This was a really good read to someone like me, who always questioned the way people lessen the social impact of advertisements. The points made by Laura Carroll about social media being a place that requires rhetorical analysis were very well stated. She placed a focused lens on how with a unaware mind the consistent selling, persuading and manipulating can easily control the things you see.When she acknowledge the facts of advertisement will fabricate an popular image that is desired by the public to show of their product will be the reason for you obtain whatever you want. It’s even crazier because most of the time of misguided information that has no true connection that is blurred by social aesthetics.

In my own life, there was a time where i was in a deep rabbit hole of watching shopping. Since in this day and age, our cookies are stored and studied to know what’s best to show you in the future. So there came a point where I kinda grew closer and closer to buying a specific want. It was a stainless steel gold with a blue face interior and i went back onto m instagram page and just on time, I had at least 4 sponsored pages make their way to my profile feed. It was not like pages I follow or even related photos that I like, but it was the fact that I searched it on googled that instagram knew what it was that I needed to see to get me to think it is convenience rather than manipulative advertisement. For me, it was the fact that i took a second to question why is it that now so many watches are at my fingertip even though I have been wanting it for so long now. Knowing that it was just the fact that the internet knew I placed a watch in a shopping cart on a website to now take the opportunity to make purchasing as easy as they can, to persuade me to buy buy.

So last semester I was given a assignment to choice a social issue and write about it. I was given the option on what would be the focus of my essay, which was a research paper. So, I choice the social issue of air pollution in China and focused on a particle in the air that was able to be breathed into from the air and cause lung damage. I first started off with the type of genre that I wanted to put my research paper in, but before I do that, I needed to know who my audience was. I choice my audience to be middle age work class citizens of China. The reason for this was because they were the ones that were greatly affected by it and had some voice in the government. This also caused me to think were they would most likely read about this and that gave me the idea of putting this on a newspaper in the form of an article with pictures. This way they can read it while going to work in the morning. I was able to create a good thought process using rhetorical analysis and this helped me to get started on a solid foundation. Before all this, I had to find articles that support my claim and viewpoint. So, I had to rhetorically analyses about 7 to 10 articles that support my claim and see if they matched in terms of what my audience was and if my audience would be able to understand what I was citing from my resources. I made a chart of who the audience was, where and when was it written, to see how reliable the data is. All these and more gave me a good idea of how to begin my research paper and how much background info is needed so that I can get my message to the audience in a clear and precise manner.

-Tanvir Youhana