Though digital rhetoric on its own is a recent concept, it is part of a greater rhetorical tradition—one that goes back centuries. As technology has changed throughout time, rhetoric itself has changed. Before written texts, rhetoric had a focus on oratory. Paper texts shifted the focus towards the written word. In the modern era, things changed in more so.

Now, digital rhetoric is an all encompassing term. It includes areas like visual rhetoric, digital literacy, computational rhetoric, and others. As a new technology would emerge, a new form of rhetoric would follow. In the digital, the technology is moving so quickly that it makes more sense to cover them all under digital rhetoric.

Compared to older concepts of rhetoric, digital rhetoric is massive. One would only need to understand written and spoken language to understand traditional rhetoric, but multiliteracies are needed to practice digital rhetoric. One needs to understand visual rhetoric. Something like working on a website or YouTube video requires the ability to communicate via visuals. Working on a website may also require technical skill like coding. All of these various literacies work together in the context of digital rhetoric.