Rhetoric of technology
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The rhetoric of technology is both an object and field of study. It refers to the ways in which makers and consumers of technology talk about and make decisions regarding technology and also the influence that technology has on discourse. In fact, rhetoric of technology is the study of how language, symbols, and persuasive practices shape the creation, meaning, adoption, and power of technologies and how technologies, in turn, function as persuasive forces in society. It examines technology as a rhetorical phenomenon and not just a technical one. It asks how technologies are argued into existence, how they are explained and justified, how they are made credible and desirable, and how they are embedded in cultural values and social institutions. According to Charles Bazerman's work The Languages of Edison's Light in 1999:
Technologies are constituted through discourse: Language does not merely describe technology after it exists; it helps create it. Claims, metaphors, patents, standards, demonstrations, and media narratives shape what a technology is understood to be and what it is for.
Technological development is persuasive work: Inventors, engineers, corporations, and governments must persuade multiple audiences—investors, regulators, users, and the public—that a technology is safe, necessary, profitable or inevitable.
Technologies themselves act rhetorically: Once deployed, technologies persuade through their material presence and effects (e.g., electric light persuading users of modernity, safety, and progress).
Rhetoric links technical systems to social values: Rhetoric translates technical novelty into familiar cultural meanings such as efficiency, freedom, security, or beauty.
Power and authority around technology are rhetorical achievements: Expertise, innovation, and progress are not purely technical statuses; they are established and maintained through communication and institutional discourse.
Moreover, rhetoric and technology are mutually constitutive: rhetoric gives technology meaning, legitimacy, and direction, while technology reshapes how rhetoric can be produced, circulated, and experienced. Covini and jolliffe (1995) go further and argue that rhetoric and technology are inseparable. They contend that, rooted in the Greek words techne (art or skilled craft) and logos (word or explanation), technology originally referred to a process of reasoned, communicative creation. In the modern era, however, this meaning has shifted from an explanatory practice to a finished product, causing the rhetorical element of technology to become invisible. As machines grow more intelligent and interactive, correcting language, creating art, or defeating human experts, they increasingly participate in discourse, shaping how people think and communicate. This invisibility of rhetoric in technology mirrors the growing inaccessibility of scientific and technical language, which is often limited to specialists. If science and technology are to serve the public as shared forms of knowledge, practitioners must recover rhetorical skill in order to clearly explain, distribute, and justify their work to broader audiences.
Studies of the rhetoric of technology are interdisciplinary. Scholars in communication, media ecology, and science studies research the rhetoric of technology. Technical communication scholars are also concerned with the rhetoric of technology.
The phrase "rhetoric of technology" gained prominence with rhetoricians in the 1970s, and the study developed in conjunction with interest in the rhetoric of science. However, scholars have worked to maintain a distinction between the two fields. Rhetoric of technology criticism addresses several issues related to technology and employs many concepts, including several from the canon of classical rhetoric, for example ethos, but the field has also adopted contemporary approaches, such as new materialism.