Inequality… Analysis

                In Inequality: Can Social Media Resolve Social Devision? a chapter from Danah Boyd’s book Boyd speaks about, well the title really is self-explanatory. Boyd creates an argument that uses a ridiculous amount of logos taken from an even more ridiculous amount of research.  She does extensive field research filling this chapter with interviews from teens of all backgrounds from an inner city girl to a preppy rich girl.  These interviews are done and recorded over years and Boyd makes more and more conclusions to support her claim from them. Most of her interviews are focused around a pivotal point, when teens started to change from Myspace to Facebook. She points out what a few students said about their classmates; many of them said that the classmates that “higher ups” which more often than not turned out to be white people and one interviewee came out and said that the biggest reason that she and her friends switched to Facebook was to “and not to sound racist but” get away from the more ghetto people. Boyd eventually comes to a final conclusion that social media cannot fight segregation and that the race problem will be a problem for many years to come. Although her fieldwork is the main examples she uses to come to her conclusion it is apparent that she uses many secondary sources as well. Boyd often times talks about the huge racial segregation on the internet between teens. They will more often have friends of the same race commenting on their posts than of other races Boyd says after careful observation of teens’ social media pages. The more secondary research is really the meat of the argument. From this research Boyd comes to more serious conclusions and even implements it into her field work like when she pointed out to one of her interviewees some of her findings and built upon how surprised the interviewee was. She also makes many claims in the chapter and then puts a footnote on that claim to a piece of secondary research that she found that supported that claim. It seemed that every claim she made had some way to support it  and made the chapter very convincing to the reader. 

Consider the Lobster Analysis

                David Foster Wallace in his essay Consider the Lobster writes an intriguing essay (from a rhetorical standpoint) about a lobster festival that develops into something much more. The essay begins with just the lobster festival and a description of it, but Wallace expertly transitions the essay to become something of a moral battleground causing many of us what is called in psychology cognitive dissonance (the discomfort that you feel when two opposing opinions come into contact with each other in your mind). It is really impressive the way in which he does this. He uses this festival as an opportunity to write about the morality of cooking lobster while it is still alive. It is interesting how he uses the festival as a starting point to move into his opinions lobsters. He first starts with festival and then moves into the subject of lobsters, many facts and statistics are pulled out so that by the end of the essay you feel as though you could write this 350 page paper solely on the facts that he states, but this seems to be essential to the paper because the reader then feels that they know lobsters better than just that really expensive food that you get every once in a while.  The lobster then becomes more of a living thing to the reader. After what seems like a possibly infinite amount of lobster facts Wallace brings the focus back to the festival and starts talking about the organization PETA, who is apparently at the lobster festival most years to explain the pain that lobsters may or may not experience while being boiled. From here Wallace gets into the lobster meat of things¹ he turns the reader’s attention to what he really wanted to go to all along, the lobster cooking morality. He leaves the reader in a grey ambiguous area where you’re left not quite sure what you believe anymore because the whole world seems to have been turned upside down by lobsters. Wallace makes the reader think about their view on the subject and probably even managed to change a few opinions on the matter.

1: I know it was bad, but after seeing Wallace do it so many times I thought that I’d give footnotes a shot and for some reason it was the only thing I could think of that seemed worthy of one. I apologize for any pain that the pun may have caused.

Shipping Out Analysis

                Shipping Out by David Foster Wallace is a twenty four page essay about Wallace’s experience on a cruise ship. Wallace talks extensively about the human condition or at least the American condition and often likes to make fun of it. The author’s main purpose is to entertain his audience and to accurately describe his experience on the trip. Wallace’s attention to detail is incredible, he recounts every piece of the ship and describes the things that he did very well. He molds these details all into one common theme, everything on the ship is fake. The tourists, the workers, even the ship itself has a faux atmosphere around it that all ties into the theme. Wallace talks extensively about the details of the ship making some keen observations, or really just one observation, it is always spotless and perfect. There is no place with rust on it, the windows get washed every morning to wash the salt, and the one time that Wallace did come in contact with a defect it was fixed within minutes of him catching it. The author leads this all back to the fakeness of the ship he almost seems to imply that it is in some way a dystopian society that holds the appearance of a perfect world. The workers on this ship according to Wallace work to achieve the image, they as Wallace puts it, “pamper you to death” where they truly work as hard as they can to make sure their customers have a good time on the ship and feel the luxury. The author describes how his maid would somehow always know when he was going to be out for thirty minutes or more because when that happened he would come back to a spotless room. There was also his waiter who was so serious about the tourists experiencing a good time that it would pain him to hear anything other than that their experience was great. This plays once again into the dystopian society that Wallace has created on the ship through his reflections. The tourists are then the final piece to the dystopian puzzle, the stupid citizens that play into the hands of the higher ups and have lost all value. He constantly speaks of the materialistic tourists and how in the end he starts to become one too no matter how hard he fights it. Wallace really uses his experiences to paint a picture of a cruise ship in a light that many would not think of.

