Rhetoric Analysis of a Music News Website Essay

Rhetoric Analysis of a Music News Website - Essay Example In order to understand why this target audience continues such criminal activity, their assumptions about the record industry must be examined. Music United is one website that analyzes and addresses these assumptions. A coalition group of many different organizations committed against online music piracy, Music United strives not only to disprove college students' assumptions about the record industry, but also to persuade college students to abide by the law when obtaining music. In order to accomplish these goals, the Music United site utilizes textual and technical features to establish a direct communication with its targeted audience of college students. These features are functions of appeals to guilt, fear, empathy, and the law that are embedded within the content and the purpose of the site. College students view the internet as a place of public freedom, where people can come and go, sharing their ideas, pictures, and pages along the way. A basic knowledge of web designing is all that is needed to post material on the internet for the world to see. Over time, users view the internet as a "marketplace" where everyone is entitled to every page, picture, and idea posted. College students adopt this kind of public-sharing sentiment when they download mp3s without paying. ... ree for the taking in much the same way reading a newspaper article online is free (as opposed to paying $0.50 to read the same article on a hard copy). Music United disagrees with this "free for all" spirit of college students who participate in the sharing and downloading of illegal mp3 files. Not everything on the internet is for free, certainly not music. This is one of the college students' assumptions the site refutes. Music United accomplishes this goal through the use specially designed text-graphics, which appeal to guilt and fear. The home page provides an example of these text-graphics. Although they may look like regular text, these special headers and key quotations are actual graphics (clicking on them reveals they are gif files) that were most likely created in some photo editing program like Paint Shop Pro. The combination of red and white colors functions the same way a "stop" sign functions: it awakens the senses by signaling a warning. When college students see this graphic, the colors indicate that something of greater importance is being said here, as opposed to the regular black-colored text found throughout the site. The colors catch their eyes, compelling them to read the text. The font type is different and larger from the standard Verdana text found throughout the site, further emphasizing the importance of the message. The capitalization of the number ("2.6 million") and the cr ime ("illegally downloaded") not only stresses the importance of the text, but also accentuates the guilt the phrases elicit from its audience. When college students who engage in illegal mp3 trading read the text, they are struck with guilt. They immediately identify themselves as illegal downloader's who partake in the distribution of those 2.6 billion files each