Within this post, I’ll detail my project’s argument according to the principles of rhetoric we’ve discussed in class / read about in The Craft of Research and then I’ll categorize my argument based on Semenza’s 6 types of arguments (see chapter 5).

Components of my argument

[Claim] Live tweets during/about presidential debates have little or no effect on people with opposing views, rendering Twitter an ineffective tool for making a political stance unless one’s goal is to speak in an echo chamber. [Reason] This situation arises from the fact that each side (left/right) seems to generate their own hashtags in response to events during the debates. Depending on who one follows, they may never see / know to search for posts with hashtags being used by other users with opposing views. [Evidence] I expect my data to provide evidence showing that the distance in Twitter’s vast social network between the average Clinton supporter and the average Trump supporter is great enough that the same information/tweets/hashtags is/are unlikely to flow between these two individuals and/or will show that many such individuals are actually completely unconnected from one another. [Warrant] When there is great distance between two nodes in a given network, or when two nodes in a given network are unconnected, information will not / cannot easily flow between said nodes.

As far as acknowledging/responding to limitations and/or potential criticisms, I’ll be better able to make such remarks after I have spent more time with my data and have gotten a better grasp on what they do and do not allow me to say.

Type of argument

By process of elimination, I’ve concluded that this project best fits Semenza’s description of a pragmatic proposal. I’m not really writing about social-network theory for its own sake, and I’m not applying theoretical perspectives to something. Rather, I’m proposing that something is a certain way and is not well suited for a specific kind of use, and using theory to warrant the reasons in my argument.