As Facebook Users Die

In Jenna Wortham’s As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out, she does a great job of informing casual Facebook users about Facebook’s issue with death by using facts and other people’s personal experiences. In this essay, I will analyze the author’s rhetorical choices and how they address this particular audience, whether it be by the use of ethos, logos, or pathos. I will also offer insight about Facebook’s history and how the author says they have dealt with its users who are dying.
Facebook was officially launched in 2004, by Harvard University undergraduate student Mark Zuckerberg. Since then, it has grown immensely in popularity. So much so that it now has about five hundred million members, all from different backgrounds and age ranges. “Now, people over 65 are adopting Facebook at a faster pace than any other age group, with 6.5 million signing up in May alone, three times as many as in May 2009, according to the research firm comScore. People over 65, of course, also have the country’s highest mortality rate, so the problem is only going to get worse” (Wortham 2). The author is using logos with this statement to explain to the audience just how real this is and how impactful it could be. This concept of death brings about an odd problem for a social networking website like Facebook.
These opinions give the reader an idea of what goes through some people’s minds when they see one of these posts. There are drastically different opinions. Some people are freaked out and think it’s creepy, while others think it’s good if deceased people’s profiles are left up because they allow dealing with the deaths to cope better and bring back relationships. I think these opinions were put into this piece by the author because it gives the reader a chance to take a step back and think about how they feel about this