A Rhetorical Analysis Of Aporia

One of the Team

The first instance of interaction occurs when users accessing the main body of the website is intercepted by a broad, enveloping orange overlay asking them to ‘commit to vote’. The imperative use of language acts as a perfunctory method in allowing the user to empathetically participate prior to re/viewing the NDP’s political platform. Despite the epideictic urgency, it is lead into by the aporia: ‘Ready for change?’’Commit to vote’. Of course the user is presumably ‘Ready for change,’ hence their visit to the website; yet what inverts the proposition from a rhetorical question to aporia is the ‘Commit to vote’. What the user assumingly lacks is conviction. Thereby, the allegorical ‘Count on me’, precisely the ‘objective usage
of ‘me,’ simulates a subjective familiarity; personifying the website to include the user; and simultaneously creating a feeling of dependence based on a moral causation (i.e. the entire capitalisation of the phrase to assert political agency, the green (as opposed to tonal oranges) promotes signifiers of positivity and Pan-ideologues). Continuing with the theme of familiarity, what seems to be the humanising genre of political constituencies, the website polarises the opposition (‘Stephen Harper will try and buy this election…’) and personalizes Mulcair as neighbourly/associable (‘About Tom,’ ‘Tom’s Plan’).
The medium of the website reads as a personal buzzfeed.
A formula similar to newsites that would be frequented by newspaper readership. The website is visually-oriented in a minimalistic, multimedia way in its use of basic, ubiquitous interfaces (Facebook, Youtube) purposefully serving those with little technical proficiency (thereby increasing demographic accessibility to those less technologically-inclined but frequent social media networks). Essentially, the website reads as a traditional folder-template, and along with the static use of multimedia, serves to representationally portray a stable image of ritualistic professionalism (‘Pictured here’: Tom in a basking glow of sunlight). The site proudly (and rightly should,) displays in enormous font the record-setting percentage of female candidates and their diverse ethnicity (http://www.ndp.ca/team). Yet the corollary of every possible axis of protected characteristics seems contrite--more emphasis is placed on the candidates as embodied figures, than as regular people, of socio-cultural representations (‘Jack Anawak: Former Liberal MP and Nunavut MLA who’s ready to fight for the North’). The site serves to homogenise; along with its cultural smorgasbord of superficial diversification, it desires to extend its multicultural platitudes to the neutrality of cultural appreciation. As Tom explicates in his bio: “Our offer to Canadians is clear: A government that stands up for middle-class families [...]”. A classist attitude
that is a far cry from the equality of multiculturalism desires—poverty as being not solely an economic, but a social and cultural problem.