Rhetorical Analysis Of The Flight From Conversation

“When I was seven I had an answer to this question that made sense to me….if I was the hunter, I would shoot the monkey so that it would no longer have the chance to put other hunters in the same predicament” (Beah 218). A Long Way Gone is a memoir of a child soldier who is the author himself Ishmael Beah. Beah around the ages of twelve to thirteen grew up in Sierra Leone during its civil war. During his story, Beah talks in a tone that is straight to the point, however many devices help the reader imagine his loss of innocence. Beah uses a series of flashbacks, symbols and motifs to illustrate his loss to his readers.

The Documented Life is an article wrote by Sherry Turkle on December 15, 2013 and published in The New York Times. In the article, she talks about how modern technology has caused us to put our lives on hold. Turkle states that people do not feel like themselves if they are not sharing their thoughts and views. The article states that technology has changed us by putting our interpersonal communications on pause. Turkle says we no longer see interruptions as a kind of disruption anymore. She adds that the most frequently heard phrase is, “wait, what?” as people fall back into missed conversions has become the new norm. Turkle also states that when people are alone or bored, they reach for a device. It has become so natural that they forget there is a time and place not to use their gadgets. Turkle suggests that there might be hope for the younger generation as they witness the price being paid by preoccupied, device carrying adults. Youngsters have come to value the device-free zones set up by parents for family conversion time.

Sherry Turkle’s “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk” article was published on September 26, 2015 in The New York Times. The author explains that college students spend more time on their phones than talking face-to-face. Turkle mentions that parents have realized this at the dinner table with their kids or just trying to have a conversation with them. Teenagers and young adults claim that they can multitask and understand what the person is saying while being preoccupied. Multiple studies have been done to demonstrate the influence and behaviorial changes without a device. This generation reports that they feel more personal when their phones were taken away for a certain period of time. A boy from one of the studies describes this dilemma as “It’s what texting does to our conversation when we are together that’s the problem” (Turkle par. 6). Texting has become more popular as time goes on and college students were born in a world where phones were a problem and with new features coming out, they have become more intrigued. Using rhetorical strategies such as mentioning research studies and rhetorical appeals, the author effectively explains how technology changes society.

Lyana Beato Professor Deal English 1101 18 November 2016 “The Flight from Conversation” by Sherry Turkle: A Rhetorical Analysis In "The Flight from Conversation," published in The New York Times on April 21, 2012, and written by sociology and personality psychologist, Sherry Turkle, she discusses her concerns on how the world has chosen technological connection over conversation and physical interaction. Turkle informs her readers that “Over the past 15 years, I've studied technologies of mobile connection I've learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are” (Sherry Turkle). Turkle helps develop her argument by building a connection to her audience and using personal experiences such as what she has observed from her students in the classroom and the personal experience of others.

In the article “Growing up Tethered”, by Sherry Turkle, she argues that technology today plays a major role in everyday life. Youths do not have the ability to branch off and have their own independence because of their reliance and attachment to technology. They also use technology to develop who they are as people and create an online personal identity of what they think is a perfect life. In comparison, their own life seems boring, pale and unwanted. Turkle also talks about how teenagers think of their phone as a “friend’s” and cannot live without it. When feeling a strong emotion, teens want to share their feelings with their friends and phone. I agree with Turkle’s opinion that technology is changing and will never be the same, which will be hard to improve this attachment to technology because too many teens are tethered.

Many people are not mindful of how technology is disconnecting us from one another. When people pull out smartphones during a conversation or social gathering they will cause others to feel disconnected. These phones allow people to withdraw from what is happing now and move another situation reducing the quality of the conversation that is within our reach. In the essay "Stop Googling. Let's Talk" by Sherry Turkle; she believes that we are becoming a culture of short chats versus growing our culture of thinkers that are open to sharing in constructive and meaningful conversations with one another.

