The Language of Activism:
A Rhetorical Analysis on the Advertisement of Greenpeace Stressing the importance of media for social movements has long become a cliché now. Particularly in the contemporary society, where approximately three billion people worldwide have access to the Internet (Internet Live Stats, 2014), and 58 percent of adult Americans use social networking services (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, & Madden, 2015), the effective utilization of media is the key to success of a campaign. Meticulously planned advertisements, images, press releases, and interviews help spread the word among the public, grow awareness of the issue, and inspire them to join the movement. Thus, adapting to the rapidly changing media environment and …show more content…
The characteristic features of Greenpeace’s promotional films can be summarized to a harmonic mixture of the underlying pathos, the urging ethos, and the logos of direct action. Although the order and the degree of each means of persuasion differ from one video to another, they all function to serve the same purpose — the maximization of the impact on viewers to take action. This is more evident in the organization’s representative recruiting film, Inspiring Action (GreenpeaceVideo, 2009). To begin with, a viewer can immediately realize that the video, which is dedicated to explain the core values — why and how the organization works — of Greenpeace, initiates its rhetorical persuasion by taking an emotional approach to the audience. It firstly features the images of the planet earth from varying angles, implying that we all are living on the same planet that we should protect. In addition, the tense music in the background that goes on for the first half of the video excites the audience’s …show more content…
It needs solutions. It needs change. It needs actions” (GreenpeaceVideo, 2009). Nevertheless, after getting absorbed into the aforementioned pathos and ethos, it is not hard for one to acknowledge that adding any other sentence is no more than a redundancy. Indeed, those three sentences not only effectively summarize the film as the entirety, but also finally surface and resolve the organization's logics that has been alluding behind the video all along. Another effect of straightforwardly giving the logos is that it fixates the opinions that could vary among audience to one absolute conclusion. For instance, even though the viewers watched the same promotional film that was so argumentative and powerful, some of them may cast doubt on the intention of the organization, feel unsure about what they watched, or generally agree with its argument, but couldn’t find the word to elaborate. However, when the articulation of the logos is provided, they are susceptible to the view of the organization. This is where the art of persuasion blooms. Greenpeace proficiently makes use of this opportunity by culminating the video with a web address where people can click to sign
A Rhetorical Analysis on the Advertisement of Greenpeace Stressing the importance of media for social movements has long become a cliché now. Particularly in the contemporary society, where approximately three billion people worldwide have access to the Internet (Internet Live Stats, 2014), and 58 percent of adult Americans use social networking services (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhart, & Madden, 2015), the effective utilization of media is the key to success of a campaign. Meticulously planned advertisements, images, press releases, and interviews help spread the word among the public, grow awareness of the issue, and inspire them to join the movement. Thus, adapting to the rapidly changing media environment and …show more content…
The characteristic features of Greenpeace’s promotional films can be summarized to a harmonic mixture of the underlying pathos, the urging ethos, and the logos of direct action. Although the order and the degree of each means of persuasion differ from one video to another, they all function to serve the same purpose — the maximization of the impact on viewers to take action. This is more evident in the organization’s representative recruiting film, Inspiring Action (GreenpeaceVideo, 2009). To begin with, a viewer can immediately realize that the video, which is dedicated to explain the core values — why and how the organization works — of Greenpeace, initiates its rhetorical persuasion by taking an emotional approach to the audience. It firstly features the images of the planet earth from varying angles, implying that we all are living on the same planet that we should protect. In addition, the tense music in the background that goes on for the first half of the video excites the audience’s …show more content…
It needs solutions. It needs change. It needs actions” (GreenpeaceVideo, 2009). Nevertheless, after getting absorbed into the aforementioned pathos and ethos, it is not hard for one to acknowledge that adding any other sentence is no more than a redundancy. Indeed, those three sentences not only effectively summarize the film as the entirety, but also finally surface and resolve the organization's logics that has been alluding behind the video all along. Another effect of straightforwardly giving the logos is that it fixates the opinions that could vary among audience to one absolute conclusion. For instance, even though the viewers watched the same promotional film that was so argumentative and powerful, some of them may cast doubt on the intention of the organization, feel unsure about what they watched, or generally agree with its argument, but couldn’t find the word to elaborate. However, when the articulation of the logos is provided, they are susceptible to the view of the organization. This is where the art of persuasion blooms. Greenpeace proficiently makes use of this opportunity by culminating the video with a web address where people can click to sign