UTEP Undergraduate
Angel Kaine Odriozola
Genre Analysis
Online Privacy
People who use Internet Explorer are completely vulnerable to hackers. Online privacy is an issue that has been developing over the past decade. Presented here is a genre analysis with the first being a video source by Mark Cuban titled “Stop Making These Mistakes” and the second genre being a scholarly article by Daniel Solove called “The End of Privacy?”. Online privacy has different aspects. People argue as to whether we should even have any privacy when using the internet. Others might say that it is for the people’s own protection. The truth is that we are always being monitored when we surf the internet whether it be by the police department, by the government, or by simple private companies who try to collect our personal information, not to mention the countless hackers who are out there. That is just one of the many different aspects to our online privacy. Social media, being a component of online privacy also has its consequences and it is mainly what Mark Cuban talks about in his video. Technology is growing exponentially, extremely fast. Cyber-bullying has also been an ongoing issue in today’s use of the internet, it happens through social media, video sharing websites, and blogs. Daniel Solove presents an idea of changing the law in his scholarly article and provides us with more in depth explanations which is why it is the more effective genre. This is a matter that should be of significant importance to everyone because it can potentially affect anybody who uses the internet.
Video Source: Audience & Purpose
The video source, “Stop Making These Mistakes” by Mark Cuban may differ in purposes, and audience, but the main purpose would be to inform and persuade. Cuban is informing his audience that we are about to undergo a huge change in technology, or digital media as her refers to it. When Cuban states, “People are starting to recognize that our privacy is disintegrating (Cuban, 2014)”, that gives the audience an idea that there is a fair amount of people who know about this growing issue and so he tries to inform the audience more about what is going on particularly when using social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr etc. He informs his audience that there are many applications out there who are collecting every bit of our personal online information from websites such as social medias and are putting the information into databases which then create profiles about every single person, and Cuban believes this without being skeptical.
Likewise, the audience differs because his main audience would be students at universities as well as high school teachers who have the ability to distribute such information to their students who do not have access to the video which is not likely to happen since it has been all over the internet and can be found through YouTube, a very famous video sharing website. Furthermore, this video source has an audience that consists of not only the companies who track our every online move, but to companies who actually care to keep their client’s information at top flight security. He wants to expose those companies, to try to scare them because a large amount of the world’s population is soon going to know about what is going on. The audience is imaginably confused by taking in the information Cuban talks about. It is very difficult to understand the reasons behind the wrongs of these companies, and the reasons behind their forming of these databases containing profiles of people. There is also some specialized language when Cuban is speaking and some of those phrases include “Digital Media,” “Online Social Media Analysis,” “Tweet,” “Retweet”. The audience can understand Cuban’s video right after viewing it for the first time. He speaks in a formal language in order to have his audience understand that he is trying to inform them, therefore usage of formal language is appropriate.
Video Source: Rhetorical Appeals
There are three kinds of rhetorical appeals that are used by someone who is trying to prove something to you. Those are Ethos, Pathos and Logos. Logos is the appeal to logic, or reasoning, given through examples to validate a point. Ethos is a sense of credibility; an author with a pretty good background and character may be way more credible because of their personal experiences and their expertise. Lastly, Pathos is the capability of the author to instill an emotion into his audience while they are reading.
Cuban uses a great deal of logos throughout his video. The internet really is a part of the people’s everyday lives. People use it to communicate, to search for facts, or simply for entertainment. Every single day, people are hooked to the internet and their social media profiles that they do not realize the mistakes they are making, which is letting their posts, tweets, statuses etc. live forever (Cuban, 2014). From this example Cuban draws out that there are applications out there who collect every bit of our personal information which is then used by online companies. You go into some sort of website, let’s say, EBAY. You buy some jeans, then you buy a couple of shirts. Companies collect that information to then organize it and send you automatic e-mails with promotions of the type of clothing you bought. It is an invasion of our privacy. This data Cuban presents supports his argument that these profiles people are creating about themselves is going to be used in every walk of life and not just by these online companies.
Cuban is an expert in the field of computers as well as computer networking, apart from being a billionaire and a graduate from Indiana University. His experiences in the field of computer networking establishes a sense of authority. When Cuban states, “You’re going to go look for a job and they are going to run an online analysis of you and use that as a psychological profile (Cuban, 2014)”, he says that statement with a sense of authority because he knows from his expertise in the field that that is without question, going to happen. This ties in with companies collecting our information and creating the online profiles of everybody. Cuban said, “Hey you might not get that job because of that beer can you were holding up (Cuban, 2014).” While speaking about the concept of having online profiles, Cuban speaks as if trying to instill fear into his audience by saying that peoples’ pictures that have already been posted online will not land them a job in the near future. After talking about that he then creates a sense of another emotion, joy. He does this by explaining what the uses are for his two new applications, Cyberdust & Xpire, that he has come up with to provide us with a taste of what it feels like to have some sort of privacy. Cyberdust is an application that automatically deletes the message you have sent to a person thirty seconds after they open it and it is then stored nowhere in any sort of database, it cannot be found (Cuban, 2014).
Video Source: Structure & Delivery
In the video source by Mark Cuban, the information he said was well organized. The general idea Cuban had for making a video to distribute such information, is because he believed it would be more effective in getting the attention of the audience if he talked in a tone that was slightly alarming. He provided his audience with quick information in those four and half minutes that he spends talking about online privacy. Since it is a subject that tends to not receive much attention, the video has a limitation of time, it cannot be too long or else the audience will get bored watching the video so he has to keep the video under five minutes. All in all, this genre was the least effective of the two because he talks mostly about social media websites which is merely a component when discussing the issue of online privacy.
