ThankLindsey O’Brien 10-12-12
TYFA Project Per.1
“Growing Up Online”: Persuasive Techniques
The world today has been overthrown by technology. In the last decade this tech renaissance has changed our society and culture in America. The age group that has experience this effect straight on are children and teenagers. An episode of Public Broadcasting System’s Frontline named “Growing Up Online”, originally aired January 22nd 2008, enters the complicated world online and examines the impact the internet has on adolescence. This documentary brings front serious issues kids deal with everyday on the web including bullying, harassment, sexuality, and bizarre forms of celebrity. It reveals how virtual private lives online intercept with reality. This exposé on American online life is reported through many rhetoric techniques to help persuade you to think how much the computer has impact social culture and behaviors sometimes in a negatively way. This episode of Frontline opens up with a basic scenario. It’s Friday night and everyone is online, even if it’s for different reasons. One group of teens are on the computer to play video games, accompany by loads of caffeine. Another group of teens across town at the local community center are looking up the latest videos on YouTube, and are social networking. The final example shows how in one household the older brother upstairs is on MySpace while his younger sibling downstairs is on videogame website Club Penguin; both are looking for virtual friends. They do this to show how much activity children spend on this media outlet even though we all have different interests. Their audience which is probably parents of children online can relate to this, this segment is using decorum in the way. The documentary is coming from a commonplace to adults. Parents of children can share the feeling of having their child online every Friday night and not knowing what they’re really up too. This strategy is very effective as right from the start the audience will trust the documentary because they are showing honest examples of children and parents know that many children spend hours online during the weekend. It will be very successful in creating a connection between the audience and speakers. The next segments that follow this one is about how the online world has shifted from adults to children, as they use it as an outlet to get away from their parents and be their selves. This segment builds up ethos by using facts like statistics saying 90% of teenagers are online in Morris County, New Jersey on an average Friday night. This is an astounding figure because it truly proves that many children in America have been taken over by this black hole of technology. They also use authors who have written about these topics to get a professional view on the issue. Anne Collier who wrote MySpace Unraveled comments “It’s really hard to control what our kids are doing online, what we have here is kind of the new Wild West, no one is really in charge.” C.J. Pascoe who is involved with the Digital Youth project at University of California- Berkeley comments on the topic stating, “it’s just this huge shift in which the internet and digital world belong to adults , but now really is the province of teenagers, so there’s a proliferation of pictures and videos , living their lives and essence online .“ The expert’s opinions on these topics persuade the audience to think that the internet is a crazy place where teens are running wild. It puts the web in more of disapproving slot. It also builds up the documentary’s character by using respectable accounts. These sources know what they are talking about because of time and research they have put into their projects or text. The audience will have confidence in their words and believe in what they say, therefore being very valuable.
Another segment in documentary called “cyber bullying” welcomes the technique of pathos. The websites of children who have passed because of suicide from the effects of cyber bullying played with slow depressing music bring up feelings of sadness and compassion for these victims. The audience also hears a story of a boy name Ryan Halligan who committed suicide. His dad who was puzzled why his loving son would do this and later went on his old computer and found links to suicide websites and saved messages sent from girls just to humiliate him. Along with this horrible story they have accounts from his friends, families, and principal. They show pictures and home videos of the boy who looked sweet but was really hurting on the inside because of the pain his computer bought him. This gloomy anecdote bring s in sympathy which is the only thing you can feel as you watch his father hold back tears in his watery eyes when he talks about why he didn’t understand why his son would do this and how a simple machine like the computer was the roots of the problem. This strategy of arguing by emotion how the internet can bring negative, even deathly effects on the culture of young adults. This will affect the audience’s emotions as they think how could a parent go through the death of their child when the cause was because of the internet web and present day cyber bullying which they are probably not very comfortable with. The final moments of the documentary show a graduation with many students that were interviewed in the video. Greg Bucotta, a senior in high school who talked about cheating on the internet for school assignments, decides to make a fresh start, “it will be hard, but I need to disconnect, I just need to pull the plug on this internet life and see what it’s like.” Greg who is going to the Coast Guard Academy in the fall is prohibited to use the internet or his cell phone for the first two weeks; his parents guess that he won’t be able to make it. His mother says, “It’s going to be a big withdrawal from him,” while his father agrees, “I think he’s going to have trouble, he’s never been without it.” This is argument by logic or logos. Obviously the generation of teenagers now have grown up with internet in our daily lives and it will be hard to separate from it and actually start life when we graduate from high school and go on to bigger and better things. This last piece of the documentary is a great ending because it makes the audience think will the generation get over the internet or will stay forever? Logic shows that the World Wide Web is not a fad but will be here forever negatively or positively. Overall this documentary shows techniques through the three most powerful tools of persuasion: logos, ethos, and pathos. Each one can be relatable to the audience which is parents, and teachers of teenagers, and even teenagers themselves. They use ethos many times to build up the trust and respect of this Frontline episode by using many professional opinions from authors and doctors. They also use stats when describing the usage of computer use by teenagers. Pathos is widely used as well because of the many natural feel videos they included from real teenagers from the internet. It gives the documentary a sense of realism and not superficial sense. In the persuasion sense this video did a great job of convincing the audience that the computer is quickly taking over younger age groups and how there are so many negative effects because of it on our social culture. They range from all interest from cheating, social networking, harassment, and sexuality. This documentary is a wonderful example of rhetoric because the way it arranges the three main points of argumentation into different segments focusing on one but bringing it all together at the end.