Being Healthy

                Because of a desire not to gain the freshman 15 and the fact that I’ve always wanted to get into the habit of exercising consistently I’ll be doing my experiment on being healthy through a good diet, exercising every day and going to bed and waking up at the same time. Studies show that good habits such as these can not only increase mood, but longevity as well. To do this I will attempt to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time as well, I will try to only eat healthy options at dining halls and in my dorm and I will try to exercise every day. I plan on going to bed each night at eleven and waking up at 7 then I will either go to the gym or go for a run. When eating I will only eat healthy things, which means mostly vegetables and meat with a little bit of grain. The experiment will be a challenge, I won’t be able to eat my favorite food, burritos, or stay out with my friends until two on the weekends. I really see the sleeping part and the consistent exercise part as my biggest humps to get over, it will be hard to stave off that late night Oreo craving, but getting up at seven and going to exercise will be rough and purposely excluding myself from going out with my friends past eleven will be even harder. To keep the experiment consistent I plan to reward myself for every time that I find it hard to get through it. When my friends are about to leave for a party instead I’ll go to my dorm and watch lost, my latest Netflix show, which I never have time to watch because I’m either doing homework or with my friends. When I don’t feel like exercising in the morning come back and take a long shower, which I really enjoy and find very relaxing. The problem with the food is that it will probably just have to be its own reward. I’m going to have to think of healthy snacks that I like and they will become my rewards. There is a possibility that this reward system will not work and then I will have to reevaluate my incentives and hopefully make them better.

Unitasker Rhetorical Analysis

                The Unitasker by AJ Jacobs is a chapter in Jacobs’ book about how he performed an experiment trying to kick a bad habit that he and many others have, multi-tasking. Jacobs uses extensive evidence in his writing to help the reader understand what he is doing and why. He uses evidence from ranging from primary sources- an interview with a scribe- to books, a lot of books. With this evidence he shows his purpose more and more, Jacobs is trying to inform the public of the dangers of multi-tasking. While the main focus is his struggle to focus on a single task at once the purpose becomes clearer when he puts ominous quotes, or in this case a summary, such as, “Multi-tasking shortchanges the higher regions of the brain, the ones devoted to learning and memory.”  It is an essay that is filled with logos. He uses this rhetorical appeal very nicely so that the reader is properly informed. Jacobs does an excellent job of scaring the reader with his striking facts and statistics then diffusing the situation with some form of humor or good will leaving the reader with a sense that this is a very serious issue, but not overly afraid of what is to come. The structure of the chapter is also interesting, Jacobs splits the chapter up into twelve different sections. The most of these sections are devoted to his personal experiences in his experiment, but there are a few more sobering and factual sections. Through these sections the Huxley model is shown in different lights. There are the sections that focus on his experiment. Theses sections show the inner self and have some abstract and poetic pieces in them where the author makes the reader feel good and makes light of the situation and oncoming problem that effects many of us today. He keeps objectivity to a lower degree, but does not exclude it completely so that the reader can always have the idea in the back of their mind. As you probably have guessed the sobering more factual sections are much more objective and only have minor moments of subjectivity. With these sections the author can really get his point across.

The Huxley Model

The Huxley Model states that at any given moment an essay is moving into three different directions the subjective, the objective and the abstract.  Overly Documented Life by A.J. Jacobs does just this in his essay in Esquire magazine. The essay is a document of the experiment Jacobs performs on himself where he goes into the depths of “lifeblogging.”  Jacobs states, “In 2013, Google plans to release Internet-enabled glasses that, the company boasts, have the capacity to display data on the lenses and also to record every moment (including, presumably, those moments when you get beat up for wearing Internet-enabled goggles). Very spooky.”  This excerpt is most obviously objective. It states a series of facts about google goggles and what the capabilities of the product are.  Then from there it starts to become very subjective and abstract. The abstractness comes from the creativity of the sentence, he puts his opinion in parentheses to separate it from the objective piece then puts his own personal feelings towards it, which is where the subjective parts enter. All three almost simultaneously occur in the essay and Huxley’s model is once again in effect. It is not always like this though there can be different combinations and intensities of the three parts. Jacobs later in his paper states, “It clues you in to how often your emotions fluctuate. It reminds you that your morning funk is temporary. As dark as the world seems at the moment, you will climb back to level 9.”  This piece seems to be more dominated by the subjective. There is more feeling in the author’s voice and the reader has more feeling as the excerpt is being read. Yet, there are still moments of objectivity as in the first sentence of the quote when it is clear that there is much less emotion than in the rest of the quote. And at the end of the quote he italicizes “will” this is the point where the abstract shows most brightly. He uses the italicized word to emphasize his statement and it seems to pull out a little more objectivity to this more emotional part by making it seem like more of a true statement. An object fact. 

