In Peter Steiner’s famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993, two dogs are talking in front of a computer, and one says to the other, “On the Internet, nobody you’re a dog.” This idea of the embodied freedom that would come from networked digital spaces pervaded many of the popular rhetorics around the World Wide Web at the end of the 20th century. Online, many hoped, we would be free of homophobia, racism, sexism, classism, etc — if people exit only as words on a screen, then how could readers possible know who these people really are? What will matter, folks thought, is only what’s written.

Of course, this absence of embodiment also meant, for some, anxieties: if you don’t know who you’re talking to, reading, engaging with, how do you know this person is “really” who they say they are? In the last twenty years, this issue has seemed especially pertinent, from the now famous example of “A Gay Girl in Damascus” to the work of ‘bots in the 2016 US election. Twenty-first century scholarship on digital cultures has often focused on how the promises of disembodiment were never met by networked digital spaces, while more recent work has looked specifically at how coding, algorithms, and other “invisible” parts of the Internet work to maintain racial, sexual, gender, and class-based inequalities, as well as promote acts of hate and violence. In this context, it is important to ask how digital rhetorics are also cultural rhetorics. This course looks at the rhetorical work happening in different digitally networked spaces in order to imagine the sort of literacy practices that participants in such space are developing — and to imagine how we might use college-level writing courses as sites of engagement and intervention.