Digital enthymeme: morality, emotions, and materialism in new media participation

In this article, I discuss moral and rhetorical challenges in new media discourse concerning celebrities. I focus on the concept of digital enthymeme, that is, an online comment evaluating people negatively or positively without articulated reasoning, but, instead, letting online participants find proofs by themselves in a digital environment surrounded by pictures, texts, links, and videos. The aim of this paper is to explore what kind of moral rhetoric is involved in digital enthymemes concerning celebrities. The research questions are 1) what kinds of digital enthymemes are used by Englishand Finnish-speaking online participants commenting on gossip about violent celebrities and 2) how these enthymemes operate as moral arguments on the level of style (discourse itself as a persuasive material) and in relation to moral norms as a communally shared purpose. The research material consists of 1800 online comments (900 English-language, 900 Finnish comments) of which 808 comments were categorized as digital enthymemes (464 English-language, 344 Finnish comments). Methodically, this study combines rhetorical argumentation analysis of enthymemes with the analysis of evaluative language based on the linguistic appraisal framework. Two types of digital enthymemes, namely, moralistic and amoralistic, were identified in the material. The moral rhetoric in both types of digital enthymemes is solely based on the emotional involvement of online selves as a sign of consumerism and materialism becoming more important than moral negotiation. While moralistic digital enthymemes invoke personalized moral norms by judging celebrities as moral beings, amoralistic digital enthymemes block moral imagination by dehumanizing celebrities and evaluating them as objects, such as aesthetic or sexual “things”. In general, amoralistic digital enthymemes were more typical than those evaluating celebrities in moralistic terms. Digital enthymeme: morality, emotions, and materialism in new media participation Maria Eronen Special Issue of “Sociedad de la Información” 2013 36