My roommate and I constantly look for new activities to try
out. We’ve dabbled in yoga, knitting club, ballroom and salsa dancing, and
countless other seemingly random clubs and activities. We hold this obsession
up to our intellectual curiosity, when in reality it is more likely our
attempts to discover a true passion or talent while we are at Penn State and
are exposed to so many activities not available in high school or in the “real
world.” In any case, our most recent pursuit was the Penn State Women’s Crew (or
rowing, as it’s often called) club team. We had received a flyer in our mailbox
for an informational meeting. Usually such announcements go straight to the
recycling bin, but this one caught our eye. Not knowing much about crew, we
took a second look at the paper. The picture of smiling girls in a boat,
looking like they were having the time of their lives, definitely drew us in.
The rhetoric and persuasive powers from such a simple photo were unbelievable;
it made us want to learn more about the Crew team and potentially join. Already
remotely in shape from daily gym workouts, we figured it wouldn’t hurt to
attend the meeting.
Fitsugar Google Images
The night listed for the meeting on
the announcement came around, and we headed out. If we thought the flyer was
enough to influence us to join, the team was even more convincing. Yeah, we
would have to get up at 5:30 every morning for the 6:15 workouts, but the camaraderie
and amazing workouts promised seemed to make it worth it. The girls were
extraordinarily friendly and perky (especially since they’d been up since 5:30!),
pointing out various pros, humorously including the fact that the boys on the
team were cute, but also maintaining complete honesty. They were sure to warn
us that our bodies would hurt immensely and it would be a love-hate relationship
with the sport. However, we immediately felt as if we fit in, and laughed
constantly with the team. And we found ourselves stumbling out of bed the next
morning before the sun had even risen and dragging ourselves to what was
promised to be a workout that would put us in pain. But a good pain, apparently.
And it was – two full hours of intense cardio, abdominal workouts, skill
practice rowing on the ergometer, and an absolutely insane circuit-training
route.
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By the end, I certainly felt
muscles I previously didn’t know I had. I felt good though. Good enough to come
back the next day. They had successfully lured in my roommate and me. We were
pumped; we were ready to commit. Unfortunately, the end of practice also
brought with it what would be the end of our short careers as rowers: the news
that we would have to pay a four hundred dollar fee. All the effectual rhetoric
in the world couldn’t convince us, two essentially broke college students, to
pay that.
As
most of the modern, Internet-dependent world was well aware, yesterday saw an
unprecedented “blackout” of major websites, namely Google and Wikipedia, among
others. If you haven’t heard of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act and PIPA, the
Protect IP ACT, they are anti-piracy bills proposed to stop copyright
infringement and illegal downloading, allow for the suing of such sites, journalists, and individuals. In order to do this, the government would
have to censor the web, blocking countless websites, and restricting what
search engines can provide to users. However, these bills wouldn't even be effective, as the sites could still be accessed by typing in the IP address and therefore still allowing downloads. The targets of the bills would mainly be
sites based in other countries. SOPA has received massive opposition, and is
currently in the process of being reworked, which could take months. Now that
SOPA is in the public eye and heavily resisted, it is constantly losing
popularity (1, 2).
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So
where does rhetoric and civic engagement come into play? The potential passing
of these bills has created some major forms of protest, unsurprising since it
aims to hinder the one of the rights that America was founded on – freedom. Yesterday,
January 18, was an Internet blackout day, where sites like Google and Wikipedia
showed their negative response to the bills. Wikipedia entirely shut down for
the day, effectively proving its point and further deterring procrastinating
college students all over the country. Google, though remaining up and
functioning (Thankfully! It would be hard for me to go even one day without
Googling something – further proof of how lost we would be with a censored
Internet.), placed a blackout bar over its logo and a link to instructions on how
concerned citizens could contact their Congressional representatives. Countless
videos explaining the bills and their negative consequences were released to
YouTube and other sites, as well as a myriad of articles. Almost every website
I visited yesterday had links to petitions to sign, or rousing slogans
encouraging me to call my representative. Even my personal social network sites
were taken over by it. I was invited to Facebook events to demonstrate my
discord to the bills by joining and showing solidarity, spreading the word, and
making a difference by calling my representative. Those I follow on Twitter, especially celebrities who hold a lot of
power to persuade others due to their prominent social status, wrote countless tweets to raise awareness.
Take Action Google Images
The
hype over SOPA and PIPA and stopping them at all costs spread ridiculously
fast, effectively proving how when people care about a cause, they will not
hesitate to become civically engaged and use rhetoric to persuade others successfully
to care about the cause, too. After all, I started yesterday knowing nothing
about SOPA, PIPA, or the blackout, and ending it by signing a petition.
