Use Rhetoric...invest in victory!

Everyone wants to help out Uncle Sam, right? This advertisement for Scotch tape from the 1940's uses Logos, Pathos, and Ethos to advertise their unique and new (at the time) brand of tape.

First and foremost, this ad obviously appeals to Logos, by showing readers the practical uses of their tape. For example, Scotch tape is being highlighted in this ad as a valuable tool in the war effort. The tape is used to hold together care packages for soldiers and hold together parts in factories producing wartime goods.

This ad also uses Ethos, giving it credibility, by telling of those same ways Scotch brand tape is helping Uncle Sam, and telling of the many places in which scotch brand tape can be found and used.

This ad is also more than an ad. It is a notice, telling faithful users of Scotch brand items that the reason their favorite products can not be found on shelves anymore is that they are helping out the country. An obvious appeal to Pathos, Scotch is spending their money to tell consumers of their efforts to aide in American Victory (notice the use of Victory, a positive description) and advising citizens to invest in war bonds, a completely non profit to Scotch action. Scotch is appealing to the hard ingrained emotions of patriotism within the hearts of Americans.

Another appeal to Pathos that this ad uses is the obvious display of an aesthetically pleasing woman in a bright red dress as an attention getter, drawing people in, particularly men, to read on in the advertisement and be delivered Scotch's intended message. Also notice that everyone in the picture is smiling and happy, showing readers that Scotch has a positive attitude and wants America to win the war.

Scotch's 1944 ad, or public announcement to be more accurate, uses at least a tidbit of every type of Rhetoric, to effectively draw readers attention, sell them on the product, and keep spirits up in America's time of trouble.

Are we becoming tweeting Twits?

How reliant have we as humans become on the use of technology for the everyday acts of communications? As shown in Mashable's article, "Twitter's official tweet button has arived,"referenced on CNN.com, twitter has come up with yet another way for users to tweet, keep track of other's tweets, forward tweets, and follow tweets, and just about any other action that uses the word tweet. Have we gone too far? Is the urge to be able to communicate with others 24/7 overtaking our lives?

Twitter's new button lets users keep track of how many "retweets" (reposts) they get on their own posts, and also lets other users "retweet" something that someone else has posted easily and with the push of a button. Am I the only one who is taken aback by this statement? Have we stooped to the point of being too lazy to type out our own responses? Going deeper, what ever happened to writing?

These questions may seem old fashioned and weird, but let me be the first to say, I love facebook. I am on that website more than the average person, and even the average person is on it more than necessary. I am just asking the questions to make us think. We as individuals and as a society must get out of our computer chairs and do something. If we let the lazy attitude that society has adopted start to overtake our lives, we will soon be sitting in the middle of a crumbling world.

Mashable's article illustrates just one of the many ways our society, already amazingly blessed with everything we have, is becoming more and more dependent on technology and more accustomed to instant gratification. This doesn't mean we should all throw our computers out on the sidewalk and only ever communicate through handwritten letters ever again. This does mean, however, that we need to take a step back and reevaluate where the line should be drawn between convenience, and laziness.