Rhetorical Analysis

My issue topic talks about the globalization of social networks, so I picked an article on online privacy to make a rhetorical analysis of it. Even though I read most of the article, I’m only making an analysis on the first part of it (involving the overview, etc) due to its length.

The author of the article introduces it by talking about how millions of online users store their personal data on websites. He makes a good point by saying how websites people visit are tracked down by advertisers and more commonly by the government who uses this information for different purposes and investigations. The main concern or argument in the article is the effects of networking on the privacy. This is a good way to address his audience since it is clearly directed towards all of those Internet users who enter personal data on their daily activities to these servers.

The Kairos moment of this article is almost perfect: The rise in popularity of social networks like Facebook, Twitter and the use of internet over the last few years makes this an article that will concern a huge audience who is already aware of the dangers of the Internet.

Ethos is used fairly to establish some credibility. You can see paragraphs or examples and quotes of experts in privacy, government employees related to Internet security, professors of very respected universities, amongst other people who have authority in this topic. All of these authorities in the privacy area support the author’s idea or give examples of facts that have or can affect this audience somehow.

Pathos is also important to attract the audience in this article, especially because the author makes a smart move at the very beginning of it, in the first paragraph of the overview. He makes a question to start off his paragraph on a very engaging way: “What could happen to you?” This is no doubt the key sentence. After reading this, the audience feels curious about what’s next. The readers become concerned because they may be bound to suffer these consequences. By giving a couple of examples of negative consequences, he gets to the people’s feelings and attracts them to keep reading his article and support his argument.

Logos is established with facts. The author clearly does a lot of research and connects facts that sustain the weakness of privacy in this area and the flow between his sentences in every paragraph is good.

I hardly found fallacies in this article. Some of the consequences he mentions when appealing of pathos may be interpreted as Threat/Reward, but it isn’t really a consequence of not supporting the argument but a possibility that may happen for those who are part of the audience. It is very well written, the tone and language is semi-formal, the ideas are presented in a very concise way and the article is easy to understand. Some counter arguments may be ignored. I can think of the reason why the government controls these networks: national security. So the loss of privacy could mean more security, which is a little strange to say, but this could be a fair counter-argument to this article.  Other than that it’s a really well written article on privacy and it’s loss caused by the Internet and social networks.

Source of the article: http://library.cqpress.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre2009110600&type=hitlist&num=16