Digital rhetoric, much like computer science, provides an interpretive framework that encompasses much more than the study of hardware or software. Yet many who purportedly study the rhetoric of digital discourse focus excessively on the technological apparatus, so that a conventional view of the study of hypertext and networked communication directs attention to the computer rather than the theories behind its development. In the standard model of digital rhetoric, represented by journals like Kairos and Computers and Composition, literary theory is almost always applied to technological applications without considering how technological theories could conversely elucidate literary texts. Rhetoricians of digital culture debate about the merits of MOO’s and MUD’s or blogs and wikis but rarely address how fundamental paradigms of the public sphere have been reshaped by new ideas from the discourses of codes and algorithms.