1. Boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Researcher and the founder of Data & Society. She is also a Visiting Professor at New York’s University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program; she is an academic and scholar and her research pertains to the crossing of technology and society. She is also the founder of Data & Society Research Institute. Boyd’s background consists of her taking her grandfather’s last name as her own and deciding to use all lower case for her name “to reflect my mother’s original balancing and to satisfy my own political irritation at the importance of capitalization”. Her parents got divorce and she moved to York, PA with her mom and bother. She believed that computers were lame but was intrigued with connecting with others, which her brother helped her with. Boyd was a great student, she excelled in extracurricular activities and in the classroom. However, she had a hard time socially in high school. She had wanted to be an astronaut but due to an injury she then became more interested in the Internet. Boyd earned her bachelor’s’ degree in computer science at Brown University, then her masters in sociable media at MIT Media Lab’s, and received her Ph. D. at the UC Berkeley School of Information. In the past she has wrote about social media, teenage drama, privacy, digital backchannels, and social visualization design. It’s Complicated fits in with what she has written in the past because it pertains to social media and teenagers and involves digital backchannels.
2. Boyd’s research focuses on technology, society, and policy. Over the years she has been focuses on these and has become a scholar. For example, on page 176 when she says, “In my fieldwork,” and then goes on to explaining how teens make sense of the technology in their lives.
3. I was able to identify myself and others when I read about the different ways young people use digital media and the different skill levels they have. I recognized myself when she talked about young people knowing how to use social media and the internet to get around, but the didn’t know the background or how it works. I would consider myself a technological person with being able to navigate things, but I have no clue about the coding or the behind the scenes work.
4. Boyd talks a lot about “rhetoric of digital natives” by this she means, that digital natives is used in the wrong way. She believes that students don’t understand the deeper meaning of things they just look and know the surface of technology. She spends a lot of time on this because she thinks its important. She believes its important because people falsely assume things about students today and she mainly focusing on how teens interact with technology and the way it is shaping our lives. This connects with her because it relates to her research.

Throughout this section a lot of informative topics were covered. The first one being, citations, the author explained which citations should be used when and how to do it. The author gave many different of examples of MLA simplified citations. Secondly, the author went to into great detail about chains of reasoning, evaluation, and fallacies. The six common chains of reasoning are; definition, generalization, analogy, casual, authority, and principle. Definition is merely how the author defines a word with multiple meanings. This allows the author to let the reader know how they are going to use the word. Generalization is assumptions for what is mainly true for a large group or population. Analogy involves comparing two different situations that are alike, they link together in some way.  Casual deals with a disagreement over a result that may have been altered from an outside factor. Authority is related to credibility; using the acronym STAR allows us to identify if the author or whom the author uses is a credible source. Principle is displaying that a certain situation still stands with this principle being applied. Next, the author tackles evaluation. The author’s main purpose is to let the reader know how to evaluate an argument. To evaluate an argument the reader needs to present their own argument by asking themselves is the text strong or weak, effective or ineffective, persuasive or not, and giving good evidence and support to back up their claim. The author also goes in depth about pathos and ethos and how those are a very good source to use in evaluation. Lastly, the author mentions and describes fallacies. Fallacies are a list of things to avoid when you are reflecting on an argument. Complementary to the chains of reasoning some fallacies would be a hasty generalization, false analogy, confusing correlation and causation, false authority, misapplied principle. All of these are easy to do as writers because sometimes we don’t even realize we are doing it. When writing a persuasive piece writer’s need to be aware of how they are wording statements, so it is not contradicting or confusing to the reader. And they need to be sure about their credibility and the other sources they are trying to use to show more credibility. Writers just need to be aware of how they are writing things and how they are showing it to the reader. These pages provided a lot of great information because it gave a lot of examples of what writing should and should not look like.

How often do you write a day? How much of that is formal writing for school or your occupation? And how much of that is just for your pleasure? Do you know how writing affect you and your emotions? Clive Thompson is a writer for New York Time Magazine and columnist for Wired. He has made himself a very outstanding and prominent writer throughout the years. The amount of research, experiments, and publishing he has done has allowed him to prove himself with many different arguments to his readers. With all his experience, he has made a trustworthy name for himself; consequently, readers are more likely to be persuaded by all his writings. In the same way, he has made a consistence list of readers. In other words, readers are more likely to read more of his other writings after reading one. In one of his books Smarter Than you Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better, there’s a chapter that he dedicates to public thinking. People categorize public thinking as many different things; such as social media, debate, group collaboration, sharing and discussing. Thompson was worried our civilization was going to plunge because of the internet. He thought that internet was influencing our society negatively. Many years later, he realized that the internet has a positive impact on our society because people are able to express themselves and their thoughts. The purpose of the chapter on public thinking in his book is to argue that social media and the internet are improving society’s writing skills; how we present our ideas and arguments, and contribution of thoughts. Thompson wants to persuade his readers to believe that the internet has helped our society and he does this using many different strategies.

