Rhetoric and Civic Life | Kevin Gardner

With the development of the internet, access to information as exponentially increased. However, this also means an increase to access to violence. This one line from a popular television show on Adult Swim called Rick and Morty, "I see sh*t like that for breakfast," when referring to videos of beheadings illustrates this shift very well. The increase in access to violence in media has led to the desensitization of youth, which causes an increase in violent behavior. Morty illustrates someone from before this shift, the desensitization to violence, has occurred, while Rick can be seen as someone from today's society. Throughout the show, Rick displays violence constantly with no hesitation or guilt. This seemingly shows what our society is moving toward with the current access and constant bombardment of violence is our society. The shift I will be discussing is the desensitization to violence in America's youth and the impact it has. It has been shown th...

One example of a paradigm shift is the change to less and less words when communicating. As communication has become easier and the number of people that can be communicated with the number of words people use to communicate have decreased. First, incomplete sentences began becoming common and messages could be conveyed without filler words such as 'the' or 'a' and many more. Then entire phrases began to shorten to a bunch of letters such as ily or hmu. Then, as you can observe now, our society has moved back to hieroglyphics aka emojis. Messages can now be conveyed in a couple of emojis. The most likely reason for this occurring is that as communication becomes easier and quicker, so does our language. Our communications must also speed up to keep up with our technology. Thus, as communications gets faster, our sentences evolve, or devolve depending on how you look at it, into simple pictures that takes barely any time at all to send and understand. Another example...

What separates an average talk from a good and great one is the composure and preparedness of the speaker. With both of these attributes a speaker can convey his or her message in an engaging manner and be able to adapt to any audience. A speaker who is so unprepared that he or she clings to dear life onto his or her written speech might not be able to adapt to an audience's question or any other unexpected interference. The ability to adapt to an audience is crucial for a speech to be effective at conveying its message. A good example to illustrate how bad a speech can be if it misses its target audience is Sheldon Cooper's speech on the Big Bang Theory season three episode 18. The audience members are either confused, disgusted, or offended. This is of course an extreme and silly example, but it still captures the essence of a speech that misses its target audience and thus shows the important of being able to adapt to your audience. Another way a speech can be a good ...