Vanderbilt Summer Academy – Our Digital Lives

From June 19-July 1, I went to Vanderbilt’s summer academy for a two week program designed for 9th and 10th graders. We spent two weeks staying in the dorms at the campus while taking classes in various classrooms and spaces throughout the campus. This summer program gave me a real perspective as a college student. I really enjoyed the cafeteria and amazing nearby restaurants. I took a course called Into Our Digital Lives. We started off by learning classic rhetoric vs contemporary. Aristotle says that rhetoric is “the art of finding out the available means of persuasion.”  The 3 classic kinds of rhetoric are logos, pathos, and ethos. Classic Rhetoric includes 5 stages: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Delivery, and Memory. Contemporary rhetoric, on the other hand, is a way of conveying meaning. It’s a use of context not just the meaning of the words. We applied these two types of rhetoric to a new type of rhetoric called Digital Rhetoric. Digital rhetoric is the application of rhetorical theory to digital texts, social media, and other platforms. Digital rhetoric can be applied to many situations, i.e. social media, texting, public announcements, posters, information, etc. When learning about rhetorics, I found the most important takeaway was that language doesn’t always mean words. Furthermore, there are multiple different ways of communicating without speaking, i.e. body language, sign language, gestures, eye movements, and so on. These are types of semiotics that display information with a non verbal approach.