Week 7: Reflection Blog

What I've done during my Social Media Campaign and what I learned about making arguments from the three videos we watched this week!

This week we did a Social Media Campaign (SMC). This was helpful in learning about the problems sharks faced and what solutions there are to those problems because I did sole research on that matter. I did research to find information I could tweet about, in order to help spread awareness on my species. Some of the problems I learned about are shark finning, overfishing, bycatch, climate change, water pollution, and habitat loss. Out of these problems, I think the most important is shark finning. Shark finning is the act of removing the fins off of sharks for human gains, and releasing them back into the water to slowly die. This is an important problem because there are increasing demands for shark fins, especially because of the growing popularity of shark fin soup. This is also one problem that leads to a great decline in the population of sharks. Evidence I can include in my essay to prove that this is an important problem is how many sharks are influenced by this problem: around 100 million sharks per year. Solutions I found for the shark finning problem included protecting sharks with the help of legislation and reducing the demand for shark fins. Reducing the demand for shark fins sounds like the most feasible solution because if there is no demand for shark fins, there is no reason to participate in shark finning.

One organization I learned about for my SMC was the Shark Research Institute. Their website contains a page dedicated to shark finning, with information I can use to help define the problem and express why it is such a big problem that needs to urgently be addressed. Here is a link to this specific shark finning page on their website: https://www.sharks.org/shark-finning. For my SMC, the two best tweets I had is my tweet about the issue of shark finning and my tweet about the issue of bycatch. My shark finning tweet had the best content and my bycatch tweet had a great picture that was intended to catch the attention of my followers. Finally, I made an infographic of the issues sharks face, which can be depicted below! I hope to use my infographic in my advocacy essay. I will insert it in the section of the essay that addresses the issues sharks face because that is what my infographic is about.

My Shark Infographic!

This week I looked at three videos that made arguments about animal issues. I learned that when I write, I can use the ideas of other scientists to make my arguments and support my writing. In the videos, the ideas of scientist Darwin and his discovery that we are all just animals because of our evolution was used repeatedly to back up the arguments of the speakers. Additionally, I also learned from the ways these speakers argue and present philosophical questions. Speaker Richard Ryder argues with the help of visual elements. He uses videos and clips to appeal to the emotions of his audience, to help get his point across. Speakers Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins do a great job of exemplifying their argument with examples that can really speak measures to their audience and raise philosophical questions. One example of this is when they bring up abortion and address how embryos feel less pain than fully grown animals, yet we have no problem buying meat from the store for our meals. They then in turn raise the question of how we can allow these animals to sufferer without a thought, yet some make big deals out of the sufferings of an embryo that can barely feel pain. Speaker Gary Yourofsky speaks with a great deal of passion and presents many philosophical questions with that same amount of passion. This helps him get his argument across, inspiring change. These are aspects I would like to include in my AP. To add on, when writing my essay I would like to use ethos, pathos, and logos by backing up my argument with credible sources, touching on the emotions of my audience with visual elements, and using scientific language and a formal tone to present myself as a credible writer who has done their research. One quote that I hope to refer to in my essay is one from Ryder who says, “it doesn’t matter what species you’re from any more than it matters what race or gender you’re from, the pain is the same so we should all have the same sort of respect” ("What is Speciesism" 2:20).

I hope you were able to learn about my SMC and what I learned from analyzing the three videos I watched this week!

All the best,

Pallavi Rajeev