Being given the prompt to “comment on any civic issue” is a pretty vague topic to base a blog post on, and I had a hard time picking a topic straight off of the top of my head. There are so many pressing civic issues in the current media, but one that is dominating the media is the Parkland school shooting. The actual shooting occurred over a month ago on Valentine’s Day, when a former student walked into Marjory Douglas high school with an AR-15 and killed 17 people. It was immediately apparent that the Parkland shooting was going to be different than some of its predecessors.

There have been numerous public shootings in America within the past ten years, Sandyhook in Newtown, the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, the Harvest Music Festival in Vegas are just a few. The thing that makes Parkland stand out from the others that I have mentioned above is the response from the surviving Parkland high school students. Their ability to unite and actually form a plan of action in a time of unbelievable tragedy is unprecedented. Their solidarity and commitment to bringing about a change in policy was enough to inspire other students to take action as well. The Parkland shooting prompted a call to action louder and more resounding than I can personally remember, especially with the widespread .

It seems as though the time for simply grieving over gun violence tragedies has passed, as there has been a stronger push for gun reform in the age-old controversy of gun control. While the Parkland students have not let up on their social media campaign for better policies, it is interesting to watch the reactions of the American public. Despite the facts that these teenagers just survived a public shooting, they are still being me with a loads of criticism and hate on the very social media platforms that they are campaigning on.

What the Parkland shooting has really done is expose the ingrained beliefs of many Americans that guns are a necessity for America to be considered a free country. Similar to how the 2016 presidential elections shed a new light on the divisions within America, many strong pro-gun enthusiasts are louder today.  It is amusing and disheartening to read through comments on Facebook of people arguing that if any restrictions on access to guns are put into place it will undoubted snowball until guns are abolished completely. This isn’t a logical argument, but yet it somehow proves to be persuasive to many gun owners.

It will be interesting to watch this issue unfold over the next couple of months, and watch the showdown of teenagers vs. adults that don’t want to listen to what they have to say. For our countries’ sake, and for the sake of the next school targeted by a gunman, I hope that someone starts to listen.

 

One time that I was influenced by someone’s use of pathos rather than his or her logos or ethos was in fifth grade. It was a long time ago, but I clearly remember the day that the yo-yo man came to visit our school. The whole school got to attend a special assembly where this full-grown man did yo-yo tricks for about 30 minutes, and then tried to get all of the students to buy his yo-yos. Looking back now it seems weird that our school even allowed this man to come, and even weirder that this was what this guy actually did for a living. Regardless, ten year old me was captivated, and all of the elementary school kids were tripping over themselves to try to convince their parents to buy them a custom yo-yo.

The yo-yo man didn’t employ any logos in his sales methods; because in reality there was actually no practical sense in buying a $30 trick yo-yo. I mean I couldn’t even manage to get the old wooden yo-yo at my Grandpa’s house to come back to my hand at the time. The only ethos this man employed was that he could actually do some yo-yo tricks, but other than that he had no credibility whatsoever. What he did use was some very convincing persuasion.

Before this random man stepped up onto the gymnasium stage yo-yos were not cool, but the minute the show was over the only thing anyone in my classes wanted to talk about was yo-yo tricks. He was enchanting in his passionate speech about yo-yos. As you can easily imagine he was eccentric and loud in his delivery. We never stopped watching and listening to him, simply because he didn’t even give us that option. He wasn’t successful because of what he was selling (duh. he was selling f’ing yo-yos), but because of his infectious passion for his product that he was able to share with the audience. I believe that the key to pathos in persuasion is passion. Nobody who is passionate about something ever talks in a boring, monotone voice. If I could employ half of the yo-yo man’s enthusiasm in my persuasive arguments then I’m sure that I could sway more people into believing my side.

In reference to our upcoming podcast recording, I do believe that pitch is important. The This I Believe podcast isn’t necessarily a persuasive essay, but it is a concrete stand on individual beliefs, and it will be much more powerful if it is recorded with a voice of confidence. If the narrator is confident when they state their belief, it will be much easier for the audience to buy into that belief. For whatever reason the mysterious yo-yo man chose to believe in yo-yos, and his passion for them managed to get my parents to buy me a yo-yo that I never learned how to use and is probably still sitting in my desk drawer at home.

For my paradigm shift I chose to focus on the prevalence of ice hockey in North Carolina after the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup in 2006.

