ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the implications of computer algorithms for the field of digital rhetoric, and how teachers and researchers may lay bare the benefits and consequences of computational procedures in networked computing. Algorithms always reflect the design choices of programmers through an encoded agency—transmitted for a future rhetorical exchange. In terms of a performative computer algorithm, persuasion plays an important role in the overall design and functionality of the coded processes of algorithms, which leads to understanding algorithms as functioning on a scale of social, political, and cultural biases. Algorithms have abilities to write from the data inputted while calculating what a user might want to experience next online, thus guiding end users to a limited scope of information online. Through additional inquiry and analysis, researchers may be able to identify the rhetorical strategies of persuasive algorithms, build a taxonomy for a theory of algorithmic discourse.
