Retórica em ambientes digitais

The increasing use of networked digital devices is giving rise to a new culture: the digital culture theorised by Manuel Castells. It has its own space, cyberspace, and makes available a large collection of content, creating what Pierre Lévy calls collective intelligence. Although it is based on the technocratic belief that technology promotes human progress, some research shows that the actual uses fall short of what is desired and theorised. The analyses carried out in Portugal on the use of the Web by the Catholic Church in the pursuit of its mission prove precisely that. There are several hypotheses that try to explain the phenomenon. This paper seeks to demonstrate that one of the existing fragilities is that the various analyses did not consider the need for a new rhetoric, the digital rhetoric.