In this study, ethos refers to the construction of trustworthiness of the ‘self’
(rhetor) in a community to which the ‘self’ contributes. Community in this study is understood as a rhetorical construct based on the togetherness of the rhetor and audience (see Miller 1993: 212). Ethos as the locus of togetherness is an essential persuasive means in any community. I have analysed online comments on celebrity gossip sites as self-expressions in which ethos is both individual and collective at the same time. Such understanding of self-expressions, as argued at the very beginning of this thesis, goes back to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (see also Fleckenstein 2005; 2007).
Unlike radical approaches to constructivism, rhetorical criticism does not emphasize that communal belief systems are constructed out of nothing by mere appearances, such as words or symbols, in human communication. Nor should the idea of topical thinking central in rhetoric be seen as the opposite of invention;
on the contrary, it is the practice of finding something that may be surprising and can be put to novel use even though it is not completely unexpected (Miller 2000:
143). Consequently, ethos construction does not, even in ‘new media’ contexts such as on celebrity gossip sites, create something completely new; instead it may be constructed based on surprising choices of already existing resources and restrictions in terms of trustworthiness. In the methodology of this study, I have considered the idea that both proximity and distance are involved in self-expressions in online celebrity gossip. In rhetorical terms, the ethos of the rhetor in online contexts does not merely lie in persuasive speeches but relates to values and norms beyond the screen, beyond rhetoric online. This means that in rhetorical criticism applied to new media contexts, classical concepts (such as
phronesis, arete and eunoia) should not be replaced with entirely new ones but rather should be given the possibility to surprise with novel uses.
As Warnick (2001) suggests, those who analyse online discourse cannot take traditional concepts of rhetoric and rhetorical criticism, such as ethos or text, for granted, but rather they need to apply these concepts to new media environments by taking into account the specific interactional and multimediated context of persuasion.13 This study holds that not only online participants are faced with the problem of limited cues; researchers of online communication must also deal with this problem. The key problem of online participants, as well as of researchers who explore online participation ‘stems from the fact that we often only have access to fragments of discourse related to the identities of those we study’
(Grabill & Pigg 2012: 105). We rarely have access to individuals’ reputations, motivations or their particular cultures outside of these fragments (ibid.). As researchers, we are left alone with the ‘messy rhetoric’ of online participants whose ethos can be analysed only based on what they have revealed in those fragments (see Grabill & Pigg 2012).
Moreover, an essential aspect of rhetoric online is the interplay between verbal (written or spoken texts) and visual elements (pictures and videos), as well as hyperlinks, in persuasion (e.g. Warnick 2007). Thus self-expressions are not speeches consisting of mere words; they may also include visual elements or hyperlinks. The verbal contents of self-expressions were the core interest of this study, but I also took into consideration the visual elements and hyperlinks they involved. I explored these non-verbal elements as referents to which verbal self-expressions related. For me as a researcher, pictures, videos and hyperlinks provided useful contextual material in the analysis of self-expressions. Thus it was relevant in this study to take into consideration, for instance, which celebrity was in a photograph that was evaluated with humorous and mocking tones. A detailed study of visual rhetoric with specific methods of visual analysis was, however, beyond the scope of this project.
In online digital settings, it is obvious that ethos is intertwined with the idea of community (see Fleckenstein 2007). According to Fleckenstein (2007), ‘the digital author position is distributed not merely across lexia or lex-icons, but
13 Rhetorical approach to texts and interaction in new media environments is also called digital rhetoric, particularly in the U.S. (e.g. Zappen 2005; Losh 2009: 47–95). However, I prefer calling the approach of my study simply rhetorical criticism because by self-expressions I refer to expressions of embodied beings who do not construct their online ethos in a digital vacuum.
across the system of interlocking loops that constitute cyberspace communities’.
Bearing the idea of ‘messy rhetoric’ in mind, I dealt with one online comment as one text, as one self-expression, and thus as a cue of an online participant’s ethos.
However, I also took into consideration that these texts become meaningful only when seen in relation to other comments on each given site and to the particular time- and place-bound settings surrounding communication in comment sections.
Picture 1 shows what I mean by self-expressions as collective expressions. The comments in Picture 1 come from the Just Jared online comment section following the gossip news story ‘Rihanna’s Bruised Face Revealed’.
Picture 1. Examples of self-expressions.
