Classical rhetoric, developed in a world of live speeches and written texts, largely assumed persuasion happened through words, spoken or written, structured into arguments an audience could follow sentence by sentence. Digital and visual media let the same underlying persuasive appeals — ethos, credibility; pathos, emotion; logos, logical argument — operate through an entirely different medium: an image, a layout, a piece of music, or an internet meme's familiar format can each carry real persuasive force on their own, sometimes with barely any accompanying text at all.
The same classical appeals, working through a fundamentally different medium
A meme relies heavily on a shared, pre-established visual or cultural format that its audience already recognises, letting a single image instantly evoke an entire familiar context and emotional register without needing to spell any of it out in words — a persuasive move that still operates through recognisably the same underlying appeals classical rhetoric described, just carried by a radically compressed, image-based medium rather than by extended written or spoken argument. A well-designed visual layout can establish a source's credibility, doing real ethos-style persuasive work, purely through visual choices like typography, colour and overall polish, entirely independent of anything the accompanying text might separately argue.
Visual and digital persuasion can also move faster than the audience consciously processes
A significant part of what makes visual and digital rhetoric distinctive, compared with classical spoken or written rhetoric, is genuine processing speed: an image or a familiar meme format can register with an audience, and begin doing real persuasive work, in a fraction of a second, well before a viewer has consciously read or fully processed any accompanying text at all, in a way a written argument's sequential sentences simply can't match for sheer initial speed. This doesn't make visual and digital persuasion inherently more manipulative or less legitimate than classical rhetoric's slower, word-based forms — but it does mean rhetoric scholars analysing digital and visual media have to account for genuinely different mechanisms of persuasion than the ones classical rhetorical theory, developed centuries before photography or the internet existed, was originally built to describe.
What we're still unsure about
The extension of classical ethos, pathos and logos to visual and digital media, and the genuine speed advantage images have over sequential text, are well documented across rhetoric and media studies research. What's more genuinely unsettled is exactly how to systematically analyse a given specific piece of visual or digital rhetoric with the same rigour classical rhetorical analysis brings to a written text — a formal written argument has a relatively clear, linear structure that's straightforward to break down and evaluate piece by piece, while an image or meme's persuasive force often depends heavily on shared cultural context and instant recognition that resist being cleanly decomposed into the same kind of explicit, step-by-step structure, a genuinely active methodological challenge in contemporary rhetoric scholarship rather than a fully solved one.
This sits inside Rhetoric in Digital & Visual Media, one of seven topics in Rhetoric, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.