analysis, interp, presentation:

draft

Analysis and interpretation of a Facebookprofile. Look at all the significant affordances and explain - interpret - how they are used to create ethos, and how that ethos works to create popularity. We're trying to get a handle on how people use Facebook to create/engage in popularity.

Start: How will your group define popularity for this exercise

• number of friends
• number, distribution, and freq of posts on Wall
• ...

• ethos seems to be at the center of things, but these might also go to pathos and logos
• or use Burke's identification to analyze. short intro in the text, and a separate reading.

This is tricky because you have to step outside the rhetorical exchange and hang your interp not on what you would do / what you like but on the evidence on the screen.

Aim in this exercise is to locate affordances that rhetor uses to create ethos, and to link the specifics of what the rhetor does to ethos.

How to proceed

Review some profiles until you find one that might prove interesting to focus on. One way to do this might be to skim until you get interested in the ethos (a response of Hey, this seems like an interesting guy. I want to know more... suggests that they ethos is persuading you of something). Then use the project to figure out why / what / how.

You will need to look at other profiles, of course, in part to put this one in context, in part to follow links to friends to see if there are any patterns, and in part to see what the person has posted elsewhere.

End

We want to come out of these group presentations with a set of rhetorical strategies we see at work: patterns, tendencies, similarities to and differences from f2f and other media (blogs, etc) in such things as

• use of images
• comments on wall
• Friends / network
• ...