Short Paper #2: Change My View

In this paper, you’ll be acting as a rhetorical anthropologist—looking to see how real! live! humans use rhetoric to make their ways in the world. Now that you have the foundations of rhetoric’s vocabulary in your repertoire, you should be able to understand rhetorical exchanges at a more meta- level. Reddit’s r/ChangeMyView is a unique subreddit in the broader digital media ecology, hosting detailed conversations about people’s beliefs in ways that often lead to public changes in those beliefs. The subreddit description is “A place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an effort to understand other perspectives on the issue. Enter with a mindset for conversation, not debate.” Posters typically post beliefs that they want to be tested, and commenters work to undermine or support specific claims in order to convince an audience of one, who interacts sometimes in real time to provide feedback about the persuasiveness of a given argument. Reddit’s infrastructure of upvotes and downvotes, “deltas,” and threaded responses, along with a committed community of moderators and participants, help create a community of arguers where the process of argument is actually valued.