Human Identity By Susan Greenfield Summary

Neuroscientist, Professor Susan Greenfield, expresses her fear of modern electronics and modern culture, exclusively relating to the loss of identity of the modern populace. The article, published on DailyMail.co.uk, has an intended audience of the conservative middle class. She opens her article with a powerful statement, "Human Identity, the idea that defines each and every one of us, could be facing an unprecedented crisis". Susan Greenfield defends her claim (that modern technology is changing the way we think) by appealing to the audience 's emotion, or pathos, in two main ways: ‘What if’ statements and remember the Good ol ' days. The other appeals of Logos and Ethos are present, but play a minor role in the article as a whole. Professor …show more content…
On the second page of her article, she states, "This games-driven generation interpret the world through screen-shaped eyes. It 's almost as if something hasn 't really happened until it 's been posted on Facebook, Bebo or YouTube ". Here, the readers of the article are lead to remembering the days before the internet, this makes them feel nostalgic for those days. Back in those days they were able to grasp the reality of a situation, it didn 't take it being on the internet to make it fact; this could also invoke a sense of pride for how things were handled in the past. The last bit of nostalgia the author tries to invoke was by a separation of demographics, specifically dealing with how we (millennial generation) vs how they(previous generations) derived pleasure. Specifically, "...For some, pleasure means wine, women and song; for others, more recently, sex, drugs and rock 'n ' roll; and for millions today, endless hours at the computer console. But whatever your variety of pleasure, it 's long been accepted that 'pure ' pleasure - that is to say, activity during which you truly "let yourself go" - was part of the diverse portfolio of normal human life. Until now, that is... pleasure is becoming the sole be-all and end-all of many lives, …show more content…
Ethos, takes on a few different forms, namely, authority and ethics, namely the author tries to distance herself from the reader by saying that this could happen or that could happen but falls short of taking a real stance on something. This can be reassuring to the readers who feel that some of the views are a little irrational and presumptuous because she has already stated that it is a guessing game. Her second method was to list her credentials, which she does in the second paragraph, "I 'm a neuroscientist and my day-to-day research at Oxford University..." . This adds some credibility to her, but she takes it a step further (later in the article) by relating herself to George Orwell, in a way that made her seem to agree with what Orwell was saying, which is, the future could be perilous. Lastly, she ties in the ethics of what it means to be human into her arguments about the future, she says that to accept technology would be the same thing as letting our human spirit die. If she uses ethos to enforce her arguments she uses logos to make them factual, while describing the malleability of the human mind, she cites research conducted by Harvard medical school, "There, a group of adult volunteers, none of whom could previously play the piano, were split into three groups. The first...given