Speaking to algorithms? Rhetorical political analysis as technological analysis
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395720968060 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Author | Benoit Dillet |
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395720968060
Politics
2022, Vol. 42(2) 231 –246
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395720968060
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Speaking to algorithms?
Rhetorical political analysis as
technological analysis
Benoit Dillet
University of Bath, UK
Abstract
In the last few years, research studies and opinion pieces have tried to account for the new
polarisation and dealignment of US politics after Trump and the post-Brexit UK politics. It is now
well-established both by academic research and by Facebook’s own research that Facebook leads
to more polarisation in its users’ political views, but rhetorical analysis has not yet accounted for
the role played by algorithms in political communication and persuasion. What does social media
do to rhetoric? The situation of speech in social media is often treated like in a public sphere
when it should not be. This misconception prevents rhetorical studies to take into consideration
the question of technology. By using the recent literature in critical algorithm studies, I develop a
new approach in rhetorical criticism. I argue here that the increasing agency that algorithms have
acquired in delivering and mediating rhetoric means that we must consider the role played by
intermediaries when examining rhetorical situations. This paper sheds light on what I call the four
conditionalities of algorithms on rhetoric: (1) programmed speech content, (2) the verticalisation
of political communication, (3) the new biases produced by digital media, and (4) the rhetorical
machine learning.
Keywords
algorithms, ideology, methodology, rhetoric, social media
Received: 6th March 2020; Revised version received: 17th July 2020; Accepted: 14th September 2020
In the last 10 years, rhetorical analysis has been flourishing in political studies. Leading
studies have helped us to pay attention to the evolution of speech writing and perfor-
mance. Rhetoric is a deeply creative practice and with an expansive repertoire of devices
(Atkins, 2015; Finlayson, 2012; Hatzisavvidou, 2017). By using anecdotes, transforming
the context, or adhering to the ritualistic characters of ‘speech moments’ in the British
political calendar (Finlayson and Martin, 2008), orators constantly find new ways to
express themselves. Rhetors work as close as possible to the common sense. They endorse
‘established ideas while simultaneously advancing new ones’ and ‘what was once rheto-
ric later comes to be ‘common-sense’ premises to routine decisions’ (Martin, 2015: 28,
33). In short, rhetorical analysts insist that it is through speeches that ideas are
Corresponding author:
Benoit Dillet, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK.
Email: b.dillet@bath.ac.uk
968060POL0010.1177/0263395720968060PoliticsDillet
research-article2020
Special Issue Article
232 Politics 42(2)
externalised and are made public. What is often not accounted for in the debate, however,
is the situatedness of speeches in other media: the same speech will be packaged in mul-
tiple ways – truncated, edited, subtitled, remixed, or hijacked – depending on whether it
is shared on a newspaper website, on the official party Twitter page or on an amateur’s
social media page. In parallel to this expanding scholarship on rhetoric, we have wit-
nessed an increasing polarisation of political life in the United Kingdom and the United
States with recent upheavals in 2016 such as the Brexit referendum and the election of
Donald Trump. Analysts and journalists alike have accounted for this transformation of
the common sense and the dealignment of the political landscape by focusing on the use
of language, questioning the limits of acceptability and the effectiveness of the rhetoric
used by ‘populists’.
In this context, the return of rhetoric to the nucleus of political debate leads to a more
contentious question: are we witnessing, together with processes of dealignment and
polarisation, a complete transformation of rhetorical culture as a consequence of the recent
upheavals in UK and US politics? While this is a question that can only be answered in the
long-term, a clearer understanding of the unfolding scenario must take into account the
media by which Trump managed to capture the political imaginary. Recent academic
research as well as Facebook’s own internal research have shown that Facebook polarises
users (Horwitz and Seetharaman, 2020; Settle, 2018; boyd, 2018), and yet very little
research has examined to the role of algorithms in rhetoric and in particular, the distribu-
tion of speeches. By turning to rhetoric, I want to update the frame of rhetorical analysis
and show that ‘rhetorical situations’ (Bitzer, 1968; Martin, 2013b; Turnbull, 2017; Vatz,
1973) are not only constructed between orators and the situations, but they are essentially
mediated and governed by software and algorithms. Algorithms are one more component
in the assemblage of rhetorical situations (composed of speakers, arguments, context,
effects). What interests me is to examine how algorithms can be held partly responsible for
making speeches highly visible or for completely burying them.
Some important studies have analysed the transition from the print culture and radio to
the television age and its impact on rhetoric. The space and time devoted to speeches were
drastically reduced, forcing politicians to adapt and shorten their speech. ‘Hour-long
radio speeches gave way to thirty- and sixty-second ads’ (Jamieson, 1988: 7). This time-
compression was also coupled by new economy of televised images. Kathleen Hall
Jamieson noted already in the 1980s that visual moments become more expressive than
memorable words from great orators. When moving to the digital age and social media,
we will need to assess whether the form and content of the speeches have been trans-
formed by the new media ecology.
In this article, I use more specifically the recent literature in critical algorithm studies
(Bucher, 2018; Gillespie, 2018a; Panagia, 2019) to develop a new approach in rhetorical
criticism. A growing debate has taken place about the impact of digital media on politics
and democracy (Chadwick, 2019; Crawford, 2016; Eubanks, 2017; Marwick and Lewis,
2017; Moore, 2018; Noble, 2018; Pasquale, 2016; Tufekci, 2017). Other approaches in
political science are emerging to study the impact of social media on political knowledge
or whether algorithms cause radicalisation (Ledwich and Zaitsev, 2019; Munger and
Phillipps, 2019; Settle, 2018). Contrary to this last strand of political science, I am not
concerned with online radicalisation and democracy, instead I aim to update the frame of
rhetorical analysis by focusing on algorithms and social media. Very few scholars in
rhetoric have examined the role of algorithms. Aaron Hess (2014) presents one of the few
studies on this question using Kenneth Burke’s notion of identification, others have
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