Section 1

Scheidegger, Kent. “Abolish the Death Penalty.” Intelligence Squared. April 15, 2015.                         Keynote Address.

Section 2

            Scheidegger’s main claim is that the death penalty should not be abolished. This claim he supports trough his sub-claims, which are it deters people from killing, in most capital cases there is no doubt who did it, and innocents would still be in prison with or without the death penalty. He supports these claims through a series of counter arguments. He starts with the fact that the studies that show the death penalty does not deter are not scientific but empirically proven to support his first sub-claim. He does not support his second claim with evidence as he seems to believe that it is common knowledge and the evidence used for the last claim is that death penalty cases are so expensive that the innocent would not be able to afford a good lawyer. Scheidegger concludes the same way that he started by stating that the death penalty should not be abolished.

Section 3

            The purpose of the speaker is to convince his audience that the death penalty should not be abolished. His immediate audience is intelligent people in the crowd, but Scheidegger seems to focus on a more general audience judging by the fact that he never uses excessively big words and his argument is very clear and easy to understand. He also ends his opening statement with a quirky rhyme that suggests he is trying to reach a broader audience. The speaker provides mostly counter arguments to the other side’s claims to prove his point. He does not provide new information that would push the audience to sway towards his side and thus does not do a good job of achieving his purpose. Although this may be true he does have time constraints, which could very easily impair him from stating something very important to his argument. Scheidegger’s debate is very different from other sources on this topic because he is in a debate and does not have time to come up with the best response possible and has to more often think on his toes.

Section 4

“An executed killer never kills again.”

Section 1

Kaveny, Cathleen. “A Horrific Crime: but is Execution the Answer.” Gale. Literature Resource Center, December 17, 2010. Web. September 3, 2015.

Section 2

            Kaveny writes an article where she tries to argue against the death penalty. She starts with a death penalty case in which two men, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, commit horrible acts. She takes this evidence and bases most of her claims on this case. Her main claim that society must look for a way to stop these crimes at the source is mainly supported by this evidence. She also makes claims that there is a point where the death penalty stops being effective and that death by lethal injection is not an appropriate way to give these men what they deserve, which she then supports using the acts of these men. She also uses a statement by Pope John Paul II to support her main claim that we as a society must go back to our roots to stop crimes such as these from happening. In Kaveny’s conclusion she supports her main claim again by implying that society is fighting againsty evil and that the death penalty is not a way that can stop it.

Section 3

            Kaveny’s purpose is to tell the American people that we live in a brutal society and need to make reforms. It is obvious that she wants to speak to all Americans in general this is shown by her informal tone and the fact that she humanizes herself by starting the story off with a report that she saw on the news. The purpose is only made clear when she begins to talk about how the death penalty is not good for our society. She talks about the death penalty and its problems then uses those problems to show her audience the shortcomings of our society as a whole. The only constraints that the author may have to this article is her editor may have only allowed a certain number of words and the edits that the editor makes himself/herself. The problem with the constraints is that they could have hindered the author in saying exactly what she wanted to say. This particular article is interesting because while most of the media on this issue are truly about the subject at hand the author tried to get a deeper meaning using the issue as a gateway into it.

Section 4

“Two traditional goals of punishment are retribution and deterrence. But the evildoing in this case calls both those goals into question.”                 

“The bottom line is that society cannot impose a condign punishment, or an effective deterrent to these monstrous acts, without in some sense recreating and participating in the brutality of the criminals themselves.”

Comparative Rhetorical Analysis Subject

            The subject that I chose to write about is an issue that is very controversial. Should the death penalty be legal? There are a few reasons that I chose this subject, the first is that I do not have a personal opinion one way or the other on the topic (I don’t believe I have enough information on the subject to make a final decision over something so important) and was hoping to have a final opinion on the matter by the end of the assignment. Another reason is that many people have very strong opinions one way or the other, which I think will make the assignment more enjoyable in that it will be more interesting to read the reasoning from the writers and to find their voice. The third and final reason is that I believe there will be a huge range of discourse for this topic. It has always seemed to me that in this issue there has been a few in the middle that can see it from both sides and most that have made up their minds and have a straight opinion one way or the other even to the point where there are some extreme views- I at one time had a teacher that expressed his belief so strongly in the death penalty that he told the class that, “those people should be tortured first.” Because of the amount of people that have an opinion on either side it is likely that I will be able to find media on the issue in many places.  Social media sights such as twitter are a good way to get the viewpoint and reasoning of a more common everyday person. The problem with this is that there purpose and voice may not be very developed as most tweets are very short. Another place to go would be the news, which debates about this issue every once in a while. The arguments on this issue coming from the news would be another good way to get people’s opinions on a less broad scale, but at the same time the argument is likely more developed and the voice more clear than in the social media sites. Debates on the subject would also be a good form of discourse so that professionals could get their opinions on the matter out there and hopefully provide a very clear cut voice, purpose, and audience.