When reading Burke's discussion of the fourth purpose, "to portray," I immmediately thought of the rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. When describing the fourth purpose, Burke writes, "there is a fourth “office” still to be taken care of. We refer to the utterance as “portraiture,” as the “self-ex-pression” of an agent, as an act characteristic of the poet’s “personality” whether or not he so wills it" (41). Burke continues in the next sentence, "Aristotle deals with this problem from the purely rhetorical point of view when discussing devices whereby the speaker can deliberately promote an audience’s confidence in him simply as a person, regardless of the cause that is being advocated or of the speaker’s true nature" (41). I focus on Burke's use of the word "devices" and the phrase "to promote an audience's confidence" when describing the three rhetorical appeals to argue my point. Initially when I encountered these terms, I thought of ethos or credibility; however, I later realized that one's use of pathos and logos as devices is also tied into one's ethos, as an overuse of emotional appeals (pathos) or poor logic and arrangement (logos) would undercut one's ethos. Put another way, that person would "portray" his or herself poorly to the audience and would not be able to achieve any of the other three purposes of the Ciceronian formula. Thus, Burke acknowledges a fourth purpose that the success of the other three purposes is contingent upon.

When thinking of this fourth purpose in regards to technology, though Burke was aware of technology and its potentially negative uses, he couldn't have envisioned how it is used today. Whereas in the past a speaker's ethos could be seen as more static, ethos today is a more dynamic concept because of the dynamic nature of electronic mediums. In the past, one had more control over how he or she could portray his or herself, but with the introduction of online writing and hypertext, there is less control for a speaker or writer. Specifically, one is limited in his or her ability to stop others from linking to or referring to his or her writing online or appropriating it elsewhere offline. I'm struggling with what I'm trying to say here, but now one's building of an ethos or portraiture has taken on or should take on a policing role. By that I mean, one needs to be on guard and police how his or her words/images are used by others. I'm thinking about environments such as Facebook and MySpace where someone linking to you as a friend in essence ties that person to your ethos because of your connection on the site. Maybe I'm overstating this a bit, but one may be perceived as unethical according to how he or she is linked/connected to others on the Internet who write unethically or present themselves in an unethical manner.