There are five self-expressions in Picture 1. These self-expressions relate to the gossip topic concerning domestic violence involving the pop singers Rihanna and Chris Brown. Each self-expression (such as ‘I hope Chris Brown spends time in jail...but I have a feeling he won’t’) can be seen as the cue of the rhetor’s ethos involving evaluative language (see Martin and White 2005) and forms of moral argumentation (see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1951). In terms of evaluative
language, these comments involve both judgement (e.g. Shame on, put in jail, monster) and affect (e.g. omg, Poor Rihanna, Oh my gosh). Affect in these self-expressions, moreover, is transformed into meanings of appreciation as the reactions of ‘shock’ and dismay to Rihanna’s picture on the site also indicate voyeuristic pleasure. As forms of moral argumentation, these comments are based on act-person separation: they focus on explicit judging of Chris Brown without distance from the audience. In this example, judging Chris Brown in harsh terms is the sign of trust, which is collectively supported.
As can be seen in Picture 1, self-expressions are typically signed with a male or female first name. However, like pictures of celebrities, also online participants’
signatures provided a useful background material for this study, rather than being the focus of it. When citing online comments as examples, I have discussed the female or male signatures or usernames and pseudonyms of participants whenever they played an essential role in online participants’ ethos construction, especially when they were not just names, but involved language of evaluation. Moreover, when such signatures were part of Finnish comments, I translated them into English.
Despite the ‘messy rhetoric’, online comments are fruitful targets of rhetorical criticism because these fragments can be seen as obvious and authentic indicators of what is considered persuasive in addressing the audience in celebrity gossip. In this sense, ethos is to be found between the rhetor and audience (see e.g.
Reynolds 1993; about group ethos in online contexts, see Gurak 1999). Since the online rhetors and their audiences constantly change places with each other, the persuasiveness of particular ways of constructing ethos is easily observable. An online comment, therefore, has a double role: it is both a persuasive self-expression by the rhetor, and at the same time, it is a response from the audience to other rhetors and their self-expressions. When the ways of constructing ethos are shared by rhetors and their audiences, it indicates that online gossipers contribute to the common idea of trust. Consequently, in addition to the qualitative analysis of ethos, I have also paid attention to quantitative measures, especially numbers and percentages, to explore the popularity of each type of evaluation and forms of moral argumentation as persuasive ways of contributing to ethos in online celebrity gossip.
3 DISCUSSION
The results of this study indicate that the rhetoric of celebrity gossip participants in online comment sections contributed to emotivist morality in which self-interested relationships to distanced ‘others’ became the basis of rhetorical ethos.
Firstly, self-expressions rarely included autobiographical moralizing, and if they did, gossipers avoided critical self-reflections (arete) (see Article 1). Secondly, online celebrity gossip was heavily based on the eunoia component of ethos, which emerged as a contribution to preferences for power and domination in the guise of play and purpose (see Article 2). In other words, online participants of celebrity gossip aimed at addressing ‘the second persona’ (Black 1970) by evaluating ‘the third persona’ (Wander 1984), a selected group of ordinary
‘others’, as moral inferiors. Although celebrities were the common targets of mockery and moralizing, the participants occasionally attacked one another as well. Thus self-expressions in online celebrity gossip were not merely ‘friendly’
ways of creating intimacy with all online gossipers on the site. Thirdly, the most common argumentative ways in online celebrity gossip were act-person separation as the logic of what I call digital enthymeme (see Articles 3 and 4) and the curbing technique as an argument called categorical enthymeme in Article 3 (for techniques of moral argumentation, see Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1951).
While digital enthymemes were expressions that took place as shared, ‘crowding’
preferences evaluating celebrities without any notion of their acts (such as ‘she deserved it!’, ‘what an ugly, fat pig’), categorical enthymemes were arguments stressing that a certain group of people is known for certain manners (such as
‘women should be blamed because they provoke men to violence’). Fourthly, the undermining of arete and the sharing of preferred sentiments as emotivist means of persuasion were also supported through ethos control (see Article 5). By such ethos control, I mean types of normativity through which online gossip participants criticized self-expressions involving moral identification with celebrities. This last case study was motivated by the other four case studies, which made it relevant to focus on one specific forum (ONTD) only.
Despite the prominence of mockery and condemnation contributing to the emotivist morality, online gossip participants also showed moments of resistance.
The ways participants created and resisted self-expressions of emotivist morality are discussed in Section 3.1. In Section 3.2, I discuss contextual differences, particularly those relating to the language and cultural background of the celebrity gossip participants. Section 3.3 deals with the contributions this study makes and discusses the opportunities this study leaves for further research. Finally, Section 3.4 is a brief conclusion on emotional self-expressions as rhetorical practices in online contexts.