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The Greyness in White Papers

The most surprising thing about this particular public piece of information is that it was paid for and sponsored. Not to say that this particularly indicates fraud but as Jill Walker Rettburg states in her book Blogging, on page 98, "commercial blogging…is the field where the temptation to create fake blogging personas is the strongest." Yet, this article was not published "commercially." It is the type of literature that shows up in business spheres. Another surprising thing, at first glance, was the table of contents. It makes sense within a document produced that has so much information packed into one space, but it was surprising how linear and formal the information appears to be presented.
In the white paper article "Illegal to Be Homeless: The Criminalization of Homelessness in the United States," the objective is clearly stated  and the purpose for its existence is obvious; the document seeks to present itself as a sort of guide to the legality of homelessness, stating "The following report will document that people experiencing homelessness are subject to basic violations of their civil rights through the unconstitutional application of laws, arbitrary police practices and discriminatory public regulations." The authors seek to present that the issue is widespread and not just a local issue that requires immediate attention.
The reason this particular document does not feel familiar is because it is a document focused on legal issues but it is not produced by a team a lawyers—it is funded and produced by people who appear to have a vested interest in the problem. Where this blurs between "journalism" and other types of public discourse is that "a journalist is presumed to be outside the action…", according to Rettberg on page 104 of her book. This document was very clearly not produced by someone who is outside the action. In fact, many involved directly work with the homeless—the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, just to name a couple.
This document is taking several different occurrences and synthesizing them, correlating them and giving them an outcome. Criminalization of homelessness is caused by discriminatory public practices, racism, and the housing-income gap. It seeks to be rational and tries to avoid being enthymematic in regards to their claims staked. Often times, this is the kind of article that would be used as the basis for changes made in public policy, a document not really produced for public consumption but still available to the public eye. That indicates transparency and an attempt at authenticity.
These types of reports don't seek to say they are an expert on a particular field but they do attempt to build an argument based on germane evidence and studies done by others, building an implicit and explicit argument based entirely on facts. It tries to maintain its formal tone but yet it wants to be an authority, the backbone for many arguments to come.

The Slice On Blogging and Why This is The Most Important Post on the Blog Right Now

Often times, a blog is started for personal reasons—built out of personal experiences or just a general interest and/or need to comment on a certain topic. According to Carolyn R. Miller Dawn Shepherd in their article "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog," "They are addressed to everyone and at the same time to no one." Of course, there can be specific blogs for specific topics that may only specifically appeal to a certain group of people but it is absolutely a fact that the genre was created around the desire to be witness. The viewers, purveyors, and the general audience that has propelled the blog into popular usage are "mediated voyeurs" and the consumed media is steeped in the immediate. We want secrets and juicy details—we want those sneaky pictures or videos and we want to be treated to the "authentic." We craved "… glimpses that seem more real because they are secret…" On top of this, blogs seem to be the closest way to get close to someone without having to personally interact with them but it also has the "… hope for connection, for community, and at the same time a more traditional voyeuristic enjoyment of stealth and the possibility of a glimpse of unguarded authenticity." Certainly, we are interested because there are people out there that want us to be interested, "voyeurism could not have become such a common preoccupation of our times without willing objects." They bring attention to themselves and allow their actions be mediated and appropriated and remediated and made real through media coverage and people's reactions to them. Our voyeurism is encouraged.

The other element of immediacy in blogs is the time function. It stacks oldest to newest, making that new, fresh content the most important thing. Sure, you can go back and look at older content but the most important thing is to stay on top of breaking news, breaking feelings, breaking interactions. It makes it real, just as Miller and Shepard insist "the reverse chronological organization of the blog [is] a feature that reinforces the impression that the content is true, or real."

Glamorizing Science

As far as websites go, there isn't really any limitation to the amount of space a journalist might have to explain scientific theories to the depths that they deserve, but the particular genre of scientific writing and "accommodation writing," as Jeanne Fahnestock calls it, stemmed from almost an entirely print medium; most of these types of articles used to be found in magazines like the Scientific American and Science, both of which have now switched to online publications. While in the past, as both of the analyzed sources (Jeanne Fahnestock in "Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts" and M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer in chapter 4 of their book Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America) have indicated, there were limitations of space; thusly, it was imperative that a journalist get the most pertinent information in their article as concisely as possible without completely fabricating the results or findings of the scientists they are quoting. However, there is still the problem of, as the Killingsworth-Palmer chapter states "if a particular source proves to be more willing about sharing information or to have a more interesting slant on a particular story, journalists may consciously or unconsciously privilege that source and thereby betray their own objectivity." On page 135. As a journalist, the constraints placed on their product are far more vast and limiting than those of the scientist writing for their peer group. Journalists have to make things interesting.
 However, with the age of digital media, while space is virtually unlimited, we still have the problem of engaging a non-scientific audience. This generally means having to have an interesting title and subtitle to get a potential reader to click on the article in the first place. As Killingsworth and Palmer say on page 134 of their book, "for a story to be considered 'news,' it must tell readers something they don't already know, something they haven't already heard or become accustomed to." This has to mean that topics don't often get revisited if small discoveries that slightly alter the outcome (at least in the eyes of the general public) even if the small discoveries actually drastically alter the meaning to the scientific community. If something seems to be curing cancer, to the journalists and general public that something cures cancer whether or not it causes other complications.
 The end goal of most journalism seems not to be to complicate things (as most scientific endeavors seek to do) but rather to simplify them—the author's job, as Fahnestock describes on page 281 of her article is to "glamorize." She states "[…] glamorizing is the (accommodating) writer's purpose throughout the accommodation, part of his heavy task of bringing a deliberately dry research report into the realm interesting journalism." The author wants to be recognized, they want to make a splash in the world of journalism and propel themselves forward to fame. This is how you get a writer like Jonah Lehrer. His audience trusted him because he wrote things that sounded interesting and as long as there was some scientific jargon and "cited" sources then obviously the reader is educating and bettering themselves.
 Educating and bettering ourselves is a large mass appeal of some of these well-known science (and non-science publications) give us as readers. There is a certain prestige in reading a particular publication on a regular basis. So, then, of course, we want to take things at face value. "We are pattern seeking primates," as Dr. Michael Shermer says in his TED talk "Why Do We Believe in Unbelievable Things?". We have something called association learning and our default state is to believe. So, if a journalist knows that if something is attention-grabbing enough that people will default believe their article and the only obstacle is writing style and rhetoric, why not omit a few words and make it interesting?

