Digital Ethos

Rhetoric has long been concerned with a rhetor's audience, dating back to Aristotle's audience-centered tradition, which centered ethos and a rhetor's ability to connect to and persuade their audience. In the same vein, Taylor Lorenz (2023) aligns with this audience-focused rhetorical tradition by highlighting creators' special consideration of their digital ethos that needs to be constantly examined, reassessed, and updated in response to their online participatory audiences' reception of their texts. A central theme of Extremely Online is the creator's almost epiphanic discovery of the need to possess an authentic digital ethos to be read widely. Lorenz chronicles how mommy bloggers became highly circulated because of their honesty in sharing the highs and lows of motherhood in which no topic was off limits, being "the first to bring that honesty to the public sphere" (p. 21). Later, following this lead by the mommy bloggers, Lorenz records the example of the DKNY PR Girl fashion brand's Twitter (rebranded as X in 2023) account that became an online sensation because, rather ironically, it did not represent the brand. Rather than advertise products and deals which the executives noticed had no likes or retweets, DKNY PR Girl was run by the senior vice president of global communications who tweeted anything from sharing commentary on TV shows to updating her online audience of her daily routine. From assessing and reassessing the audience reception of the tweets, the brand realized that to curate and maintain an authentic digital ethos, "the key was to act human on social media" (p. 109). This understanding to present a more human persona showcases the critical role of digital ethos for circulation within online social spaces.

Managing one's digital ethos is, in essence, a form of doxastic rhetoric concerning the body. According to Caddie Alford (2024), doxa "conveys a moment wherein opinion and reputation occur simultaneously—what one person believes gets presented to another as an evolving impression" (p. 10). Lorenz showcases this simultaneous entanglement between opinion and reputation through chronicling the period of disconnect between influencer and audience. Because "the gap between influencers' super-professional posts and the everyday lives of most users grew too large," as Lorenz (2023) describes, creators and celebrities experienced the repercussions of violating the online doxa when managing their own digital ethos (p. 252). Lorenz gives the example of a group of A-list celebrities who promoted a lavish festival on their social media platforms that ended up being a scam. Receiving much backlash and questioning these influencers' digital ethos, online audiences became more wary of sponsored content and the intentions of content creators. As creators aim to gain a following and to be widely read within this digital update culture, they pay close attention to digital doxa, or the circulating opinions, impressions, and expectations that online participatory audiences hold of creators' self-representations. As opinions and bodies mutually inform each other, bodies finally are able to "habituate a sense for how to respond" to their audience's expectations (Alford, 2024, p. 174). This interaction was evident in the "Instagram Aesthetic Is Over" trend in which content creators, in an effort to gain this authentic digital ethos, began to speak more openly about their mental health, burnout, and stress (Lorenz, 2019).