Humans have evolved for thousands of years. Humans have evolved to become intelligent, resourceful, and efficient. Humans have used these traits to create things like the industrial and the technological revolution. These revolutions changed the world. Specifically, the technological revolution puts millions of gigabytes of information in the hands of almost everyone. This provides millions of opportunities.

Opportunities to share new ideas, explore new topics, and most importantly communicate. But with these opportunities for widespread communication comes power. A power that I believe has been mishandled. Mishandled so much that I believe it has degraded the state of rhetoric in America.

In our technological era capitalism has flourished. With this growth came advertisements. Advertisements that are seen everywhere, every day. There are two types of advertisements. One that promotes ideas and one that promotes products.

First, I want to break down advertisements that promote ideas, for example, political advertisements. I remember being eight years old and seeing an advertisement belittling a political figure. I remember seeing an advertisement of one party ripping another party apart. From that moment on when I hear politics, I think of divisiveness and polarization. These advertisements put negative thoughts and ideas into my head. I never even had the chance to explore politics on my terms. These advertisements employed demagoguery. A tactic that instills fear in the viewer to control them. This is used in thousands of advertisements every year.

The problem with these advertisements is that they are blinding, not always true, and are not always diverse. The wealthy and the majority party who support the wealthy get all the control. Minority ideas can be silenced and forgotten. I believe this muddies the water of equal expression and communication, leading to a deterioration of rhetoric.

The next type of advertisement is product ads. My issue with these advertisements is they communicate deceptive realities.  Billboards, radios, magazines, phones, grocery stores. They are everywhere. And similarly, to the other advertisements they are largely controlled by large corporations. These large corporations feed off addiction. So, they market products geared toward this. For example, some advertisements make sugar seem healthy, vaping youthful, alcohol manly, and gambling cool. These are all forms of deception that get mass communicated to American citizens. These advertisements subconsciously change the perceptions of their viewers. I believe that this is a large contributor to the deterioration of the state of rhetoric in America.

These advertisements are smoke-in mirrors. As normal citizens, we can solve this problem by seeing through the smoke. When we see demagoguery, we must see past the fear. When we see deceptive products, we must see past the lies. By doing this, these advertisements become ineffective and nonexistent. We are the solution.