"Myspace: Your Kids' Danger"

Paper Summary:

This paper presents a rhetorical analysis of Sandra Hughes' CBS news item, "MySpace: Your Kids' Danger? Popular Social Networking Site Can Be Grounds For Sexual Predators." It aims to move beyond the implicit and relatively superficial review of the text to a fuller understanding of how the text creates meaning, how it helps the reader to construct knowledge and how it sways us to take action. The paper specifically looks at how the language of this article works.

From the Paper:

"Visually, the story is arranged as a headline, a smaller-font secondary headline, and then twenty-two paragraphs, this for a story containing not quite 650 words. Immediately below the headlines, half of the reading column is taken up by a graphical image showing a computer in silhouette with transparencies of several young children, mostly girls, and several of them using cellphones. Below the graphic is a quote, suggesting the danger the article warns of. The effect of the graphic, the quote, and the headlines is to draw readers to the story that follows, a story that opens with three suggestive vignettes about children being approached in a sexually explicit manner on the Internet. Two of the three teenage girls described in the opening vignettes were murdered."

Sample of Sources Used:

• "About Classmates.com, Inc.," Classmates.com. Undated; accessed 23 July 2007; available at <http://www.classmates.com/cmo/about/;jsessionid=P2IJ4JBB2HWYECQKWZUCSNQKBK1GSIV3?_requestid=550228> Internet. .
• Burton, Gideon O, "rhetorical analysis." SILVA RHETORICAE. Undated; accessed 22 July 2007; available at <http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Pedagogy/Rhetorical%20Analysis.htm> Internet.
• Chandler, Daniel. "D.I.Y. Semiotic Analysis: Advice to My Own Students." Semiotics for Beginners. Undated; accessed 27 July 2007; available at <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/ Documents/S4B/sem12.html> Internet.
• Hughes, Sandra. "MySpace: Your Kids' Danger? Popular Social Networking Site Can Be Grounds For Sexual Predators." CBS News. Dated 6 Feb. 2006; accessed 22 July 2007; available at <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/06/eveningnews/ main1286130.shtml> Internet.
• Kinney, Thomas J., Rhetorical Analysis. Dated 2003; accessed 22 July 2007; available at <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~tkinney/pdf/handouts/r_analysis.pdf> Internet.

More papers on "Myspace: Your Kids' Danger":

• Analytical Essay # 134352 : "Rhetorical and Semiotic Analysis"
• Analytical Essay # 133837 : "The MySpace Phenomenon: Ritualistic Social Networking"
• Analytical Essay # 121599 : "Analysis of MySpace"

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