Date of Award
2018
Document Type
Thesis
Mentor
Lisa Luedeman
Abstract
Excerpt from Literature Review
The Internet age has seen a huge shift in the way that candidates communicate their political rhetoric, because there has been a huge shift in how voters consume that rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook are now some of the vehicles by which voters consume political rhetoric. Twitter and Facebook are home to lots of non-political content, but many members of the politically engaged community have flocked to both social networking sites to create politically engaged social networks. The emergence of social media as an important information source within the electorate has fundamentally changed not only the way that candidates communicate, but the very rhetoric that they are communicating. The importance of modern social networks as sources of political information, combined with kind of demotic rhetoric popularized by Donald Trump, has fundamentally changed the way that users consume political rhetoric.
Citation Information
Byrd, Alice, "The Art of the Tweet: How to Change Political Rhetoric in 140 Characters or Less" (2018). Undergraduate Honors Theses. 28.
https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/undergrad-honors/28