Cultural Rhetoric

I was watching TV last Saturday, and a commercial came on. The commercial was about the Philadelphia 76ers and their new basketball camp they were opening. They had players from every team to come and show how effective the camp was. There were NBA players from Mavericks, Heat, Celtics, and Thunder. This was the logical fallacy of illegitimate authority. They use those players because most young kids look up to them. So this will make kids go to their camp because if their favorite player from that team was at the camp that means they will be there when they will go. Although the camp cost $120, kids were signing up one after another. I was thinking about signing up but then I realized that those exact players will not be there. They just used them to lure customers in. This fallacy is very effective and is used a lot in our marketing society. Most things that we buy today are because we either saw a celebrity get it or the bandwagon mentality. This mainly affects clothes and shoe...

It was a Sunday afternoon and we were watching football. This commercial came on about buying a new clothing trend. They had Zac Efron modeling clothes. He was modeling underwear from Abercrombie and Fitch. Then They had another commercial with Justin Bieber modeling the Calvin Klein underwear. This was appealing to Illegitimate Authority. It’s this fallacy because they used two celebrities to model. They only used them because they were good looking.  Not everyone looks like Justin Bieber and Zac Efron in underwear. This lowers men’s self esteem. Some fat kids might find this insulting. This can make kids go into a non-eating habit. One kid in my class said and I quote “ Abercrombie doesn’t like fat kids.” I don’t know if he was upset. He sounded kind of angry. This is the exact things that I am talking about. Kids don’t like when they use fit people to model clothes that some can’t fit into. Zac Efron and and Justin Bieber are two males that are super fit. Sometimes this...

I was in my house watching the Panthers vs. Seahawks game. So this commercial came on about babies and how to protect them. The speaker/actor said that we should use a car seat that will protect the baby if an accident was to happen. This made me think "What if this happen to my family and my nephew or niece." The speaker had used a logical fallacy. The logical fallacy was Appeal to Fear. This really scared me because I wasn't used to being afraid about a commercial. He wanted to also me and my family to feel like we were left out also. They had a director come in and display the car seat and say "Everyone has it and do it for your children." The argument made logical sense, because they were trying to get their main point out to the audience which was me and my family. They wanted to draw more consumers to their project, which in this case it was the car seat and the protection of the baby. One part about the commercial I didn't understand was why t...