Because I'm (sort of) a Rhetorician Who Was Once a Music Major

Several weeks ago, this digital poster made the rounds especially among my artsy, hipster friends. Of course, graduate school ruined me so that I can't look at anything without performing a miniature Toulmin analysis, so I quickly analyzed this poster, questioned it's assumptions, and filed it away in my brain to deal with it later. Well, it's later. I won't do a line by line Toulmin analysis here, because it wouldn't be particularly interesting, but I will address the implicit argument of this digital poster and the assumptions on which such an argument relies.

The argument itself is relatively straight forward. The poster first shows lyrics from the song "The Way You Look Tonight" which, if the adjacent photo denotes authorship, it mistakenly attributes to Frank Sinatra (the song was written by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields and originally performed by Fred Astaire for the 1936 film Swing Time. Sinatra recorded a version in 1964, by which time the song was considered a standard.) Underneath these lyrics, the poster lists the much less interesting, highly reductive (dare I say, stupid) lyrics of Justin Bieber's "Baby." Underneath these lyrics, in the popular style of the (de)motivational poster, is the line, "Music, w..what HAPPENED!?"

The argument here is easy to discern. Music (judged by lyrics) was at one time rich, complex, and good. Now, it's simplistic, stupid, and bad.

This claim presents as its grounds the lyrics of these two songs. Of course, this is a digital poster, so it has little time for a nuanced portrayal of the music of these two eras (either the 30s or the 60s depending on if the poster intends the actual song, or the Sinatra remake, and the early 21st century). A complete historical picture of these two eras obviously cannot fit onto a digital poster. The claim of this poster, then, relies on the assumption that each of these songs is representative of its era. The quality of each era can, therefore, be judged based on the quality of each of these songs.

This assumption is relatively easy to attack. After all, it relies on the related assumption that ridiculous lyrics, like those of the Bieber song, did not appear in songs of the earlier era. Such a claim disregards lyrics like these from the Johnny Mercer song "I'm an Old Cowhand" (also remade by Sinatra):

I know all the songs that the cowboys know
'bout the big corral where the dogies go
'cause I learned them all on the rad-ee-o
Hey, yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay
Yippie-yi-yo-ki-yay

Furthermore, this assumption suggests that our current era does not include lyrics of more sophistication that the Bieber song, thus discounting lyrics like those of Anna Nalick:

Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable
Life's like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, girl
So cradle your head in your hands

In other words, in order to support the claim of this poster, the author relies on a biased sample, a logical fallacy in which the arguer makes generalizations which cannot be supported by the evidence provided because they are purposefully biased.

Furthermore, claims like the one made by this digital poster tend to discount one very important aspect of history--that is, history will ultimately remember the things that were the best of the era. Every church in the Baroque era large enough to hire one had a church composer and organist. But they didn't all become Johann Sebastian Bach. Indeed, an extraordinary majority of them, though they may have been popular at the time, have been forgotten by history. We remember Bach because he was the best of the era. The same has been true of the music of the 1930s and will be true of current music as well. It is, therefore, inappropriate to compare the relatively banal lyrics of one particular Justin Bieber song to the songs that have survived because they held some quality that made them classic, and use this comparison as evidence of some kind of devolution of music.

Claims like the one made in this poster ultimately belong to the narrative of the "golden age." Such narratives are often presented for rhetorical reasons by folks who wish to show that their own generation had it right and that "kids these days" have it all wrong, or by people who wish to show that they are aware that things used be be better and that their awareness of this fact makes them more sophisticated than others of their own generation. In other words, there is an element of pop-culture elitism inherent in these arguments. To the careful observer, however, these arguments do not show the sophistication of the arguer, but rather, the arguers historical ignorance, or at the very least, the arguers abuse of rhetorical strategy.

