Reflections on Internet Intoverts: Final Paper for Rhetoric and Composition

This paper wound up being very different from the project I initially planned on putting together: much more about introverted people and the magical rhetoric of the internet, much less about anonymity and social activism. I hope that doesn't make it less effective than I planned on it to be. To connect to my topic, have some related media I found while researching. In the interest of making my final project as full and fleshed-out as I hoped it could be, I'll begin with a blog post on introversion, which, although key to my topic, occupies too much of my paper for how little accredited research exists.

Most of the testimonies and valuable opinions I found online came from people other that scientists, people who were busy living their lives as introverts  running blogs, going to work, sharing their stories of frustration with their extroverted friends. One of my favorites, and one I would highly recommend reading if you have the time, is Carl King's 10 Myths About Introverts Blog. I found his blog enormously helpful in my research, although I am still debating about including it in the bulk of my paper, which otherwise contains exclusively scientific journals.

Similarly What Is An Introvert? seemed out of place in my essay. It was enormously helpful in crafting this essay and followed the pattern I had noticed in my own research: most introvert material came directly from the source: introvert users communicating and reaching out to one another through the internet. As I'm typing this, I have actually decided to go back to my paper and add a section regarding all of that information because it is simply too intimately tied to my final paper topic to leave out. You're probably laughing a little bit by now, but I'm still holding on to that old rhetorical rule: 1st person is a cardinal sin in a research paper. Silly me, thinking I could experiment like that.

Still, in an effort to continue incorporating elements of the internet (into my...God forbid...paper about the internet), I found two pieces I wanted to share with you and with whoever from class might read my blog in the future months. The first is the video that inspired this project. It got me thinking about introverted people, clearly using the internet as a tool for communicating and rallying together, explaining to other, introverted people that there was nothing wrong with them for not fitting into an extrovert world. I thought there was something enourmously beautiful about that...so I dedicated a research paper to it. Yep, English majors are real romantics, folks.

The second image was easily the most popular image response of Tumblr to the query "introvert" which I thought said something, particularly because it came with comments like "So true" and "my life." Also, a mellow and edearing look at what life is like for an introvert.

This next photo has nothing to do with introverts or the internet. I just thought it was thematically relevant to the problems we've discussed in class.

In closing, I sincerely hope you enjoy my paper and blog presentation. They have been fun to work on and the challenge of tackling a topic of my own choosing and one that I am close to and interested in has made a world of difference. Rhetoric and Communications has changed the way I approach writing and speaking as modes of communication and not nearly in the negative manner I feared early on in the class.

Watch: Hank Green explains why you need to vote

I love the vlogbrothers. That is all.

Visual Rhetoric

I feel like a lot of people will go this route, but the site I went to for visual rhetoric help was the Purdue Owl.
I also went to stanford.edu's analysis of their own advertisement and the things that make it effective. Stanford's approach featured more specific details, geared towards their own advertisements and their effectiveness. Purdue offered a broad examination of the themes and ideas that combine to create our knowledge of rhetoric.

With these readings in mind, I went in search of the most basic visual rhetoric I could find. I was looking for something even simpler than a structured photo. In this theme, I give you:

Effective Visual Rhetoric

Did you ever want to buy something from Billy Mays?

Don't lie. This man could sell dirt to a hobo. 

The point, though, is that he represents visual rhetoric because, at the time of his death, he was a brand. He was sought after for infomercials because he made them his thing. It was what he did and his face lent a different, more serious register to a product. That is effective visual rhetoric.

Ineffective Visual Rhetoric

Do they even sell these monstrosities anymore? The slogan will haunt me to the grave and beyond, I'm, sure.

Moral (and in my opinion, good) Rhetoric

I was going to use Nike as my example of effective but not necessarily nice rhetoric, until I found this. I've never seen a sport equipment ad featuring an overweight person before. They are almost exclusively the "after" picture people.

Good on you, Nike. Good on you. 

Bad Visual Rhetoric

I hope all of you remember this image from a few years back, but the reason it's on my blog now is because it is an excellent example of bad rhetoric. These advertisers are attempting to connect one extremely negative thing (gang rape) with one hopefully positive thing (don't you want to ooze sex like the people in this picture? Better shop Dolce and Gabbana). I actually believe this was a perfume ad, although why a woman would want a perfume that makes men jump her on rooftops is a little bit beyond me.

Really, Inexcusably Bad Visual Rhetoric

 Font is an important aspect of visual rhetoric and this ad uses a terrible one. Comic Sans should be outlawed for anyone over the age of 13 and heavily discouraged for anyone under it. Here, it would be particularly inappropriate, but it's right up there with Papyrus on my design font shit list.

Rhetorical Sitations

As in, situation governed by rhetoric, not situations that are, in and of themselves, well, you get the idea...