In my analysis of Thompson’s text, I will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence he uses for his claims. I will show what types of evidence were very effected and persuading to reader. Another thing I will point out in my evaluation is when Thompson wasn’t very clear or strong with his claims. In addition, I will mention the types of strategies Thompson uses that are a big indicator of triggering the audience to believe his side of the argument.

The objective of “Public Thinking” written by Clive Thompson was to persuade the audience that online writing has benefits. The author mainly focuses on how on writing has developed over the years. He claims that writing isn’t always formal, over the years writing has changed and become more technology based. He gives many examples of the different ways people use technology now-a-days to write. He emphasizes that writing is something that is continuously growing and adapting to new ways to express information.

One of Thompson’s main claims is that the internet is a way for people to communicate with and through their writing. Some of the examples he mentions are: blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. He justified that these are different ways of writing that have grown over generations, but he indicates that using the internet for writing is still helping the writer. He believes that the writer learns so much from the little blog posts he or she writes because they always receive feedback. This idea that Thompson mentions allows the people to collaborate on each other’s work; allowing both the reader and the writer to grow.

A big piece of evidence that Thompson used in his article was the experiment he did on children and college students. This experiment was to see if people’s writing changes when the audience of their piece is different. For example, is there a difference between a student writing to a professor and a student writing to post on the internet. In the article Thompson states, “…comes to analytic or critical thought, the effort of communication to someone else forces you to think more precisely, make deeper connection, and learn more.” This is very strong evidence for Thompson’s claim and experiment because it proves that people write better when they know an audience is watching. People change the way they do things when they know that someone is going to read it. They put more time and thought into their writing instead of just throwing something together.

The way Thompson organized his writing made it very easy for the reader to be persuaded. The strategies that he used played a big part in how he was able to catch his audience.  He used a lot of logos which strengthen his argument of online writing having benefits. Thompson used relatable examples throughout the article which stuck out to the reader. He became a reliable source to the audience when he packed the article with data and real-life experiments. Thompson threw in some assumptions the audience had to trust him on and they were able to do this because they identified him as a ligament source.  This allowed Thompson to squeeze in his own thoughts and ideas, but the audience believes what he says because he established his credibility with the strategies he used throughout the whole article.

The author of this email is a professor who is writing back to one of his students. Therefore, the professor has made the audience of the email specifically towards him and other students at the University. The purpose of this email is to tell the student how he should email him back. The professor gives the student a lot of great dos and don’ts. He tells the student what he did correctly and what he shouldn’t have done. Then, he provides some idea of what the student should do in future emails. The professor responded to the student respectfully. He greeted the student and immediately answered his question very clearly. Not only did the author complement the student on what he did well, but also gave him some advice of adding explanation. The author justified why adding an explanation was so crucial in writing an email to his professors. Next, the author told the student to add some pathos, so his professor would feel sorry for him. Adding in pathos helps persuade the reader, in this case the professor, to believing why the student missed their class. The professor concluded the email with some humor, but also some truth about the student’s writing in general. This will allow the student to become more professional about the way he emails his professors. Lastly, the professor signed with “Take care”, this shows that the professor is respectful towards his student and is willing to help him.

Explicit:

-Science Conclusions

-Person’s View

Implicit:

-Non-Fiction Books (poems)

-Cartoon (picture)

One-sided:

-Is College Education Worth It? (essay)

-Marketing Presentation on a Product

Balanced:

-Coach’s Speech (i.e. halftime)

-Peer Reviews

Common Ground:

-Political Speech

-Selling Tactic

Conceptual:

– Abortion Essay

-Science Conclusions

I think these are all very good forms of an argument, however, I think it is important to identify some facts, basis statements and credibility. I think depending on the type of audience you have is very important to know, therefore, you know how to prepare your argument. That way you have the correct form of argument.