1. Preachers around campus. Should preachers be allowed to publicly force their opinions on people?

• Argument for freedom of speech
• Argue that it has caused some violent outbreaks
• Could get opinions of students, alumni, teachers, preachers themselves, police, etc
• Certainly prevalent issue around campus (Willard preacher, general preachers showing up every other week)

2. Accessibility of Food

Ethically, how late SHOULD food institutions be open around Penn State?
Are they taking advantage of inebriated students in order to gain massive profits? Is that ethically correct?

Global Climate Change:
Global Warming:
Is Global warming real/ is it a serious issue that needs more attention?
Al Gore
Assert values of actual data that shows exponentially increasing temperatures over the past few decades

Leads to… 

1. Deforestation

The world has a large dependency on trees in order to make lumber, paper, etc. At what point will enough be enough, and trees will be incredibly scarce?

World Wildlife Fund

The tree population has been steadily declining and is incredibly less now than only a few decades ago.

2. Polar Ice bodies melting

The melting of the polar ice bodies has a harmful effect on the planet based upon the changes in the currents of the ocean, which change the weather; also increasing the overall temperature of the Earth by reflecting less light from the sun.

Natural Resources Defense Council

3:  Alternative Fuel Search

Should we start looking for alternative fuels or should we focus on limiting fossil fuel consumption?

Institute for energy research

So far, nothing can compare to oil, but in time can it be substituted?

Link to excerpt from  “An Inconvenient Truth”

An Inconvenient Truth

-The advent of the internet. The advent of the internet changed the world, and allowed us to make quantum leaps with technology, communication, and human development.

-The introduction of the smartphone. The introduction of the smartphone into our world has both allowed for easier lives, but has also created problems in our world as well, such as changed social behaviors as well as an entire culture stemming from texting.

I can honestly say that I use the website Reddit every day. It’s such an amazing tool able to connect me with random facets of the world, with an international community based around entertaining one another. But what I didn’t see before and what I see now after the Rhetorical Analysis unit is the implications that Reddit may have on me, based on the different rhetorical aspects of the website. For instance, the incredible bias that Reddit offers. The Reddit community is filled with “inside jokes” and ideas that only pertain to certain subjects. You can post other ideas, but a good majority of the community will not see your idea because a small group deems it “not funny” or “stupid”. This is some of what I was drawing on in my paper, that Reddit is a website that constantly practices pathos, appealing to the masses, and how it’s easy to fall into the kind of silent “peer pressure” in order to gain a positive score on Reddit. It’s essentially gaining the social satisfaction of people enjoying your ideas in the form of a virtual discussion board, which is why the sub-culture and liberal bias exists on the website in the first place.

However though the website is biased, its merits outweigh its faults; it provides real-time updates of political, world, technological, or any kind of news that floats one’s particular boat. And its uses are incredible: providing sources with background info, the members of the Reddit community’s opinion; as well as the occasional Q&A from any celebrity, politician, or expert on a certain subject in the form of an “Ask Me Anything” (or AMA as the Reddit community dubs it).

I enjoyed the unit overall. It allowed me to really analyze the website that I use every day, recognizing the subjects and issues that I really should be paying attention to, using the rhetorical analysis provided to us in class to do just this. Though I learned about the different rhetorical tactics in high school, we never went into the depth with which we took it in class and within our work. Perhaps now I can use this on many other subjects as well.

Here’s a link to the website for those who wish to take a peek:

http://www.reddit.com/

I will begin by describing life before the internet, maybe include some humor about how those days were dark, and a boy had to call a girl’s household in order to actually talk to her and risk her parents picking up on the other line. Now, boys and girls can be as detached as possible, remaining aloof on social media. I’ll discuss research in the late 20th century, how it required one to go to a library and know of the Dewey Decimal System and use books to research different topics, when now one simply needs to go on Google, type something in, and within seconds one may have several different sources to choose from.

Then I will describe the introduction of the internet into average civilian life, as well as the incredible impact the personal computer, or the PC, had as well, for it went hand-in-hand with the internet.

Then I will go from a personal to a global perspective, describing the world before the internet and how certain systems that use the internet as their primary medium of function worked before the introduction of the internet. The main example I was going to use is the stock market, and I would provide examples of how it worked then and how it works now. I will mention the incredible amount of investments that people have made in order to increase the speed of the internet, and how that affects the market as well

I will then describe the increase in pace in people’s lives, how as the internet becomes faster, so do we. We operate on a faster pace, constantly checking our phones for incoming messages.

I will mention the future of the internet, how speed is everything. I will also try to tie this in with the recent introduction of Google Fiber, which is an internet provider just recently released by Google that is significantly faster than the internet that most significant internet companies provide now. I will mention the increase in the amount of new businesses established in the area where Google Fiber exists, and how maybe the increase in speed means an increase in productivity.

• Explosion of the internet, and the increased human reliance upon it over the past two decades.

What was life like before the explosion comparatively to now? How deep is our reliance upon the internet? Which technological advances were key in the advancement of the internet in our lives?

• The Resurgence of the Nerd: At what point did it become “cool” to be quirky?
• College education: When did college education become so vital in the acquisition of jobs, and can we expect to see this requirement stay?
• The photography boom: when did the disposable camera die and the mobile camera make it’s boom?
• The opinion on Terror: Life before 9/11, immediately after, and the recovery 12 years after the event

I was thinking at first about something like this: an aged Hershey ad about kisses, probably when they were first coming out. It would probably make people thing “Why are they called Kisses?” or maybe they would see the bliss (and possible romance) in the children’s eyes. Either way, the ad is meant to reach out to the emotional response in people, specifically happiness, and causes them to want to feel that themselves.

But then again, comparatively I could use this post. This is a humorous post, but why? Because it is taking a serious subject (global warming) and applying it to Reese’s. This is using a method called bathos, a style where something which should be basic and commonplace is taken completely serious and exalted. This kind of humor is often instituted today, and unlike the first advertisement, could appeal to the society of today.