As a rhetorician, I am interested in what media shift means for rhetorical analysis and criticism. In particular, my current research considers the following question: How does persuasion as a form of social influence occur in new media environments?

As interactive, digital communication gradually supplements and to some extent replaces traditional mass media, print, and even face-to-face interaction, how can communication researchers trace and take note of changes in the forms of communication?

• For example, when many influential WWW texts no longer have an identifiable author or message source, how do users judge the legitimacy and credibility of site content?
• Or, when linear logic and traditional forms of reasoning seem out of place in unstructured, hypermediated environments, what alternative forms of logic take their place?
• Or, as media texts become more immersive, personalized, and malleable, what sorts of continuous, reciprocal adaptation in the message works to "adjust people to ideas and ideas to people?"

Provisional and ongoing efforts to answer such questions keep me very interested in my work..

For example, in a 2003 study on website credibility, I found that on website texts where the author is not identifiable, users tend to consider other attributes, such as site design, usability, and use of information resources. For them, "distributed credibility" is a composite construct comprised of many factors. Only infrequently do they consider who the site author might be.

In another co-authored study in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, my collaborators and I found that political web sites with higher levels of text-based interactivity were sites on which users spent comparatively more time and had greater recall of candidates' issue stances.

Here is an op-ed op-ed piece I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, July 29, 2007 on the Democrate YouTube debates on Monday, July 23, 2007. It is a speculation about the possible effects of this type of media convergence on public perception of the candidates.

My 2007 book, Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web, considered how existing rhetorical theories can be adapted to the study of online persuasion. The book argues that there are many forms of rhetorical activity on the Web that should be analyzed. These include political campaigning, social activism, and persuasion disguised as entertainment. The book used a case study method to illustrate how the analysis of persuasion on web sites and in distributed networks requires critics to make use, in part, of reader-centered criticism and notions such as field dependency to study co-produced, customized, de-centered hyptertext discourse. More information about the book is available on the Peter Lang Web Site.