Captolo-what?

Despite its short length, I found the summary/analysis of Stuart Selber's article on Rhetorical Literacy to be a challenging read. After reading it several times, I realized that there were just too many concepts that I was unfamiliar with. For instance, I had no idea what "human-computer interfaces" or "captologists" were. I spent some time looking up these concepts and even exploring the meaning of the title "rhetorical literacy." I eventually stumbled upon Stanford University's Persuasive Tech Lab web site, where I discovered that captology is "the study of computers as persuasive technology" ("What is Captology?"). This is a brand new, cutting-edge school of thought that examines how web sites and computer technology influence people's behavior.

Since public writing is primarily done to persuade others, and many forms of public writing can now be found online, this new field of study is highly relevant to public writers. A very basic example of the kind of persuasion that they are studying can be found on their "trigger" page. A trigger is something that tells people to "do it now!" and succeeds in actually influencing a person's behavior/actions; the implications for public writing could be significant if we found a way to apply such principles to get people to make a difference in their community. Many of Stanford's Behavior Model projects are studying the persuasive rhetoric of social networking sites, but with so many people using these sites, the data and findings from these studies may be incredibly telling---and possibly useful for application in other fields.