Advances in digital media have made an impact on traditional rhetorical culture, thus shifting expectations and norms associated with orality and public presentation. Technology, entertainment, and design (TED) talks represent a new genre of presentation characteristic of Jamieson’s notion of electronic eloquence in that presenters weave together an engaging narrative complete with a strong visual presence. This study applies Bandura’s social cognitive learning theory to explore how students make sense of TED talks. Students responded to two questionnaires in two different classes: a basic public speaking course and a technical communication course. The results suggest that students learn vicariously through viewing mediated presentations, thus shaping their view of public speaking as a coproduced, networked, and engaging narrative. The authors offer recommendations for communication practitioners related to electronic eloquence and the rhetorical tradition.

In this article, the authors answer the call of the IText manifesto to use ITexts to explore fundamental issues of writing, describing instant messaging (IM) as a form of interactive networked writing (INW) and showing how IM writers discursively construct contexts. Specifically, they argue that writers use (a) deixis to build and maintain material contexts and (b) intertextuality to construct sociocultural contexts. Four intact IM transcripts were coded for instances of four kinds of deixis—space, time, person, and object—and for instances of intertextuality. Results showed that IM writers use all four kinds of deixis and that deictic elements made up almost 10% of the total words of the transcripts. In addition, two kinds of intertextual elements— direct quotation and cultural referents—were used to invoke, build, and sometimes undermine social and cultural contexts. The authors also discuss some of the material affordances and constraints of writing and conclude by arguing that INW is literally dialogic.

This article argues for a rhetoric of networked exchanges that focuses on the response. Working from Spinuzzi's call for a rhetoric of horizontal learning, it examines two kinds of online writing spaces in order to propose such a rhetoric. After surveying conflicting, academic attitudes regarding networked exchanges, the article proposes the response as a type of professional communication. A specific message board thread and a series of blog carnivals serve as examples of the rhetoric of response, a way that horizontal learning produces a specific type of networked writing identity. The article concludes with a call for response-based communication practices.