Scoggins 1

Noah Scoggins

Mrs. Munsell

ENC1102

6 April 2022

The Internet and Political Knowledge

In Mona Kleinberg and Richard Laus text, THE IMPORTANCE OF POLITICAL

KNOWLEDGE FOR EFFECTIVE CITIZENSHIP; DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE

BROADCAST AND INTERNET GENERATIONS, they argue that younger Americans relying

on the internet are less knowledgeable and more prone to forget facts about politics and

candidates. With the rise of the internet and social media over this last generation people are not

spending the time to attain the information rather than looking up what they need to know at

their convenience. But is this a bad thing? In this text the authors use of illustrations, appeal to

ethos, and appeal to logos help to convey their argument that people relying on the internet for

political information are less knowledgeable than the older generation.

In this text the authors analyze whether the access of internet in today's age affect the

importance of political knowledge. They go more in depth and explain that if people can look up

anything on the internet at their own convenience, then people will not spend the time to actually

take in the knowledge and know it compared to the older generation reading the daily newspaper

and watching the few select news broadcasters every morning and evening. They include the

experiment that they ran on the public to test their hypothesis and also included graphs of all the

information they included. They also included a great amount of ethos by including their

political science background and some stuff about them, and some very credible and

knowledgeable sources in their argument. They also had a huge appeal to logos as they included
 Scoggins 2

everything that went into running their experiment and the results that they got out of it. Not only

did they use logical reasoning in this argument, but they also included evidence to back up their

hypothesis.

One of the biggest appeals used in this text is logos. Logos makes up most of this

argument as they use a bunch of statistics and an experiment to back up what they are arguing

for. When running their test, they had a survey that approximately 17,000 people took the time to

take to get data. To do this survey in the first place the respondent had to have access and use the

internet. They asked many factual questions about the respondents' political knowledge such as

“What was the purpose of Guantanamo Bay”, and “Who is Condoleezza Rice?”. They also got

information on many variables that went into the respondents' answers, like age of course,

income, race and ethnicity, and if they have any interest in politics in the first place. After they

got about 17,000 surveys, they analyzed all of it into graphs which they included to give a better

understanding to the reader of what they are trying to prove. In one of their line graphs “Political

Knowledge and The Internet Generation”, they created a graph between low political knowledge

and high political knowledge on the x-axis, and candidate knowledge on the y-axis. In both

graphs it shows that the broadcast generation or older generation has more knowledge on

candidates overall than the internet generation which proves their hypothesis correct. By

including this information in their argument is a non-deniable fact and supports their hypothesis.

The author also un-tryingly appeals to pathos in this text. As it is mostly fact based there

is not much emotion included in the text but does show a sense of passion by how much time and

effort was put into this study and paper. At the beginning of the paper, they give information

about themselves and what they do for a living, as this is their profession, they put all the

knowledge and hard work they attained into this study and paper. For the group that they are
 Scoggins 3

targeting, the younger internet-based generation, when read by one of these people it could create

a sense of anger as the authors are nicely saying they are not as smart as some people are. They

could also use this as a learning point and take something good out of this and put more time into

increasing their political knowledge in hopes of creating a stronger American democracy. The

author could also possibly scare the audience by explaining how political knowledge is the

currency of American democracy, therefor if the reader doesn’t know anything about politics or

care about it could put them in a group leading to a failing democracy. This could urge them to

put more effort and learn more about politics.

The author also appeals to ethos in many ways in this text. They start out by including all

of their background information and their credibility in the political science field to let the

audience know that they are very knowledgeable on what they are researching and writing about.

Another huge part of this paper is all the sources that they include to strengthen their argument

and include more knowledge. They also include tests ran by other credible sources that are

relative to the tests and research that they have done in this paper. At the end of every page, they

include links that have more in-depth information on the topic talked about above, and a mix of

different and relative research done prior to this. At the bottom of the page if another link is not

included, they include some of their own words that go more in depth. Most of the articles linked

in the text are written by very well-known figures and journalists.

In this text the authors use of illustrations, appeal to ethos, and appeal to logos help to

convey their argument that people relying on the internet for political information are less

knowledgeable than the older generation. The authors use of these rhetorical choices really gives

a good understanding and posts a solid argument to the reader. The mix of these rhetorical

choices is extremely convincing to get people to believe the writers hypothesis. After reading the
 Scoggins 2

argument and understanding what is talked about in this text could influence the reader to put

more time into increasing their political knowledge and not only using the internet when they

need it!
 Scoggins 3

MLA Citation

Kleinberg, Mona S, and Richard R Lau. “Importance of Political Knowledge for Effective
Citizenship: Differences between the Broadcast and Internet Generations.” OUP Academic,
Oxford University Press, 5 Aug. 2019,
https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/83/2/338/5543803?redirectedFrom=fulltext.
(Accessed through the UWF Libarary)