Fear and the Environment

The blog I have chosen is called Enviroblog and can be found at http://www.enviroblog.org. In a small description about itself, the blog describes its aims as an attempt to encourage a "smart" discussion about the intersection between the environment and public health. More specifically, it mostly discusses possible toxins in our food, clothes, etc. Because it does focus so heavily on toxins, rather than on health in general, however, the blog promotes an atmosphere of fear and danger in which so many of the objects around us may be hazardous. I feel that this makes it an appropriate blog for discussion in our class.

(Now, for the respondents--here are the prompts you can choose to comment on after you visit the blog and read some entries, etc.)

1. Analyze the interface of the featured blog. Focusing on visual elements on the home page, make an argument in your comment on the class blog about what the interface implicitly suggests about the blog's central theme(s), values, or identity (see Writing Analytically on how to make the implicit explicit). Make an inference that could be a topic for class discussion and debate.

2. Look for an argument or disagreement occurring in the comments on a particular post on the featured blog. In your comment on the class blog, analyze the key issues and points of contention in the comments. Based on your observations, develop a theory about what blog’s readers value as a community. Use the following questions to get you started:

• What issues or ideas do people seem to agree upon despite the larger disagreement?

• Do people on the blog think some comments are rude or inappropriate, and if so why do you think this is?

• What rhetorical strategies do commenters use to construct their arguments?

• How do commenters reference other comments, and what does that suggest about the nature of interaction within the community?

3. Look for an argument or disagreement occurring in the comments on a particular post on the featured blog. Respond to that argument with a comment of your own on the featured blog. Explain your comment on our class blog and ask our class how they might respond. If you receive a response to your comment on the blog we're analyzing, post an update about how readers responded to your presence or ideas.

4. Look through several posts for any claims about a writer's or several writers' ethos on the featured blog. In your comment, develop an analytical theory about how ethos is working on the blog. Here are some questions to get you started:

• How do writer(s) invoke their education, status, experiences, beliefs, or identity? Do these methods ever backfire (do readers ever respond negatively to a writer's identity, education, etc.?)

• If there are multiple writers contributing to the blog, do you see any similarities or differences in appeals to ethos across posts? What assumptions can you make about the community based on what appeals to ethos bloggers seem to rely upon most? (For example, is education seen as particularly important? Political beliefs? Gender? Anything else?)

5. Look through several posts for any direct references or appeals to the audience on the featured blog (you might look for the use of the pronoun "you"/"we" or for more subtle techniques, such as posing a question to the audience or inviting the audience to respond). Write a comment on our class blog that states your theory about what those appeals to the audience suggest about who the writer believes the audience is, what they believe the audience values, or what the relationship between the writer/audience seems to be (for example, does the writer ask for the audience's opinion or position herself as an authority, or something else entirely?).

6. Look for one instance or several instances in which an author of a post makes a claim or introduces a new idea on the featured blog. In your comment on the class blog, write an interesting analysis of the rhetorical techniques the author uses to make this argument. You might consider the following questions:

• Are any of the ideas particularly controversial, and if so, how does the author attempt to persuade the audience or account for the controversy in advance?

• Look for whether readers generally agree or disagree. Formulate a theory about what the trends you notice suggest about the nature of the community, their values, the purpose of the blog, etc.

• Does the author cite any evidence or an authority on the subject, and if so, who or what is considered persuasive? Do the readers agree? What kind of knowledge does the community seem to value or disagree upon?

• Does the author introduce a new idea by referencing or attempting to improve upon someone else's idea? What might we learn as writer's about how arguments can be built off of or proceed from other arguments? (What's effective and what's not effective?)

7. Read through several posts and comments and formulate a claim about whether or not you think the featured blog actually does anything. In other words, does the blog seem to have any effect on people's knowledge, values, ideas, etc? Provide evidence for your claim in your comment on the class blog.

So What Do I Do?

So, let's review the steps to completing this Blog Project. You have already been divided into six groups, and those six groups have already been assigned a day in the syllabus in which they have to find a blog pertinent to the course theme and post it to our common blog for discussion.

But what kind of blog are you supposed to look for?

There aren't a lot of blogs entitled FEAR. Instead, I want you to look for blogs on hot-button issues and examine how the bloggers approach these subjects. Do they promote a lot of posts and stories that are based on fear and anxiety? Or perhaps a blog you've found has one story or entry that you think fits perfectly within our course theme. In that case, the whole blog might not have to be focused around our theme, just the one story. Or perhaps you've found a really cool blog that analyzes horror films, and you think this might be useful information for the class. Whatever you choose--and choose wisely--provide the title for the blog, the URL, and a brief description. Also provide a brief line at the beginning or end of the post that explains why you chose this particular blog and that explains why it fits with our theme. This will help guide a fruitful discussion.

Anyone who is not a facilitator (someone picking a blog for that week) is responsible for responding to the blog. The list of prompts you can choose to answer are in a Word file on Carmen. However, I will also post them below the sample blog entry that will follow these instructions. If, at any point, conversation begins to lag, the facilitators are responsible for interjecting and saving the discussion. Every person on the class must have contributed in some way to the common blog each week--whether as a facilitator or respondent.

Now, see below to begin our project. I am the facilitator and you are all respondents for this first go-round.

Welcome to Rhetoric, My Friends

So, by this point, you know about the class theme. You know that we will be studying the power and persuasive appeal of fear in all types of media in the upcoming quarter. These media may include Youtube videos, clips of horror films, radio broadcasts, newspapers, TV news, TV shows, interviews, magazine articles, journal articles, and websites. As you study this wide variety of texts, you will hopefully begin to notice the difference between writing and communication in the public sphere vs. the academic sphere.

After all, our Commonplace project will ask you to produce a piece of public writing stemming from the academic work you will do in this class. This class blog project is the perfect place to start practicing your analysis and evaluation of public writing. Because, despite the fact that we label public writing as laid-back, carefree, relatively unhampered by convention, etc., it actually is often constructed very deliberately as well.

Writers use ethos, pathos, and logos (terms we will talk about later if you don't know what they mean yet) to persuade and encourage an audience to read further. They choose pictures and visuals, consciously or unconsciously, that back up the claims they make. The very words they choose can indicate mindset, view, or bias. So use this class blog as a useful forum to strengthen your skills of writing and analysis.

And have fun.