In undertaking this course design, I wanted to emulate the work of scholars like Selfe & Selfe (1994), Gurak (2004), Hauser (2007), Wysocki et al. (2007), Selber (2013), Kurlinkus (2018), and many others who draw upon critical theories of technology to bring fresh rhetorical insight to the digital communication platforms we use to invent, compose, circulate, communicate, argue, and advocate. The result, a sequence of three assignments for a course I titled Critical Design Rhetorics of…

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