Analysis3
Kendal Gast
2-4-16
Almossawi appears to have the goal
of simply making clear what is a difficult topic to understand. Although he does not talk about rhetoric or
use specific terms in rhetoric, logical reasoning could be described as rhetoric
in that well defensible positions must be taken up on the road to stasis and
afterwards. Almossawi perhaps did not
see any effective introductions to logical reasoning for newbies, so he set out
to create one that includes visuals. He
also chose to illustrate these concepts in a way that I am a fan of, that is,
defining something by stating what it isn’t. Almossawi also probably wants to keep the
field of logical reasoning and argumentation alive while based on concrete,
timeless principles.
I chose to
focus on the Participie website. There,
users can make a pie chart based on portions of the United States federal
budget. Although this was made for the
previous election, the idea is still applicable to any other. Two pies were available for users to
adjust: the federal budget and topics
needed to be clarified by Obama and Mitt Romney. You start with the averages of each pie and
adjust from there. The three main areas
of spending are defense, social security and healthcare. Very little is spent on agriculture,
community development, science and technology, energy, or transportation. These are not accurate representations of
current government spending, obviously, but they still provide a unique visual
and a powerful tool of participation.
Currently only 185 people have chosen to adjust a pie, and that’s only
for the budget pie. My pie focuses
spending money on three key areas: science and technology, education, and
energy. The rest of the spending is much
more evenly distributed, although defense has been reduced the most.
This could
be used as an effective tool of persuasion.
Rhetors could use the average pies of a population to make any kind of
argument. The only problem is getting
people with similar ideologies to participate.
Climate action groups such as NextGen Climate could send the link out to
their email list of subscribers and then wait for the average pie to change in
their favor. They really don’t even have
to do any work, only encourage the right population to make pies. Any other type of action group could use this
tool and then present the averages to candidates (if they saw them), important
business owners, congress people, state representatives, etc.
Participie
could also be a really effective educational tool. If Almossawi could tweak the program so a set
of adjusted pie charts could be averaged out instead of every single pie chart
submitted, teachers could use this in a government class, history class, or
argumentation class. Hovering over the
pieces, a short description is given about the details of our energy program or
subsidiaries of social security. But
this platform could be even more effective if there were more pie charts to
make, like who should be elected to this certain position, how a test should be
conducted, or the choice of a pamphlet design.
Almossawi I
think directs this project towards those that have opinions on current
political affairs. While that is a broad
category, most people that I encounter don’t hold any strong convictions about
how the government should spend money or how the government should make policy,
for that matter. Their statements tend
to be along the lines of “The government is taking our jobs” or “I think the
government should spend more money on trying to get me cheaper prescriptions”
or “I don’t like Hillary, she says dumb stuff”.
These types of people would not have an interest in adjusting a pie
chart on government spending. I
think. Individuals who recognize
shortcomings of the government and specific areas such as science and
technology or defense would be more interested in adjusting the chart.
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