I feel like this was almost a set-up for me, because I spent most of my high school career in carefully structured rhetorical situations. I was a speech kid (not a debater. never a debater), so rhetoric was my thing. I didn't even have a name for it at the time, but everything in those events, from my interactions with my competitors and judges to my carefully paced and plotted speech was a rhetorical gesture.

My signature event was called Original Oratory. In OO, your relative success is entirely dependent on your ability to create a lasting, completely one-sided discourse with your audience (in this case, your judge, because you competitors have heard your speech a dozen times by mid-season and could probably recite it back to you, verbatim). You must convince the judge that, not only do you know everything there is to know about your chosen topic (Sexualization in media, rain-forest destruction, the family units of geese) your topic is of immediate and vital importance to the survival of culture as we know it (to this day I think that goose-family-unit-girl was secretly the god of orators. no other explanation for her success exists).

Your job, in other words, is to create a lasting and meaningful discourse with your judge about the worth and reliability of your information, delivered as emotionally rich as possible so that your budding professional relationship can outlast and defeat the relationship being built by your seven competitors in what is essentially a complex emotional/logical deathmatch. If you win, your judge remembers your topic and/or hair color long enough to place you first. If you lose, you dwindle slowly down the line of placings until you get to last...

Bitzer says that rhetoric is situational. OO is purely situational  because if you take away the context of the situation, you become some yahoo with a soapbox issue that no one wants to listen to. Maybe you have a niche group of activists. Probably not. In your situation, you can construct this facade of reliability by making yourself seem more knowledgeable and confident than you are or ever have been. You construct this fake persona to create your rhetorical situation to convince your judge that you are, in fact, the most talented rhetor in the room, in the competition, perhaps on the planet.

This is probably more than you ever wanted to know about high school speech and debate, but these articles spoke to the seventeen year old in me who learned to play the system before she knew what rhetoric was.

Abstract

My paper will examine the methods by which Clint Eastwood and Bill Clinton spoke to their respective political conferences so differently, but with almost unanimous success. It will examine the audiences to whom they were speaking, the atmospheres (political and social) in which they spoke and the topics addressed in their presentation. I will look closely at their individual speeches, the content and delivery of those speeches and what rhetorical strategies made these two very different strategies equally effective in their respective locations. The “multimedia” presentation will include embedded videos of both speeches, my real-time reactions to those speeches and a complete, follow-up analysis for both speeches based on the merits of their rhetoric.

The Essay Itself

Clinton and Eastwood: Metaphor, Appropriateness and Why the Audience Is God

Clinton Liveblog

Former President Bill Clinton, Democratic National Convention 2012

“Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”

:47 "We are here to nominate a President and I’ve got one in mind". So do I, Mr. Clinton. So do I.

1:20 The road to recovery is, indeed, long.

2:17 Michelle Obama for President! Oh, wait, that’s not what we’re doing? Ooops. I came to the wrong party.

4:00 “The Republican narrative says we’re all completely self-made. … but, it ain’t so.”

4:35 Bill Clinton believes in the buddy system.

5:33 – ongoing Lots and lots of facts. Emphasis on the morally right and economically sound not being mutually exclusive. Nice to know I can be a nice person without becoming a panhandler.

7:37 we’re getting a little bi-partisan now. President Bush (both of them) and some of the things they did right and bi-partisan focus on solving problems. “what works in the real world is co-operation.”

9:32 “a broken clock is right twice a day” I hope I’m right more than twice a day. I mean, compromise is cool, but every now and then it might be nice to be completely correct.

12:00 Highlighting Obama’s commitment to bi-partisan communication as well as collaboration within different factions of his own party.

14:00 Yeah, that work with congressional Republican didn’t work out so well, did it?

17:00 We’re well out of any bi-partisanisms now.

18:00 The terrible economy is clearly still a talking point for both parties.

19:00 Yes. We call them the Republican Party.

19:30 We probably don’t miss your Presidency quite as much as you do, Mr. Clinton, but You miss it an awful lot.

23:00 “We’re all in this together” wouldn’t make a bad slogan, would it Mr. President. Maybe a little more moving that Forward. Just a thought.

26:00 Train people for jobs available, right now, in their communities? Heresy!

Also, I like the sound of student loan registration. It would be nice to not beggar myself to get a degree.

29:00 Also, healthcare. Healthcare is good.

32:28 A little off topic, but I spent a summer as an H.R. intern at the hospital in Great Falls and they HATE Obama’s insurance plans and the Affordable Health Care Act for the changes it will inspire in healthcare. We didn’t talk about politics much.

37:00 I feel you pain, Bill Clinton. I so often come up against the problem of people cheering too loudly for me to get a word in edgewise.

38:00 Romney vs. The Fact Checkers: The Epic Battle Continues

43:00 More about Mitt Romney's incredible, automatically-reducing tax plan to balance the budget. If nothing else, Romney might go down in history as the most successful man in the world to never learn basic addition and subtraction.