Blog Assignment #3

What is a Rhetorical Situation?

by: Brandon Walwyn

   Exigence:  In Lloyd F. Bitzer's essay, he discusses the idea of what a rhetorical situation is. Bitzer states that most people commonly believe a rhetorical situation to be simply understanding context in a text. He states, " A work is rhetorical because it is a response to a situation of a certain kind." (pg 3) By this statement, I believe that Bitzer means that a work is considered rhetorical when it is used as an answer to a specific question or situation. I think that the issue at hand in this essay is determining what the exactly makes up a rhetorical situation. According to Penn State's English department, "the rhetorical situation can be understood as the circumstance under which the rhetor writes or speaks, including: the nature and disposition of the audience, the exigence that impels the writer to enter the conversation, the writer's goal or purpose, whatever else has already been said on the subject, and the general state of the world outside the more specific context of the issue at hand." This definition mirrored my own personal definition of  what what I believed to be a rhetorical situation. However, on page 5 of his essay, Bitzer states, "A rhetorical situation is... a natural context of persons, event objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance." I feel that Bitzer's definition is a bit too broad, especially when he defines a rhetorical situation as, "an exigence which strongly invites utterence." By this statement, Bitzer is basically saying that rhetorical discourse occur because of situations. However, why can't it be the other way around? Why can't it be that rhetoric defines a situation? Another writer, Richard E Vatz, writes an article, "The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation", in which he argues "that the meaning of the situation is derived from the rhetoric which is surround it.' - Rebecca Garcia, journalist

Audience: The groups of people that are invested in this exigence are educated readers and writers. I think that the majority of people have something at stake with this issue at hand. According to Bitzer, "a rhetorical audience consists only of those person who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change." The people who have the potential to be persuaded by this exigence are those who are able to understand what they are reading are influenced by it as well.

 

Blog Assignment #2

Amusing Ourselves to Death

     In chapter 1 of  Amusing Ourselves to Death, author Neil Postman explains the decline of humans gaining knowledge from print, and the rise of gaining information from images. Throughout the chapter, Postman gives several examples such as clocks, smoke signals, and graven images which proves that there is a rise in gaining information from images, and proves Marshal McLuhan's aphorism "medium is the message" (Postman 8) to be accurate. Although Postman makes these overt claims throughout the chapter, his concluding claim is significantly less obvious. In the final paragraph of chapter 1, Postman states, "We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as "it" is but only our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture" (15), implying that the things that we view and hear on television (media), "creates a fixed conception in our minds" (13) that alters human culture. I definitely agree with Postman's claim. He refers to President William Howard Taft unlikely becoming president in today's time because the "the shape of a man's body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing... but it is quite relevant on television" (7). I felt that this example was one of Postman's strongest points because in most recent history, there have not been any significantly overweight presidents, not because an overweight person cannot run for presidency, but because an overweight, unhealthy United States leader does not fulfill our fixed conceptions of what a president should look like. I also thought that Postman's example of how clocks have changed the metaphor for time and how we view time itself was a very strong point. He basically says that before clocks, time was measured by the sun and the earth's season, and now time is measured by a machine that uses minutes and seconds.

     A question that I though about when reading chapter 1 was, is this argument still accurate in today's time? Postman wrote this book in 1984 when technology was nothing compared to what we have now. One of Postman's main arguments was that television, or media, played a key role in the decline of gaining knowledge from print and the rise of gaining information from images, but in today's time, twice as much information can be accessed on the internet through online web browsers. Because of the Internets vast amounts of data that can be found with ease in a matter of seconds, personally do not think that Postman's argument is still accurate in our current age.

Blog Post #1

Protecting of Freedom

by: Brandon Walwyn

In Derek Bok's "Protecting Freedom of Expression on Campus", the main topic has to do with "freedom of Expression", specifically on college campuses. I feel that this topic is very controversial and should be discussed. In "Protecting Freedom of Expression on Campus", Bok Produces a strong, persuasive argument that "the power of censorship is so dangerous that it is extremely difficult to decide when a particular communication is offensive enough to warrant prohibition or to weigh the degree of offensiveness against the potential value of the communication."(pg. 70) I agree with Bok's argument. How can we really determine what is offensive enough to require prohibition?

In his essay, Bok objects to censorship that prevents people from being "offended", yet he does not object to campus police preventing people from being "harmed". I think that most people would disagree with Bok and say that censorship that prevents people from being both "harmed" and "offended" is necessary. But what is considered and offensive act or harmful act? The definition of the two could vary greatly depending on who you ask. However, I think the difference between acts that are harmful and those that are offensive is that harmful acts are always intended to cause injury, whether physical or mental, while offensive acts are not always intended to cause injury to a person. The definitions for harmful and offensives acts may seem similar, but the two can easily be distinguished. For example, if a person were to use "fighting words", as mention in Charles R. Lawrence's "On Racist Speech", they intend to "inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace", (pg. 65) and would therefore be committing a harmful act. An example of an offensive act could be a child saying that all people of a certain race look alike because they are not trying to cause harm by their statement. However, harmful and offensive acts do not only exist in the real world. Many young adults struggle in determining the difference between harmful and offensive acts, and this confusion is increased with the uses of social media apps that allows young users to post whatever they want, without thinking of the consequences. Thousands of teenagers have committed suicide because of harmful online acts. Because of this, I think that administrators should police and punish harmful and offensive behavior performed on social media.


http://www.thefire.org/misconceptions-about-the-fighting-words-exception/


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/11/although-69-of-teenagers-who-use-social-networking-websites-say-their-peers-are-mostly-kind-to-one-another-online-88-said.html