Ordinary ways of looking at argument often don’t work with new media. For example, today I ran across this. The link appeared in one of my “personalized” ads on my Facebook profile page.
http://www.adverspew.com/
The ad begins with a contradiction. No transition between two completely opposite statements: I love advertising. I hate advertising. This goes against the grain of “good writing” but for some reason, it’s engaging. I realize the author might be crazy or confused, but I’m interested, so I click and it gives me the option of liking his Facebook page. There is a link (the one above) to his website. I see the image of a body that reminds me of the old game “Operation.” The body is covered with images that are activated by a rollover menu, with the instruction “rollover for spews.” You click on a spew image and a new windows opens with the “spew” and a box for reader comments. The site strikes me as brilliant. For one thing, I’ll go back because there is a lot to explore (there are many spews and I don’t have time to see them all now). I’m much likely to return to this site rather than to one that lists blog posts (the “spews”) in a traditional list of links.