Scholarly Article: Audience & Purpose
The article, “The End of Privacy?” may have several purposes, but its main purpose it to inform and persuade its readers, that it is wrong for companies to be collecting personal information from everyone that they come across online, it is potentially a violation of human rights. On top of that, Daniel Solove tries to persuade his audience that it is still possible to come up with a solution to this issue. When Solove said, “The government also compromises privacy by assembling vast databases that can be searched for suspicious patterns of behavior (Solove, 2008)”, he provided his audience with new information that they probably did not know. The audience for this genre would be parents, teachers, and other educated people concerned with this topic because, well everyone is affected it whether they know it or not. Solove says that the data being exposed to the public (anyone) is ever-growing as more records become electronic (Solove, 2008). Cyber-bullying is absolutely an ongoing issue which happens on the internet and anyone can be a victim. Today, even just regular bullying has become an issue because, anyone now pulls out their camcorder on their phone and starts recording, and whatever it is they recorded, goes viral on the internet a couple of days later.
Sadly, that is what happened to the particular boy whom Solove is talking about in the beginning of his article. He wants the audience to become more aware of what it is that is going on in the internet, and he does it in a very effective manner, by providing an example of the star wars kid. Daniel Solove says, “People do not need to be famous enough to be interviewed by the mainstream media. With the Internet, anybody can reach a global audience (Solove, 2008).” From this he establishes that things definitely can go viral within days when someone uses the internet. Some of the specialized language that he uses are phrases like “Online Social-Networks”, “Copyright”, “Digital Age”, and “Electronic Networking”. This article does not take very long to read, twenty minutes at most is what the audience will spend on it to read. Plus, it is very easy to understand given that Solove writes it in a formal manner, not using any sort of slang, or metaphors, so as to inform his audience professionally and clearly.
Scholarly Article: Rhetorical Appeals
Daniel Solove starts off using a great deal of pathos. He introduces the story of “The Star Wars Kid”. How he had stumbled awkwardly when waving his golf ball retriever around imagining it was a light saber while recording himself. How the other boys who bullied him had found the video and uploaded it online, where it became an instant hit with people all over the world making fun of him. He tries to make his audience feel sympathetic towards the boy. No kid should go through the feeling of having the whole world make fun of him. It is incredible how viral one video can go within a short span of time. He also creates this sensation of hope, hope that one day maybe the people can still restore their online privacy. Solove said, “To cope with increased threats to privacy, the scope of the appropriation tort should be expanded (Solove, 2008).” From here we can tell that Solove knows about the appropriation tort that prevents people from using someone’s name or likeness for benefits, it is a suggestion Solove presents that will help restore some type of privacy for the time being.
Daniel Solove is a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School. He has done extensive research on online privacy. His published work has been used by Harvard University and that makes him have a very credible character. Solove contributes some information that supports his argument of companies tracking and collecting the public’s personal information. According to Solove, “As several articles in this issue of Scientific American have already made clear, companies collect and use our personal information at every turn (Solove, 2008).” Scientific American are a well-known publishing company and they have many articles on the issue of online privacy. So if Scientific American has many articles on this issue, then it must be true that companies are in fact collecting our information. He presents other evidence, or logos, supporting his claims. Evidence that Facebook made outrages privacy invasions are made like this phrase from Solove, “In 2007 Facebook again encountered another privacy outcry when it launched an advertising system with two parts, called Social Ads and Beacons (Solove, 2008).” The Beacons in this case were about data-sharing deals that Facebook had made with other websites. The deal was about accessibility. When someone shopped on a website, the items they bought would pop up on their social media profiles inconspicuously. Clearly that is reliable evidence presented by Solove that again, Facebook problems when people started complaining about the beacons.
Scholarly Article: Structure & Delivery
The information given in Solove’s article was very interesting so it was easy for the audience to focus on the article. The fact that he also provides a very good solution that could potentially affect the laws that apply to the internet adds as support to his claims. Solove has a slight limitation to his article being that it was published by a well-known publishing company - Scientific American and for this reason the language of the article had to be kept formal and not colloquial. Solove talks mostly to a young audience which is why he refers to them as “generation google” , because as they grow up with social medias surrounding them, their information will reside on the internet as long as it is around (Solove, 2008). He then goes on to talk about the future of what can possibly happen with our privacy. He concludes with a section that explains what the people can do in order to restore their privacy which is very effective.
Compare and Contrast
The similarities is that both talked about how Facebook and other social media websites have made collaboration with other companies to collect peoples personal information. Another similarity can be that both talked about a very important component of Online Privacy which is Social Media. Although both talked about Social Medias, Cuban didn’t really talk about cyberbullying and that’s something that is relevant to online privacy, and Solove stressed the importance of that in the very beginning of his article. The Video source differs in audience from the scholarly article in that the scholarly article has an audience consisting more of scholars and the video source can be found very easily by anyone who has access to YouTube which is a high percentage of people.
Conclusion
Although both genres were on the same page, Daniel Solove’s article was more effective because he was able to communicate much more information. He had much more time to explain everything that is associated with online privacy; from cyberbullying, to social medias, to the companies collecting the public’s personal information. His formality of the article was also key in the overall effective conveyance of his message. Solove uses more examples to support his arguments which is the reason behind his article’s efficiency. Cuban’s video lacked to go into more detail on the general issue of online privacy, he talks more about a component of online privacy – social medias. There are different forms of genres that are used in order to somehow communicate a message, it is how they are organized, that defines their overall effectiveness, and that could impact the way people look at a certain topic.
References
Cuban, M. (2014, 08). Stop Making These Mistakes [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URqAeji2jeU
Cuban, M. (2015). The Biography.com website. Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/mark-cuban-562656
Solove, D. (2008). The End of Privacy?. The End of Privacy?, Vol .299, 100-106, Retrieved