My whole family is passionate about ice hockey, both my brother and I play, but it turns out that we are an anomaly in North Carolina. We were an even bigger anomaly before June of 2006, when the local National Hockey League team the Carolina Hurricanes won the championship. In my upcoming paper, I am planning on looking at the changes that happened in the local community concerning ice hockey after the big win.

I decided to keep the scope of my paradigm shift very localized, to further emphasize how exactly winning the Stanley Cup changed people’s attitudes. It is also a topic that I am very familiar with since I lived through, and benefitted from the shift that occurred.

In 1997, the Hartford Whalers organization packed up and moved down to Raleigh, North Carolina. They moved to a region that had maybe four or five ice rinks in the whole entire state, and where a large part of the population had never even seen a hockey game. In less than 10 years, they became a championship team, winning one of the most elusive trophies in all of sports (for example, Alex Ovechkin and the Capitals haven’t won one yet).

Some of the research that I am looking forward to introducing into the paper is numbers on the attendance of hurricanes games throughout their time in North Carolina and the statistics of what sports kids were signing up for both before 2006 and after 2006.

The biggest impact that 2006 had on North Carolina was the amount of kids that were exposed to hockey, and wanted to start playing. In the same way that there are spikes in the amount of kids trying new sports like gymnastics or skiing after the olympics, ice hockey suddenly went through a big boom phase, in large part due to the Carolina Hurricanes.

From the brief research that I have already done, this in a clear phenomenon that has actually been documented in regards to ice hockey. NHL teams that have won championships have seen a clear boost in local youth signed up for ice hockey programs across the state. It is also documented that there is a higher percentage increase in states where hockey isn’t as dominant of a sport, especially southern markets. This is presumably because in areas where a lot of kids already play hockey, less new people will try the sport following a championship because they already play.

Some challenges that this topic might present is finding clear data that is reliable and supported. Since I know a lot about the issue, I might have the tendency to just use the information that I know to be true instead of using facts and data to support the claims of the paradigm shift.

 

This weeks RCL post is in response to Jean M Twenge’s article titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation”. In case anyone not from English 137 is reading this post here is the link to the article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

Now I’m sure that I’m not alone in the fact that I feel like I have read several articles very similar to the one that we were assigned this week. People love to write articles that condemn the workings of the newest generation and then go into lengthy detail about how everything is ruined now. The title of this article actually implies that our generation has already been destroyed, as though there in no hope of salvaging any of it to make a competent generation or whatever. I’m tired of all of these people that don’t even belong to the iGen predicting the impending demise of the human population.

Putting aside these personal frustrations, I did think that this particular article by Twenge was well presented and thoroughly researched. Jean Twenge has obvious knowledge on the subject, and I am persuaded by ethos to trust the message that she is giving. She garners credibility by talking in detail about what exactly her job entails as a person who examines trends in generations The parts about Athena, the young girl, are especially significant in building credibility because it provides a real life iGen perspective in the article.

It is easy to connect the message of the article to individual, personal experiences everyone has because of the prevalence of smartphones and social media in our society. In technical terms, the article makes good use of Kairos to become a persuasive message that I am actually interested in. Despite my exasperation with the doomsday prophecies for our generation, the message that Twenge is sending is one that directly concerns me, and it is based on an idea that has already gathered steam for many years. For those reasons and some others it has made me a captive audience member.

Since the release of the first smartphone and the enormous surge of social media everybody has been wondering what the implications will be. Most people in older generations inherently distrust things that are new and complicate the way things have always been, so it seems like there has always been negative press about the technology wave of the 21st century. However, this article stands apart from all of that chatter because it provides data from the past ten years that decisively concludes that social media and smartphone technology is making iGens unhappy.

Now, I am never one to be completely swayed by any persuasive argument, and it the same case regarding this article. I do find myself in agreement with the author that ultimately social media has direct correlation to unhappiness in iGens, but I think that many other factors play a role. Comparing generations to each other is not the most accurate way to evaluate the successfulness of a generation because of these other factors. We live in an age where information can be shared quicker and to a larger audience than any generation before us, and this means that we can share how we feel with others. We can know what others are feeling in a more intimate sense and and a larger scale because there are platforms for exactly this purpose.