The Rhetorical Situation of Climate Change and Our Responses To It

In the Scientific American article "The Green Apple: How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change?" (what a mouthful) by David Biello, the most obvious and surface exigence is climate change. However, underneath of this, we have the exigences of the author "see[ing] a need to change reality and […] that the change may be effected through rhetorical discourse," as defined by Keith Grant-Davies on page 265 of his article "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents." There is a continuing conversation surrounding the climate change exigence—which is continually debated as an actual exigence—and that conversation makes up another exigence, as well as the rhetorical situation, and several of the things addressed (see: the hyperlinks included within the article itself) within the "The Green Apple…" article form the intertextuality of the article.  According to Julia Kristeva, as quoted by Frank D'Angelo on page 33 of his " The Rhetoric of Intertextuality", "any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." Biello is referring to previous articles hosted on the same sight, scientific panels that have already taken place in New York City, and professors or scholars who have already had a say in the discourse.
A large portion of the climate change discourse comes from scientists and experts who are warning a general public—those of us who may not exactly allow ourselves to believe scientists on the first go-round—of weather that is going to start effecting us whether or not we believe in climate change. Many are warning of storms that are capable of shutting down entire large cities, like New York City and Chicago, and it will happen continually as the climate changes.
At this point, it is worth noting that this article was written in 2010, and since then, New York City and the surrounding area has suffered another major hurricane (Hurricane Sandy) with mass flooding and power outages and deaths. Yet, there is still resistance to an effort to stem the tide, so to speak. This is why an author like Biello would see the need to write a science article for laymen in an accessible publication such as Scientific American. The thing is, climate change isn't quite so complicated as we might like to think—it is mostly a result carbon dioxide, "the primary greenhouse gas causing climate change", as Biello says. The solutions to these problems, completely altering our accustomed ways of life, are where we find trouble.
On top of these storms, we are running into increasing problems with drinking water. Fracking and natural gas drilling contaminate water sources that are already dwindling. As well as the national problem of (as the buzzwords suggest) our "crumbling infrastructure" that cause preventable injury and death. Biello quotes a man named Steven Cohen, who advised Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the PlaNYC effort as saying "You're looking at a city that could have its infrastructure compromised for periods of time by these climate change impacts…" in reference to New York City, but the take away and purposeful use of this quote is that this is a national and global problem that ought to be one of our top priorities.
Another exigence within this discourse is that these innovations referred to in the article—solar panel roofs, green roofs, etc—are, in large part, stemming from New York City—the country's largest and most trend-setting metropolis. When we, as a nation and—to a lesser extent—the world, see New York City doing these things, it's worth pointing out because it has the potential to change opinions and behavior simply by existing in New York City. Only problem is that this kind of information rarely, if ever, makes it onto mainstream news stations. We're supposed to see these efforts and believe that our towns ought to be making similar moves. The author believed that perhaps some of his readers could feel persuaded or even like they could receive some instruction (as D'Angelo talks about on page 44 of his article "The Rhetoric of Intertextuality") from the example NYC has set. The problem then, is convincing American cities that alternative energy and energy-reducing technologies are a worthwhile investment. According to Cohen, as quoted by Biello, "New York City is already the most energy-efficient place in America…" but he also believes it to have the potential for more. While some people may protest that it is easier for a city with such a small people per square mile area, the author still saw it as his job to implicitly let his readership know that it is possible to make these changes elsewhere.
The author wants to illustrate that New York City is trying to make these precautions and resilience measures are part of their city standards and that for cities/states that regularly experience natural disasters (Florida and hurricanes, for example) ought to also be coding these precautions into their infrastructure as well. Another exigence, as far as example goes, is the fact that New York City is technically a coastal town with kilometers and kilometers of coast line—they want to prevent property damage as much as any other town and ought to take similar precautions since 39%of the population is living in coastal areas (that only make up 10% of the US'stotal landmass).
D'Angelo says, on page 33 of " The Rhetoric of Intertextuality",  "every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts…" This article is just one piece in a giant, never-ending puzzle that is the discourse on our modern climate change. Since its publication, there have been countless other articles that have completely ignored this one, made vague references to this one, or even directly quoted/based their argument off of this one. Similarly, it is likely that Biello has written some sort of follow up or counterpoint article to this one since he continues to write articles for Scientific American.

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