If you’ve ever wondered why social media feels so crazy — with all the new ways we use language, storytelling, images, and tone to shape the way others think and feel — imagine how scholars studying online rhetoric must feel.
“It is crazy,” said Dr. Sarah Walden, associate professor of rhetoric in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. And not harmless.
“People have this idea that, ‘Oh, social media, it’s not that deep,'” she continued. “Yet in every image, tweet, meme, caption, video post, and comment thread in which people are persuading, comparing, arguing, joking, complaining, or selling, people are crafting identities.”
So are the folks who are scrolling through it all, she added.
“People tend to think that their online life is different than their so-called real lives,” Walden said. “But nothing could be further from the truth. Social media is changing the way our brains work and changing what we perceive to be normal and real and good.”
It’s all important to study, she noted, but not easy.
Unlike traditional forms of rhetoric used in speeches, sermons, advertising, or essays, social media rhetoric is “multi-dimensional,” she said. It can be fragmented, layered (text over image), “emoji’d,” participatory, and even fleeting, as seen with Instagram’s vanishing stories or livestreams.
“It’s never been more complex,” Walden said,” and rhetorical scholarship has to look at all of this.”
Experts in the field are also studying topics as diverse as meme culture, cancel culture, influencer branding, and even the rhetoric of silence, examining when active account users choose not to post.
Social media companies are notoriously secretive about their algorithms, as well as the demographics of their users and how their consumers use their platforms.
“Five years ago, users selected the content they wanted to follow, and that was what showed up in their stream,” she explained.
Since then, because of TikTok’s For You page and Instagram’s Reels and Explore feeds — which are dynamically generated based on previous individualized user behavior in the moment — it’s hard to nail down what people are seeing and when.
“No two users experience the same content the same way,” Walden said. “This makes it extremely difficult to study patterns or trends across users when the same message is reaching a different audience under different contextual conditions.”
Social media companies don’t divulge these patterns either.
“Rhetoric is language, but it also includes the means by which the language circulates, and the platforms keep that locked down,” she said.
Further complicating the research is the sheer amount of content. According to the blog Marketing Scoop, more than 95 million photos and videos are uploaded to Instagram every day. Instagram doesn’t break out metrics by content type, but of that 95 million, an estimated 23 to 31 million uploads are videos.
On TikTok, the oft-cited estimate is that 34 million videos are uploaded a day — that’s 16,000 videos a minute.
“This makes comprehensive or even representative sampling nearly impossible without access to large-scale internal datasets, which platforms do not provide,” Walden said.
Adding another layer of complexity, she noted, is that social media companies amplify certain voices and silence others, not randomly, but through algorithms tied, for example, to race, gender, celebrity, and politics.
“This idea of who is seen and who is silenced is now central to rhetorical inquiry,” she explained. “Rhetorical studies today have to look at who gets ‘chosen’ and how they are framed by the platform, and by the commenters.”
According to several studies, women are disproportionately more threatened, doxed, trolled, and discredited than men on social media.
In her own research, Walden has looked at how women use irony, softness, and deflection to make hard truths heard without being attacked.
“A lot of what links all of my work is trying to find the places in culture where women create safe spaces for themselves and each other,” she said.
In 2018, she published her research — “Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940” — looking at how women between 1790 and 1940 explored the intersectional nature of domestic ideology in cookbooks.
More recently, Walden delved into how women use humor when sharing parenting failures.
“I got started on this topic eight or nine years ago when my son was a toddler,” she said. “I noticed how women used humor to joke about always failing, for example, posting funny school pictures of their kids because they forgot school picture day, or what their toddler did to their dog when they turned their back for a minute.”
Even when they were only posting for their families, she noted, “there was this undercurrent of failure as the source of their humor.”
In the end, Walden maintained, the community-building created by sharing truisms seemed to supersede any residual negatives from focusing on the failures of daily parenting.
“Being fully immersed in the mom-world can be isolating,” she explained. “When kids are young, you are alone a lot of the time. It’s supportive to see women using their voices to tell their stories.”
Then, the humor changed, she said.
“Like everything on social media, trends change,” she said.
Comparing Instagram posts from before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Walden observed a shift in tone.
“Before the pandemic, mothers were saying, ‘Look, I’m failing,’ and laughing about it,” she said. “By 2022, more women were pointing to problems in society that were not meeting their needs, saying things like, ‘This is broken,’ and, ‘We need help.’ The posts were still funny, but the humor pointed to the failure of systems, not the failure of women.”
Her largest takeaway? It’s the importance of seeing social media for what it is and its impact on our world.
“When it comes to social media, there is a need to maintain vigilance, even when you are having fun,” she said. “What you have to remember is that this thing that you have been taught to take the least seriously in your lives — social media — is affecting you the most, because when you interact with it, you do not have your critical lens on.”
You may think you are using social media as a way to escape reality, “but what you are doing is crafting a new reality for yourself,” Walden said, “because you take in what you are seeing. You take it in. Even disassociating and scrolling for an hour, you change.”
“The question I ask myself all the time is, how do we get away from telling ourselves that social media is ‘not that deep,'” Walden continued. “Social media is shaping our beliefs, our values. It’s telling us what to think of as beautiful and altering who we know ourselves to be.
“My thinking is that this is actually incredibly deep.”