Ideas can trend among demographics in ways that they never could before, and this has lead to the issue of “hot-button topics” These are issues that are sensitive and usually garner response in some way. Concussions are a hot-button issue right now because of the level of attention being paid to them. In any other generation if a kid got a headache after playing a game there would be little attention paid to it, whereas now there are multiple protocols, warnings, and information about concussions everywhere. And because of this there has been an enormous spike in reported concussions, a majority of them mild ones that would never have been diagnosed in an older generation.

I believe that in a similar way to concussions, depression (and mental health in general) has become a hot-button issue. Twenge talks a lot about the significant increase in depression rates and suicide rates. Personally, I think that these number have jumped so high not just because of social media and smartphones, and not just because of the more anti-social behavior of iGen, but because more attention is being paid to mental health in our current society compared to other generations. If you tell someone that you feel unhappy nowadays it is an easier and less humiliating process to get professional help than it was 5o years ago. Also, as more information is circulated about mental health issues, more people are exposed to what exactly depression entails, and are more likely to understand that they might actually be dealing with it.

I got a little off topic, but in conclusion the article did a very good job establishing ethos to make the core message more persuasive. It was also written at a time when this issue is relevant, which also helps its persuasion.

When I was told to pick an advertisement that made me exclaim “what were they thinking creating this ad?!?” I immediately thought of Kendall Jenner’s disastrous Pepsi ad. I’m sure you have seen it because of the big scandal it caused, but if you haven’t here is the commercial:

https://youtu.be/dA5Yq1DLSmQ

 

There was immediate outrage after this ad hit the market, and it was taken off the air within the SAME DAY! However, it was not quick enough as it seemed like everyone was talking about it for quite some time, myself included.

The fundamental massage of the ad is fairly straightforward, if everyone drank Pepsi we would all be happy and there would be no conflict between anyone. Although this is a stupid proposition it is not that far away from messages that a lot of ads in the media send. “Buy this and your life will be so much better!” is constantly being shoved down our collective throats by a lot of different kinds of products, but Pepsi crossed a certain line by running this ad.

The first major flaw that Pepsi made while making this ad was trivializing all of the social tension that is present in America today. There are many different conflicts going on right now including the Black Lives Matter movement, gay rights, the new wave of feminist movements, and many others. Pepsi doesn’t specifically divulge which movement it was depicting, but it was obviously clear that they were recreating scenes similar to the ones that these real-life movements have had.

A specific example is the moment at the end of the video where Kendall Jenner walks up to the “police” and stands there face to face. This scene directly echoes the scene that has become iconic of the young black women standing alone in front of lines of police officers in full riot gear. Although Pepsi has made these two images look similar to each other, they are inherently different and do not stand for the same thing.

It is not wrong for corporations to draw attention to current events or other social issues, but it is wrong to exploit and trivialize them. If Pepsi’s underlying message had been something other than “Hey, sharing a Pepsi will solve this major conflict happening in society right now”, then maybe this ad would have been more successful. Instead Pepsi focused on it’s own brand promotion, while using a scene that instigates deep emotions and opinions in people without giving that scene meaning. It completely downplayed the serious violence and unrest that is a part of these movements and instead portrayed it as a giant party where everyone wants Pepsi as a refreshment.

The second major mistake that Pepsi made with this advertisement was using Kendall Jenner as the celebrity endorsement here. Even watching the video was awkward where it would go from super serious, politically charged shots of the individuals and the rally, then to shots of Kendall’s modeling photoshoot. The advertisement tries to make it obvious that Kendall is distressed by the commotion in the street and chooses to leave her comfortable position to walk among these regular people. However, this message misses the point because 1.) It’s Kendall Jenner who is a part of the Kardashian crowd who are famous purely because of reality tv 2.) This ad is clearly linked to the Black Lives Matter movement and Kendall has no explicit connection to this movement (unlike Béyonce)

Relating all this back to our course, the three appeals come big into play here. Pepsi fails in ethos, because it fails to give credibility to the idea that drinking Pepsi will solve social conflicts. It falters in logos because again, the logic behind Pepsi being the savior for all major problems in the world completely defies logic (and makes me think “HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY COME UP WITH THIS AD”). Finally, Pepsi tried to appeal to people’s emotions by using something that people are passionate about to drive home their brand. This is not altogether a terrible idea, but it was very very poorly executed, and became a spoof of what those emotions should have been.