She continues to use pathos to describe how people spend more time finding about their life and what is happening in it by the use of BlackBerry’s and constant checking of e-mails. “Think of the BlackBerry user watching the BlackBerry movie of his life as someone watching a movie that takes on a life of its own”. (Turkle) Here she uses another anecdote to describe a person watching their life go by tying them into another electronic device that shuts off the rest of the world physically and emotionally. This is another good example of being

In the second chapter of her book, “The Empathy Diaries” Sherry Turkle argues that people are fleeing or running from normal conversation. She also states that even though we want to be with each other, we also want to be able to disconnect with reality and connect somewhere else. She claims “What we value most is control over where we put our attention” (19). We want to be close but not that far away, but just right. The writer acknowledges that our phones give us a sense of “companionship” without having to deal with the demands of an actual relationship. With that being said, even our conversations are being impacted by our phones. The writer even states that, “even the mere presence of a phone on a table (even a phone turned off) changes

The Perils of Indifference is a speech by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor. He gives this speech at President Bill Clinton’s Millennium Lecture, fifty-four years after the Americans liberated Wiesel. He talks about his feelings towards an indifference, and explains why no one should ever be indifferent. In his speech, The Perils of Indifference, Elie Wiesel effectively convinces his audience that indifference is worse than anger or hate through rhetorical appeals, repetition, parallelism, rhetorical questions and juxtaposition.

Calling someone is now a sacred ritual. Unless it is a business call or an emergency, people now veer towards text messaging. It is a quick and easy alternative that does not interrupt someone’s day or force them into conversation. Sherry Turkle and Jenna Wortham discuss this issue in their respective essays. While Turkle believes that this is because the current generation is one of distance, Wortham believes that it is a matter of maturity. I believe that Turkle’s approach to this argument is more effective because she provides more evidence.

The feeling of indifference towards matters of tragedy “is always a friend of the enemy” (Wiesel, 1999). The experiences that young Elie Wiesel endured during World War II influenced the critical undertone of his poignant speech, “The Perils of Indifference.” The speech, delivered on April 12th, 1999 at the White House, emphasizes the dangers of apathy during times of disaster. In the speech, Wiesel encompasses the narrative paradigm, imagery, and rhetoric appeals in an emphatic tone to evoke a sense of guilt and a vehement desire to take immediate action towards the injustice of humanity. Recounting the cataclysmic Holocaust and anticipating a promising future, Elie Wiesel expresses, through his speech, the necessity of the cessation of indifference to give the new millennia a renewed hope.

“Can you remember the last time you were in a public space in America and didn’t notice that half the people around you were bent over a digital screen, thumbing a connection to somewhere else?” (Fredrickson, 2013, pg. 1). In a world today where sending a text message containing the message “I luv you,” is equally powerful to that statement said in person to your significant other. Today’s generation is surrounded by the constant need to have technology and mainly cell phones at your fingertips. Gone are the days when people would talk to one another whilst standing in line, now it is all about having and using your cell phone to pass the time. All of this takes bondage on having an interpersonal relationship with each other and conversing

Over time, we have developed more and more advanced technology from radios to robots, this has impacted us in a way no one would imagine. In Sherry Turkle’s Ted Talk “Connected, but alone?,” Turkle clarifies how technology is redefining human connection. She points out that our cellphones are keeping us away from interacting with society and has a more significant influence on our communication in person than online. In addition, we tend to seek social media as a way of comfort and attention, and the more we are using our phones the more isolated and alone we become. Is technology really redefining human connection?

In the past, families used to schedule time frames in order to all get together to sit down and have a talk about what had happened during their day. Since the creation of the smartphone, this has changed from a time for everyone to talk and socialize with each other into a competition of how many words per minute someone can text on their smartphone. This situation has occurred in none other than my family. Every dinner, we used to get together and converse about each other’s day and now it has changed into a time to use our phones. Even if we are only rooms apart, we much rather send each other a text message than call out each other’s name and engage in conversation in this matter. By no longer engaging in these conversations the smartphone has reinvented the way humans go about their social relationships. It is due to this that many people in the world today cannot have a face-to-face conversation because they feel unsafe with this form of conversation. As Sherry Turkle says:

Over the years technology has been growing fast. Knowing human use communication by texting and calling. It’s careless for humans because not seeing each other could cause them to have problems. Instead of going out together and be active they just waste time on their phones. Humans putting a stop of when they have access to their phones so that they can spend more time with friends.