"The Genre of Scams"
Gordon ByrdGordon Byrd is a rhetorically conscious writer with a long career of reading/writing emails. Periodically, he writes articles for magazines as a hobby. Currently, he is enrolled as a doctoral student in ECU's Rhetoric, Writing, and Technical Communication program. Contents |
Genre, Authority, & UptakeAuthority is not the only thing that persuades humans; other psychological factors can be leveraged for influence as well. Psychological researchers Goldstein, Griskevicius, and Cialdini (2011) have found that “reciprocity-by-proxy” was a more significant influence of persuasion than the control and other factors in their study (i.e. incentive-by-proxy). As a security concern this means that employees will do a favor for a stranger that they believe they are indebted to, or if their co-worker is the one who is purportedly in debt. Mitnick (2002) discusses other factors from research that have proven effective in influencing people. These other factors are consistency, social validation and scarcity (Mitnick, 2002, p. 248-9). Psychological research continues to question what influences security lapses. The phenomena of complete strangers persuading people to give out their sensitive information is also a concern in the field of rhetoric. I would like to investigate this form of persuasion from a rhetorical standpoint. To analyze these acts of persuasion I will use generic criticism. Genre criticism is typically used to find similarities in instances. Once similarities are found, then the critic determines if the patterns suggest a genre is being used in other occurrences (Foss, 2009, p. 137). Including a quote from Charles Bazerman, Foss says: The purpose of generic criticism is to understand rhetorical practices in different time periods and in different places by discerning the similarities in rhetorical situations and the rhetoric constructed in response to them-to discover "how people create individual instances of meaning and value within structured discursive fields." (137) Genres are used and reused throughout history and across borders. Kathleen Jamieson (1975) conducted a generic study on the early State of the Union addresses "and the congressional replies” (p. 406). She documents the commonalities between the first State of the Union and the King’s speech. The democratic country had rejected the monarchy and all of its trappings, so they thought. Once the new President gave the inaugural State of the Union address, the Congress replied in the same fashion as the King’s subjects, the Parliament, by giving an echoing speech (Jamieson, 1975, p. 411). If George Washington wanted to have Congress treat him like a king, then he did a great job. George Washington had found himself in the same rhetorical situation as King George III in giving his speech. Consequently, the Congress found themselves in the same rhetorical situation as the Parliament. Even though the new nation’s supposed ideological situations were drastically different from their former rulers’, the genres of both the address and the reply were nearly identical to the British model. This model is an example of a structured discursive field. The structure can be confining, as the nascent nation discovered. Not only is this a great example of what genre criticism can reveal, it also shows “that genres are dynamic discursive formations in which ideology is naturalized and realized in specific social actions, relationships, and subjectivities” (Bawarshi, 2003, p. 7-8). The Congressional reply in this case is a perfect example of “uptake” (Bawarshi, 2003, p. 95). The State of the Union enacted upon the Congress a response. It prompts another genre, a specific one that is used by the Parliament. The King’s speech given by the President has uptake on the Congress to respond like the Parliament responds. It is a learned response. The impetus for this reply is not seeded in the new country's democratic ideas, but in the genre that the President used. This genre acts on the Congress to respond as subjects to their king, President George Washington. To use Aristotle’s term, “invention” was not totally from within the Congress when they drafted the echoing speech. Bawarshi (2003) says, “[i]nvention, in this case, is an act of turning outward, not just inward, a way of positioning oneself rhetorically and ideologically at the same time as it is a way of discovering and exploring ideas” (p. 97). A genre acts upon someone through uptake, the genre invents, or dictates the genre of a response. Our society runs on genre and communities anticipate the proper uptake. Restaurant employees come to the table and the customer already knows the response expected before the waiter asks if they want to order. A nametag that says, “M.D.” at the end of the name is a genre whose uptake by patients, among other things, is to refer to the person as “Doctor.” Humor largely is based on knowing what is expected in a genre and not delivering the correct response, a deliberate misinterpretation of the uptake. The uptake can be engineered in such a way that the audience is unaware that they are being misled if the rhetor is using the proper genre and is convincing enough. If a man wears a pilot’s uniform into an airport, and asks the right questions, enters the right gates, etc., then he does not have to say he is a pilot. And if he is not a pilot, but he used the genre, he can engineer the uptake by the flight attendant to show him to his plane. The genre is used in rhetoric to produce an uptake. The rhetor does not have to successfully persuade a person to get the proper uptake, they simply must see themselves as subjects. George Washington did not have complete support by the Congress, but they gave him the proper uptake for the genre he used (Jamieson, 1975, p. 413). The only thing necessary is to use the right genre for the desired uptake. |