Rhetorical Velocity Of Twitter
For the last few weeks i have been trying to raise awareness on the problems with the over consumption of alcohol, specifically among college students. The groups a choose to follow for this assignment were news sources, drinking problem twitter handles (more funny posts then raising awareness), and alcohol awareness groups. I choose to retweet one tweet from the NCADD about addiction to alcohol and drugs that I though carried a lot of meaning. The other one was related to states trying the raise taxes on alcohol and the responses people had from that. I thought those two tweets were good to use since they really stuck out to me. One was a recent news article and the other one was in the form of a video. For social media sites, such as twitter, it is crucial to use videos and pictures because people would usually rather have facts presented to them visually in a picture then have to capture those facts through text.
After that I composed a few tweets of my own. Here I wanted to have a variety of different methods to capture my audiences attention.
For my first two tweets i chose to use pictures raising awareness on alcohol consumption. The first one was rather simple but i thought that would be a good first tweet. The second one which highlighted the affects of alcohol on the body was more serious and was supposed to make people think.
After that i wanted my next tweet to be a little more lighthearted, maybe make people laugh while still staying relevent to my topic. This is what i tweeted.
Finally my last two were links to very relevent, interesting news stories i read, and wanted to share with the rest of my peers. The links to the story of increased risk of alcoholism when starting at a early age and new school stratagies to reduce students drinking risks can be found there.
I believe this combination of tweets carried rhetorical velocity because it used many different means of communication to reach out to the reader. I used pictures, videos, news links, studies, and humor to get people thinking more on my topic.
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I favorited your tweet of “what alcohol tells you”. Like you said, it was lighthearted and made me laugh. In order to have high rhetorical velocity,the audience has to like the tweet. It’s a funny picture that made me think about the use of alcohol.
I favorited your #TheDangersAreReal tweet. I thought you conveyed an interesting image very effectively. You presented an image that clearly depicts the effects of alcohol, and offered a memorable hashtag along with your tweet. This gives your tweet a high rhetorical velocity and makes it very memorable.