Public Speech and Controversies (Wed. 8/26)(Blog 2-3)

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Wednesday's Class discussion: 

• Public Speech: What are the boundaries between public and private speech? Those boundaries can depend upon the rhetorical situation. What is the message? Who is the intended audience? What is the purpose? What is the context?
• Controversy:  What is a controversy? What controversies are you aware of that are taking place in public speech recently? For example: anchor babies, birthright citizenship, “#BlackLivesMatter, PlannedParenthood, the Ashley Madison scandal, Hilary Clinton's emails (note how controversies are often given a tag line or hash tag to refer to them)

Controversies are often argued publicly (why?). As an example, we looked at the online magazine The Atlantic, and as groups examined an article, including the comment threads. In discussion we noticed that these comments are often hostile, threatening, disrespectful, or dismissive.


Homework:

1. Examine the website for the National Institute for Civil Discourse. Familiarize yourself with what's there: especially click through the Programs and Research tabs. Then read this research study about the effect that comment sections have upon readers of articles.  

2. Blog Post 2: Write a blog post (remember to follow the conventions) with your reactions to the Atlantic article and comment sections that you read [Remember to include some sort of image and to cite its source.] Analyze the rhetorical situation of comments on that article. Who is writing the comments? Who is their intended audience? What is their purpose? What is the context of the controversy? Consider these questions as you write: 

• How would you describe the fears and anxieties being expressed in these comments? What are these commenters afraid of, specifically?
• How would you characterize the kinds of values and beliefs being expressed in the comments?
• Which commenters came across as the most reasonable? What made them seem reasonable?
• Which commenters came across as lacking credibility or trustworthiness? Why didn’t they seem trustworthy?
• Did the comments affect your assessment of the validity of the article's argument?

3. Blog Post 3: Begin the process of picking a controversy to write about for your controversy analysis.

• Go to Google and search “2015 controversies.” Scroll through the first 5-to-6 pages of results and click around to get a sense of what kinds of things people are arguing about. Decide on one of these controversies that interests you personally in some way. Maybe it is a controversy that is taking place in your field of study (as you will see, even ophthalmologists have controversies!) Maybe it is about a subject that is of particular interest to you. Whatever the reason, the controversy should be reflective of a personal interest of yours. Take this opportunity to branch out. Do not fall back on the general topics you may have debated in high school….abortion, legalization of marijuana, ….unless you are taking a discipline-specific approach.
• Choose an article you found that talks about the controversy. Take a screenshot of the article and insert the screenshot into a new blog post. Use the website URL you took a screenshot of as the citation for the image. Title the blog post after the controversy the article represents.
• Underneath the screenshot in your blog post, write 2-or-3 sentences that explain what the article is about, why it interests you and the name of the website where you found it. Turn the name of the website into a hyperlink that will bring readers to the article itself.