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English Paper About "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism"

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English Paper About "Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism"
Novelist, Christine Rosen, in her essay, “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” ridicules the use of online social networking in today’s society. Rosen’s purpose is to convey the idea that, online social networking is a dangerous manipulative addiction of self expression that is frankly a waste of time for all of society and a way to segregate your friends. She adopts a bashing tone to appeal to similar feelings and experiences toward her readers.

Rosen begins her essay by arguing that we manipulate our online self to display how we want to be seen. Social web sites offer ways to fudge the truth about our identity (Rosen 321). Your online friend could pretend to be anyone, even pretend to be a women when in reality they are a man and vis versa. She criticizes the truthfulness of our self-portraits in order to address the fact that their is no point in viewing other online friends because someone’s profile could be completely inaccurate. Rosen uses logo here to convey a logical tone to her readers so they will support her argument.

Rosen then moves to her next argument by implying that social web sites are a waste of time. In the text it says, “Millions of college students check their Facebook pages several times every day and spend hours sending and receiving messages, making appointments, getting updates on their friends’ activities, and learning about people they might recently have met or heard about”(Rosen 321). She is saying that students spend too much time on their online social networking sites. Also to support this argument is the text it says, “Indeed, media coverage of social networking sites usually describes them as vast teenage playgrounds-or wastelands, depending on one’s perspective” (Rosen 323). Her comparison to online networks as playgrounds or wastelands interprets that she believes online social networking is unproductive and useless. Rosen uses logos here to convey a comparative tone to her readers to help her get support on her


Cited: Rosen, Christine. “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism.” First Year Writing Ch11 p. 321.
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