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Content strategists and creators need to be more mindful about the ethical concerns that come with creating software for an online space.

In Chapter 5 of Sara Wachter-Boettcher's book Technically Wrong, the author elaborates on certain scenarios that can (or have) occurred thanks to ignorance when crafting something for an internet audience. One example that stuck out to me was her explanation of negging. Negging, though normally a term used by pick-up artists, refers to using negative (hence the name) language to lower a person's self esteem and enhance guilt, thereby making them more likely to be "picked up." It's very gross, yet many internet browsers and websites use this tactic to, as Wachter-Boettcher puts it, "manipulate our emotions so that companies can collect information, without doing any of the work of creating a relationship or building a loyal following" (92).

Negative language can be just as bad as the overly nice, teeth-rotting sweetness of something like Tumblr's "what you missed" feature or everything involving the creation of Mailchimp. As designers for a broad internet audience, strategists should be avoid manipulating people's emotions just to get them to click on a link or to be put on a mailing list. 

Accessibility is more important than ever in this digital era. Since the world is becoming more connected, people are being exposed to different types of experiences that digital writing may need to account for. Accessibility options I see most often accounted for online is text-based programs like subtitles. Both YouTube and TikTok allow users to make subtitles for their videos, and even auto-generate subtitles if the original poster chose not to add them themselves. This not only makes visual content accessible for deaf and hard of hearing individuals, it also helps people who may not have these issues.

The advent of generative A.I. has a lot of implications for the future of digital writing, mostly in regards to how people choose it to complete tasks that require writing. For example, a Washington Post article on the subject covered the story of a man with dyslexia who started using GPT-3 to help spell check and correct his emails. Overall, A.I. has been a net positive for the man and his company, as now it translates every message into something "unfailingly professional and polite."

Interactivity, as defined by Barbara Warnick in her book Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web, is “communication that includes some form of reciprocal message exchange involving mediation" (75). Essentially, interactivity involves using different types of "stylistic devices" to get audiences engaged with online content (Eyman 32). This could be anything from what kind of language a blog post is utilizing, to using photographs to further communicate with viewers. To put it simply, interactivity is about how a rhetorician displays their argument online and how their audience interprets and connects to it in their own way.