Ethos in Digital Media

The pillar of rhetoric that has diminished most under the hegemony of the digital medium is memory. As Nicholas Carr writes in The Shallows, we tend to use our technology to supplement our memories. We no longer store the fruits of our inquisitorial labors in our grey matter but rather in code. However, memory’s decline in importance in digital rhetoric is not the thing that has most changed how we need to approach rhetoric in the digital age. Because we are able to record public figures’ entire ideological pasts through their self-disclosure on social media, we are able to create a more complete picture of their ethos. The variety and scope of use of digital media has increased the volume of information that can go into an evaluation of an individual’s character, and the hegemony of digital media has also facilitated our access to this information. Our understanding of digital rhetoric needs to adapt to include more complex and nuanced analyses of ethos and how that impacts how people engage with online media. People invoke a loss of ethos when they “cancel” a content creator or uphold a sometimes falsely pristine character of online personalities and celebrities they “stan.” Ethos in the online world evolves quickly and accounts for more social factors than in the past.

In our current digital climate, creators have ethos that is largely proportional to their platform. Larger creators are considered as more reliable than creators with few followers. Users rely on other users to evaluate the ethos of an individual creator. Because a platform builds organically from individuals deciding to engage with a creator, the ethos of that creator can be regarded as democratically-derived. Their follower count is a real time count of how many people have decided that this creator’s content is worth consuming in some manner. Additionally, the internet and digital media lowers the barriers to entry with regard to content creation. Thus, more people are able to produce content. Overall, this results in a democratization of ethos. More people are able to both create content and decide what content is worth supporting. Rather than exclusively privileging voices that speak to a particular educated class, digital media allows anyone who can access the internet to take part in the conversation (although this is still a significant hurdle for some). People no longer to present credentials or hold a degree to be considered trustworthy by their audience.

Lee is an excellent case study of what frequently happens when an online personality (rather than a brand or celebrity) is cancelled. Lee posted racist tweets, and she issued an apology that failed to explicitly acknowledge and claim accountability for her racist behavior when she was called out resulting in the loss of a significant portion of her subscriber base. The concept of digital ethos is vastly different from analog ethos because the internet has an eternal memory. If Lee were an author who, for example, posted a racist story or article in her college’s newspaper, it would be prohibitively difficult for her fans to find that story six years later. Additionally, no other rhetorical environment has had an environment where the ethos of each creator is dissected for so many to observe. YouTube has an entire genre of channels that exclusively focus on and discuss drama on their platforms, and there are dozens of auxiliary communities in which people dissect the ethos of creators. Under cancel culture, a creator’s ethos is of critical importance. When an online personality is canceled, their reputation suffers lasting damage.

Stan culture is a departure from prior conceptualizations of ethos because it allows and encourages an audience to ignore the true credentials of a content creator. While an author or orator could lie about their true credentials or intentions, their audience still needed to evaluate the veracity of these claims. Modern superfans face critics of their favorite creators and blindly attack. While such aficionados may be inherent to content creation, before the internet it would be prohibitively difficult for them to congregate. The biggest difference between the superfans of old and those of today is that internet superfans have access to a community and a platform with which to proselytize. Artists such as R. Kelly who arguably should have no platform whatsoever still have pockets of fans supporting their careers and defending their reprehensible behavior. This can often give an artist a false ethos in the eyes of the larger community because dedicated stans can prevent a creator from fading from the public view. Because they still have a platform, they remain influential in spite of their poor character. The internet gives fans a platform and a collective voice, so digital media facilitates an artificial ethos creation more than any other medium.

Ethos in the digital world evolves constantly and considers many more factors than ethos in the print world. The internet is an archive of a person’s every public thought, and it is easy to find examples of opinions and beliefs that a creator doesn’t hold anymore. The average user has more power to influence the public perception of a creator’s ethos now more than ever, so ethos has evolved from a nearly static understanding of a speaker’s credibility and beliefs based on the impression they imparted on their audience as well as the audience’s prior information. Now people can decide to organize and attempt to deplatform a creator they feel demonstrates poor character, or they can create communities in which they defend personalities they admire against even well-deserved criticism. Content creators are likely to draw the ire of the denizens of the internet when they demonstrate discriminatory opinions and actions, but they are more likely to make it through the experience with their reputation relatively unscathed if they have an extremely large platform or an intersection of marginalized identities and privilege. The modern conceptualization of ethos includes more factors and is more responsive to the behavioral change of the content creator, so creators can recover after a hit to their reputation if they take accountability for their actions and change their behavior. This leads to a trickle-down cultural change where the internet audience at large assumes internet personalities are credible because they have a platform, rather than viewing personalities as deserving a platform if and only if they are credible. Our understanding of rhetoric needs to provide more consideration for the ethos of a speaker or writer because our prior evaluations of speaker reliability are unreliable with the changes wrought by social media.

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