A rhetoric of digital politics

This chapter addresses the creative processes involved in imagining, and writing about, digital politics. It argues that scholarship on digital politics engages in rhetorical constructions as necessary means of attracting and occupying the attention of audiences and of getting a good argument across; all good writers are also good storytellers. However, when such storytelling occupies binary positions such as cyber optimism and pessimism, academic rhetoric serves to suppress the complexities and nuances of digital politics. We propose an alternative rhetorical position of ambivalence. This requires an epistemic stance of receptivity and creativity, of listening and being open to contingent possibilities. The position of ambivalence allows us to capture the push and pull of digital politics - the ways in which the digital and the political shape, constrain and act upon each other. Rather than focusing on causal questions of influence, however, it compels us to query how the digital and the political constitute and regulate the reconfigured subjectivities that emerge through digital politics.