Deegan Roecker
Professor Werry
RWS 100
23 October 2018
Assignment 2
Social media is how people communicate with others, stay updated on news and politics, and simply publicize their own lives for friends and family. Regardless of its use for each individual person, social media is highly impactful on the way we feel, think, and communicate. While there are many important and positive aspects of social media’s mass influence on the public, several people believe it is more harm than good. Authors like Roger McNamee, David Golumbia, and Zeynep Tufekci all share the same beliefs that social media is actually quite terrifying, and even hijacks our brains. Specifically, McNamee develops a strong argument using different strategies, rhetorical appeals, and accurate sources.
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.
An interesting source used in this article is one written by Robert Booth titled, “Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions.” In this experiment by Facebook, they altered user’s home pages to either contain all positive or all negative posts from their friends. They found that when posts were positive, the users tended to be happier, while the negative posts resulted in unhappy users. This study concluded that “emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks” (Booth 1). Just this simple study by Facebook proves how easy it is to affect one’s emotions simply by altering the posts on their timelines. Although this study was harmless, this could lead to mass emotional contagion on topics like politics, which connects back to McNamee’s idea of “brainhacking.” This source perfectly backs up McNamee’s claims that Google and Facebook really can control and manipulate its users, and in this case its their emotions being altered. This source also appeals to pathos as well as logos, because it is literally human beings’ emotions that are being manipulated, and as humans we empathize and see what is wrong with altering the main thing that makes us human. Although this study didn’t lead to the users doing anything drastic besides being happier or sadder, it still perfectly backs up McNamee’s argument.
Analysis of Assumption ?? (HELP)
Roger McNamee crafts a strong argument in this article, without it just being informational. Instead, he combines statistics and his own credibility to create a call to action, to target his audience and make them feel like victims to social media, which will then make them angry and want to fight back. With his use of different appeals and strategies, he crafts a very strong argument which not only informs his audience of the misfortunes of Facebook and Google, but also goes the extra step to push them to act and beg for change, or else they will be at the mercy of the corrupted individuals behind these social media sites. His best strengths in this piece is the way he shapes his argument, using strong sources and strategies, to eventually lead to a call to action. He ends with, “If we want to stop brain hacking, consumers will have to force changes at Facebook and Google” (McNamee 1). After reading his evidence and statistics, the audience is already feeling targeted and used by social media, and by ending his argument with this sentence, the audience really questions what they can do to stop this injustice, which is exactly what McNamee wants.
Through McNamee’s rhetorical appeals, strategies, and many sources, he crafts a strong argument that not only informs the reader of why these social media companies are hijacking people’s brains, but also compels them to do something about it. He uses strong comparison analogies and appeals like logos and pathos to persuade the reader to get involved and make a change about how these corrupt people behind Facebook and Google can manipulate us through or newsfeeds. McNamee accurately highlights how social media companies like Facebook and Google can influence the way we think, feel, and communicate.
Works Cited
Booth, Robert. “Facebook Reveals News Feed Experiment to Control Emotions.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 29 June 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds.
McNamee, Roger. “I Invested Early in Google and Facebook. Now They Terrify Me.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 10 Aug. 2017, www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/08/my-google-and-facebook-investments-made-fortune-but-now-they-menace/543755001/.
Deegan Roecker 