Rhetoric Online 3, 4, and 5

Chapter 3: Interactivity is something that can be very useful in website architecture, but it can also be very detrimental. When you post to someone's blog, it can easily be off topic of the actual original post. What happens if someone comments to your post? Then another person comments on theirs? It's like a game of telephone, right? Mix this in with politics, and you've got a serious controversy on your hands. However, they can be very useful in a call for change as well. Journalists often use online blogging as a way to get comments from readers on specific political issues that they can write on and circulate into the hands of legislatures to create change in the U.S. (well, we only hope we can, anyway).

Chapter 4: A hamster playing the video got more views than Obama's inauguration speech? Viral videos are about as dangerous as blog posts. They can either be extremely helpful, or they are just plain stupid. I'm sorry, but I really just don't get the reason why almost all videos that go viral are completely pointless (Harlem Shake?) Viral videos are a lot of the reason that people are made famous - and I guess that's somewhat important in some way (I'm sure we could have lived without Justin Bieber, though). There is a novelty behind viral videos on the web, in that everyone wants to be part of the history when people look back on them and say "Hey, remember that YouTube clip?" However, they are something that can easily be rhetorically criticized for not being very accurate most of the time and really having no use to them other than pure entertainment.

Chapter 5: Intertextuality - the relationship between texts. Great! Now that that's out of the way. More and more online commentators are moving towards the idea of using other texts as a way to critique media. For instance, this whole class has been based around the idea of using Aristotle's ideas of rhetoric to define "digital rhetorics" and the relationship between rhetorical appeal and the online world that our society today thrives on. I think that the quote about "the more we know, the more we see" really hold true here. The more educated we are on a certain aspect (such as rhetoric) the more we can really look into the credibility of something, such as a website.