McNamee uses many different strategies in this article, but his most present and important strategy is his use of comparison. Much of his evidence stems from comparing social media to different things to persuade the reader, and make it easier for them to understand. A clear example of this strategy occurs in the second paragraph of the article, when McNamee compares gambling techniques to those used in Facebook, Google, and others to “exploit human nature.” This strategy works by comparing an obvious bad and negative idea, gambling, to social media in order to throw a negative connotation on social media as well. Another strong comparison is when he describes both nicotine, alcohol, and heroin as well as Facebook and Google as producing “short-term happiness with serious negative consequences in the long term.” Same as the gambling comparison, he creates a bad connotation for Google and Facebook by grouping them with known addictive and frowned-upon drugs. The comparison strategy is effective because it absentmindedly groups what people know about things like alcohol, heroin, nicotine, and gambling with social media, automatically throwing their bad connotations onto Google and Facebook. It has the effect of making one’s mind have sour feelings towards social media because that is how we naturally feel about alcohol and drugs, we’re supposed to not like them and think poorly on them. McNamee uses this strategy in order to persuade the reader that maybe social media sites aren’t as great as everyone has thought, maybe they are indeed just as addictive and abusive as alcohol, nicotine, heroin, and gambling. This strategy was really effective, because society has and will always frown on addiction to drugs and alcohol, so by associating social media with this bad connotation, everyone will view Google and Facebook as addictive and unhealthy for humankind.
Another strategy McNamee uses is the rhetorical appeal of logos. To back up his claims of Google and Facebook taking over everyone’s lives, he uses many facts and statistics. To show how many people actually use these social media, he uses the statistics, “The Facebook application has 2 billion active users around the world. Google’s YouTube has 1.5 billion” (McNamee). By using these facts, the audience can’t question or doubt the amount of influence these social networks do have on the billions of people in the world. He continues this paragraph with “These numbers are comparable to Christianity and Islam, respectively, giving Facebook and Google influence greater than most First World countries” (McNamee). He mixes in his facts with his previous strategy, comparison. To show the astronomical influence Facebook and Google have, he compares the amount of people who use these to the number of people that follow the most popular and influential religions in all of the world and of history. More than just Google and Facebook, he also includes other social media apps, “Other attention-based apps — including Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, SnapChat and Twitter — also have user bases between 100 million and 1.3 billion“ (McNamee). Again, he uses direct statistics and unquestionable data, so the audience can’t doubt his information. Using logos is always a strong appeal and strategy, because it is hard for people to argue or question direct facts and numbers.
Deegan Roecker 