George Campbell and Today's Rhetoric
The first thing most of us do upon waking up every morning is to reach for our phones or tablets to see what happened in our social circles and the rest of the world during our slumber. This readily accessible information at our fingertips would surely seem like beautiful magic to someone living 400 years ago. Take George Campbell for instance, a renowned writer and rhetorical theorist from the late Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. Campbell studied and wrote about ethics and psychology during his time which he discussed in his works titled The Philosophy of Rhetoric. You might be thinking. . . what does this have to do with my smartphone? Well, Campbell’s studies rhetorical science, which are closer to today’s philosophy, deduced that each mental faculty spoke its own language such as understanding spoke of logic and passion spoke of emotion, nevertheless playing a role in the persuasive process (Herrick, 2018, p. 204). Bringing this back to your smartphone, where discourse may have taken hours, days, even weeks to reach an audience in Campbell’s day, we merely have to roll over and pick up a phone. With that, we subject ourselves to a bombardment of persuasive discourse from the second we wake up every day. While scrolling through our social media, we see posts from friends as well as advertisements, news updates, re-posted jokes, poems, and quotes. I think a man such as George Campbell would caution against the overuse and even addiction many of us have fallen into with our smart devices. He would most likely publish treatises about the importance of understanding rhetoric and push to include such education as early as elementary school. There is great potential for informing and educating society in today’s digital age, however also great danger. In turn, Campbell would justifiably work on creating a new digital rhetoric as he intended to develop in the Enlightenment period. The process for his new rhetoric’s development would undoubtedly be sped up with the ability to rapidly test his ideas through social media. I think it’s a better time than any to not only seek out a new rhetoric but expand rhetorical studies in today's technologically focused society.
Reference
Herrick, J. A. (2018). The
History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction (6th ed.). Routledge.
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