Abstract
Modern discourse is often characterized by such extreme polarization that participants operate from entirely different sets of facts. These alternative facts represent a new line of inquiry for rhetoricians, who must determine how false facts gain credibility. This article outlines Memetic Rhetorical Theory (MRT), a model for understanding how information evolves to become credible in a given environment.
Highlights
Key wordsMemetic Rhetorical Theory, meme, ethos, alternative facts memetyczna teoria retoryczna, mem, fakty alternatywne
The 2016 United States Presidential Election was historic for many reasons: it featured the first female presidential candidate to represent a major party in the United States as well as the only victorious candidate in a presidential „election to have no record of public or military service
Drawing on the idea of an audience recognizing virtue or goodness in a speaker, and holding that speaker’s words in higher esteem, many rhetoricians continue to interrogate how writers and speakers might create or perform ethos by drawing on characteristics valued by certain communities (Bizzell 2006; Miller 2004; Pittman 2007; Reynolds 1993; Skinner 2009; Smith 2017) These examinations take into account that ethos, rather than being an inherent characteristic of an individual, is derived from a relationship to one’s culture and community
Summary
Memetic Rhetorical Theory, meme, ethos, alternative facts memetyczna teoria retoryczna, mem, fakty alternatywne. The content of the license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Memetic rhetorical theory: an analytic model for the spread of information online
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