Anything and Everrything all of the time : analizing noises caused by social media Through Kennth Burkes Dramatism

Abstract

Concerns are growing about the interaction between human beings and the Social Networks. In a context of social isolation deriving from the COVID-19 pandemics, we saw the Internet playing a significant role in our lives. As a Language teacher I present a Rhetorical analysis through Kenneth Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad. The artifact I analyze revolves on the theme of Social Media and how it affects our lives. It is a video clip of a song by the comedian Bo Burnham called “Welcome to The Internet” (2021). The show’s main theme is about the author’s own abilities to cope with reality and mental health issues during the 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic. This research and its analysis have the objectives of answering the following questions: Why is it a problem for young adults? How does it affect a classroom? And, specifically, what does the rhetor I picked have to offer on this theme? In order to answer the questions I review the literature to provide some crucial concepts on Social Media, definitions of Algorithms and the Mechanisms of disruption they present. After that I present the analysis in the form of an Essay where I guide the reader into the framing of the Pentad I did and the ratios between them. While doing so, the Essay sheds light on the problems we are facing now and identifies the dominant term, the Scene, framed as Social Media platforms and how the moment we live now is deeply related with an external agent purpose of disrupting our reality so it can sell our data and turn us, their users, into commodities for advertisers, their real paying customers. In this process it becomes evident that our mental health is deeply affected and every aspect of human relations deteriorates, including student-teacher and student-student interactions. When we understand that these problems derive from the amalgamation, velocity and amount of information of every type that we have to deal with at the same time, we can perceive that solutions to these problems will necessarily pass through new regulation and the untangling of information in a way that we can cope with, without denying the reality of these new phenomena.