In “What will a future without secrets look like?”, a TED talk delivered at an official TED conference in June of 2013, Alessandro Acquisti argues that personal privacy is something we should all be more aware of due to the rise of the technology and how it can collect personal data. Acquisti maintains that it is up to the individual to be aware of this subject, and presents his argument to the audience in order to inform them. This TED talk is effective for its intended audience because it is presented with strong ethical, logical, and emotional appeals. It hits all three of the main types of appeals therefore making a stronger argument.
Throughout the speech, his ethical appeal was strong. Acquisti proved himself a credible source in many …show more content…
Such a background makes him credible on the issue, with the authority to speak on the topic, without unselfish or clear motives for addressing the subject. In addition to his background he wore a very nice suit which made him appear professional and speaks to his style in addressing an audience. A suit suggests that he considered this talk to be a serious and formal event worthy of dressing up.
Then entire speech was backed up by strong logical appeal. At multiple times during his speech Acquisti would center an entire section of the argument around a specific study or academic test that he and his academic team preformed. All of the studies that he quoted related directly to the subject and backed up his argument with a sound logical appeal. For example, one of the studies done, “To test that, we did an experiment on Carnegie Mellon University campus. We asked students who were walking by to participate in a study, and we took a shot with a webcam, and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop. While they were filling out the survey, we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster, and …show more content…
Acquisti strongly used humor and as stated by (Lunsford, Ruszkiewicz, and Walters) “Humor has always played an important argument, sometimes as the sugar that makes the medicine go down. You can slip humor into an argument to put readers at ease, thereby making them more open to a proposal you have to offer. It’s hard to say no when you’re laughing.” This was an important choice by Acquisti because information privacy is a very serious and often stressful topic. By starting off the talk with [@Adam Last nite was a blast! loved dat apple LOL] [@Eve yep.. babe, know what happened to my pants tho?](Acquisti 0:43-0:45) he made a reference to the privacy issue of Adam & Eve in a light way that made the audience laugh and break the ice and setting the audience at ease. He also shows a screenshot of somebody sharing a facebook status to only their friends ‘and the nsa’ which garnered a few laughs. By presenting what is normally talked about as a serious issue in a more light and humorous way, it relieves some of the pressure and anxiety that can come from learning about this
Throughout the speech, his ethical appeal was strong. Acquisti proved himself a credible source in many …show more content…
Such a background makes him credible on the issue, with the authority to speak on the topic, without unselfish or clear motives for addressing the subject. In addition to his background he wore a very nice suit which made him appear professional and speaks to his style in addressing an audience. A suit suggests that he considered this talk to be a serious and formal event worthy of dressing up.
Then entire speech was backed up by strong logical appeal. At multiple times during his speech Acquisti would center an entire section of the argument around a specific study or academic test that he and his academic team preformed. All of the studies that he quoted related directly to the subject and backed up his argument with a sound logical appeal. For example, one of the studies done, “To test that, we did an experiment on Carnegie Mellon University campus. We asked students who were walking by to participate in a study, and we took a shot with a webcam, and we asked them to fill out a survey on a laptop. While they were filling out the survey, we uploaded their shot to a cloud-computing cluster, and …show more content…
Acquisti strongly used humor and as stated by (Lunsford, Ruszkiewicz, and Walters) “Humor has always played an important argument, sometimes as the sugar that makes the medicine go down. You can slip humor into an argument to put readers at ease, thereby making them more open to a proposal you have to offer. It’s hard to say no when you’re laughing.” This was an important choice by Acquisti because information privacy is a very serious and often stressful topic. By starting off the talk with [@Adam Last nite was a blast! loved dat apple LOL] [@Eve yep.. babe, know what happened to my pants tho?](Acquisti 0:43-0:45) he made a reference to the privacy issue of Adam & Eve in a light way that made the audience laugh and break the ice and setting the audience at ease. He also shows a screenshot of somebody sharing a facebook status to only their friends ‘and the nsa’ which garnered a few laughs. By presenting what is normally talked about as a serious issue in a more light and humorous way, it relieves some of the pressure and anxiety that can come from learning about this