Rhetorical Impact

I am lucky to start off with the Understanding Rhetorical Appeals chapter of the book because I took a media literacy class in high school. While I was enrolled in the course, I learned that all rhetorical objects try to persuade certain types of people. For example, the Dr. Pepper 10 commercial is aimed directly at men. They designed the commercial to be full of action, which the stereotypical girl would not be interested in. You can clearly see this notion in the commercial:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vBMH5DcPts. Gender in the media is one of the things we learned about in the class. Men are typically portrayed as aggressive, womanizers, and dominant. Women are usually depicted as sexy and inferior to men. Just today I received about five emails from various Clemson organizations asking me to be apart some organization or group. The emails all tried to entice me to be apart of their group by including some catchy phrase or some pictures to show how much “fun” the people in the organization were having. In this media-filled society I would suspect I come across hundreds of rhetorical objects a day! Twenty years ago I would guess those numbers were substantially less.

         Since I basically grew up in this culture, I have become used to being bombarded by rhetorical objects. They have a less of an impact on me than they would my grandmother. She constantly asks me about some rhetorical thing she saw in her daily life. In order for a rhetorical object to REALLY have an impact on me, I have to be really interested in the topic that the seller is trying to sell me. They also have to have a lot of rhetorical objects within the flyer to show me how “cool” the object really is. Oh well, I guess that means things will be even MORE rhetorical in the future in order for people to be even remotely interested in the things sellers are willing to sell…