Parenting 2.0

In case you haven't seen it, the video above was posted on February 8th by an angry father in an attempt to discipline his daughter for posting a nasty "letter" to her parents on Facebook on and his video has quickly gone viral. A dozen or so of my friends have shared it on facebook, it's been blogged half to death, and it even appeared on my MSN home page for much of the day. It features a father reading the ranting letter of his daughter's (which she thought she had blocked from her family and church), then shooting the laptop computer the family owns for her to use.

As the video has gone viral, many have congratulated this father for punishing an ungrateful child, while others have been vocally angry about his public punishment. I choose, here, to theorize about the situation, and what it means to parent in the digital age (and in digital format).

Though most (well, all) of my friends who have shared this video were congratulatory toward this father and his innovative punishment, I was initially worried. The very public nature of this punishment worried me (*though, to disclaim, I'll say: keep reading.). I have serious concerns about the highly public nature of this father's punishment.

When young people post videos about each other, we classify it as cyber-bullying. We know that one of the aspects of cyber-bullying that makes it so dangerous is its highly public nature. Information placed on the internet can spread very quickly, and the written/recorded nature of this information gives it an appearance of permanence. And though, realistically, what is said about or to another person on the internet may be quickly lost in the fast-paced, instantaneous flow of information on the web, for an adolescent, it feels as though everyone has seen it and it will never go away.

For these reasons, I have grave concerns over the appropriateness of this father disciplining his daughter in such a public way. As adolescents, we all said things and behaved in ways that we would later realize were immature. In fact, the things that she says in her letter are exactly the things many of us were in trouble for saying when we were adolescents. And, looking back, we are embarrassed by our own behavior. In this case, this daughter's embarrassing mistakes were made incredibly public. Millions of people she does not know are calling her ungrateful, citing her as an example of what's wrong with "kids these days" and congratulating her father for disciplining her.

Of course, embarrassment can be a powerful disciplinary tool. My dad used to tell us a story about how his father punished him when he was caught shoplifting by shaving his head. He hated it, and his girlfriend, who loved his longish flowing hair, broke up with him over it. Of course, we have all seen the pictures of kids whose parents make them hold signs proclaiming themselves as shoplifters. My favorite is of a kid who "wants to go to prison to be with daddy."

In fact, in a response to people questioning why he would punish his daughter so publicly, the father said that he was raised this way:

If I did something embarrassing to my parents in public (such as a grocery store) I got my tail tore up right there in front of God and everyone, right there in the store.

The difference, though, is that these describe very local forms of embarrassment. Most of the people who saw my dad's hair cut knew him. In this case, this daughter's punishment is on display to millions. For millions she has become an example of a typical, ungrateful teenager. The folks sharing links to this video, arguing about it in comments sections and on blogs (like this one. . .) do not know this girl--they do not know her other weaknesses or her strengths. Instead, she is a dehumanized and disembodied "example" of what's wrong with this generation.

Of course, to disclaim this entire conversation, she is reportedly good-natured about the whole situation. Her father was surprised that the video went viral (he expected only her facebook friends to see it) and, when it did, he had to talk with her about the attention it had received and what they should expect now. According to her father, they have read many of the responses to the video, laughing at the predictions that she would "commit suicide, commit a gun-related crime, become a drug addict, drop out of school, get pregnant on purpose, and become a stripper because she’s too emotionally damaged now to be a productive member of society." Her surprisingly good attitude probably says less about the validity or invalidity of this form of punishment than it does about the relationship between this man and his daughter.

So, a case like this one ought to cause us to begin to theorize what it means to parent in the digital age. Since digital environments have become as important in our lives as physical environments, the policing of rules of etiquette, social norms, and appropriate behavior is also important. This means that parenting will happen in, or at least regarding, these environments. So how do we do this? There has been a great deal of conversation about what we must teach our children about the internet, but little thought about what and whether we teach them on the internet. Where are the lines of appropriate behavior when it comes to parenting and interacting with our children in digital spaces? Is the digital world a place that offers us new innovative ways to parent, or just another dimension in which to screw them up?