Blog Analysis
Michelle Verge
January 21, 2018
The author Jeff Atwood is trying to prove that by having a comment counter
next to a user’s name, a culture is being created where people are motivated
to say anything and everything that comes to mind, no matter how
misinformed or unconstructive, rather than thoroughly reading and analyzing
content and engaging in educated discussion and debate.
His target audience seems to be anyone from the age of 20-40, with some type
of post-secondary education, who are involved in the web design, development,
or digital communication fields. He has a fairly casual tone and the language
isn’t overly complicated. His use of language such as referring to the reader as
a “user,” creates a tone where the general public is being talked about, and the
people designing the platforms being used are the ones he his speaking to.
The title is written in a manner that draws the reader in. Starting the title with
“because” makes it feel as though he is presenting the answer to a question,
and it creates a desire to know what that question is. The immediate
presentation of an example of the problem pulls the reader in to want to know
more: why is this an issue, what effect is it having and what is the end result?
The downfall of his article lies in his presentation of supporting research
material. Atwood succeeds in demonstrating that users aren’t thorough in their
reading and analysis. He presents an experiment done by Ars Technica, an online
publication with articles that focus on just about everything related to the tech
world, and an article written on the same topic by Farhad Manjoo, who writes
about technology for the New York Times. The research carries some industry
credibility and helps to outline the part of his argument that claims people aren’t
thoroughly reading material online, even though they are frequently contributing
to discussions.
Even though it seems like common sense that thorough reading and analysis
would result in a higher quality discussion, there are no examples to support
this in the article. His argument would have been much stronger had it been
supported by studies or experiments that proved more time reading really does
promote more constructive discussions.
The author proposes that in order to facilitate more active and complete
readership websites need to remove barriers that interrupt the reading process,
replace comment counters with some reward method for reading completion,
and creating a different way of discussion posing that mimics more closely a
face to face debate. The piece is fairly well written and is quite persuasive in terms
of structure. The content of the article, however, is lacking, as the author’s argument
is not strongly supported or proven.
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