Mache Rhetorical Analysis

Facebook in Mache’s eyes was never at the top of its game. It was a spiral downwards towards the impending loneliness of society. Technology has never run as rampant, and for so long, such as Facebook has. It is a cancer of society, and instead of making us closer together it is making us much farther apart. Mache starts off his essay very strong with an enduring story that catches the readers eye. Mache makes it a goal to play on people’s emotions and uses examples that do just this in his essay. It is effective in catching the reader’s attention but also is a great way to convey a sense of emotion and connect directly with the reader. Statistics are also used frequently throughout Mache’s essay, they serve to enrich the paper and really help
readers open up to Mache’s opinion through the use of fact. Mache seems to take a very cynical approach to convincing his target audience if Facebook is truly lonely or not. He does a great job of not only convincing this audience but does so in a very clever way. In Mache’s “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” he serves to find the correlation between loneliness and social media. Marche makes very strong statements in favor of how Facebook is making us lonely; he writes a very engaging piece and succeeds in convincing most of us, including me, by using statistics, examples, ethos, and logos. Mache’s essay is filled with statistical data and uses that data to further his reader’s perception of how truly lonely Facebook is making us. It is used to further broaden the answer to his question and show readers how this data applies to the underlying theme of his essay, how it can be used to show proof and how he uses it to convince the reader. He starts off with an interesting statistic about how much a fiber-optic cable cost to be laid between Chicago and New York. Mache does this to convey how far technology has come to allow us to connect with one another. He goes on to state that “Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation.” (Mache 601). He means to convey a sense of loneliness with this statement. While we are closer than ever, we have alienated ourselves from the real world and suffer from this alienation in the form of chronic loneliness. Mache continues to use statistics to convey his ideas with real world information. For instance, he states “Some recent estimates put the company’s potential value at $100 billion, which would make it larger than the global coffee industry – one addition preparing to surpass the other.” (Mache 601). This seems to convey a sense of scale in a product that is so often making society lonelier and more isolated. That although this company is humungous, and many, many people use it, it is separating us from core human values more than ever. This can be found when Mache mentions shortly afterward “… a moment of superconnected loneliness preserved in amber … transfixed by the glare of a screen, hungering for response.” (Mache 602). We have a false identity with Facebook and because of this, it is making us the very thing it seeks to resolve. Although we are all interconnected through and online source, it seems that in awaiting a response that may never happen, we find ourselves lonelier than ever trying to hop onto and sense of interaction. Some might say that Mache’s overuse of statistics is the downfall of his argument, but instead, Mache’s use of presenting strong statistics makes the essay not only more appealing but also more convincing and relatable. Mache uses excellent examples in his essay, he presents them in a convincing fashion and ends up not only strengthening his argument, but also the paper at large.
Marche is no stranger to using ethos to convey a sense of horror, or even sadness to his readers through the use of examples. His first example uses strong ethos to convey to the emotion of some readers, who may find the instance relatable. It is a story of a Playboy playmate and B-movie star dying in her home, but the sad part was that no one knew that she was dead until weeks or even months after she had passed away. Mache uses this story to try and convey a sense of sentiment to his readers but also uses it to strengthen his core by attaching real life horror stories to the continuing theme of Facebook making us lonely. Mache goes on to state “… now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness.” (Mache 601) And “Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in her final years of her life.” (Mache 601). Mache attempts to connect the two by explaining how the online world, or technology, has made us lonelier than it ever has by showing that in death, someone is more famous than she was in life. Her story of dying made her popular, not her work she had put her life into. It was the story behind this death that blew up online and allowed the world to quickly rekindle her legacy and make her into something she was not. Adding onto this, he uses other
examples to push the use of emotion to an even greater extent. He uses himself, a personal story, to exponentially deepen his story by allowing readers to attach themselves to the author. He mentions his scrolling through Facebook and how miserable it made him, seeing those who live near perfect lives projected onto his Facebook feed. Through the use of emotional stories Mache does a great job of strengthening his arguments and in return uses these as great defenses to back up his question of “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”. Mache makes use vast amounts of information to compel his audience to listen to his plea.
Not only is his information in abundance, it is also very convincing and scholarly. This information is everywhere throughout his essay, for example “Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend.” (Mache 603). The use of this statistic helps us realize how many Americans are lonely or without a good friend. When we see how many people are suffering from loneliness it helps us better connect to the story and get a sense of how vast this issue actually is. He uses not only examples to get his point across but also relies on statistics from many studies to help convince the reader of his opinion. It allows the reader to pick and choose what information appeals to them and it is the diversity of the information that is key. It allows for a wide range of thought and thinking that ultimately makes the essay more convincing and
strong. In conclusion, Mache does a great job convincing readers that Facebook is indeed making us lonelier. He does so by using techniques such as Ethos, to appeal to the reader’s emotion, logos with the use of statistics, and tons of examples that really make his argument convincing. Facebook is at the top of its game, but instead of making people more social, it is encasing them in the loneliness they are trying to escape. Mache has great points and arguments to back them up, because of that Mache has excelled at convincing me that Facebook is in fact, making us lonely.