As my exhibit, I have chosen social media because nowadays every other person uses some sort of social media platform especially the younger generations hence the future of the world. It has its entertainment and educational purposes but have you ever stopped to wonder about what significance it has brought in your life. After a while, people start to completely give in to these social media platforms that they start to spend more time looking at how other people are living rather then living their own lives. For my lens, I have chosen brain plasticity because it can be easily used to show the negative affects of social media platforms. The pairing of this Exhibit and this lens is very illuminating to the general reader because the reader may find himself in a very similar situation due to this exhibit being very broad and diverse. Due to the fact that social media was recently created between the last two decades, we can see how it has changed the way our mind works and how it is similar to books but much more vague. When a person goes on a social media platform, he is exposing his brain to many ideas, which is harmful for a person because there is a lot of manipulative content on them.

Clay Shirky’s “Does the internet make you smarter?” has shown me how similar the affects that invention of the internet and printed books had on the generation of people that used it. I wouldn’t have usually seen this similarity because books and the Internet are not associated together as much due to their physical features. Many people, like Martin Luther and Edgar Allan Poe, during the printing press thought that books were a great evil and were going to make the younger generations stupid. His essay showed me how it is often that the increase in freedom to create and consume media would make younger generations stupider is what scares people. Clay Shirky mentions that this type of fear has been seen throughout the printing press era as the production of erotic novels and can also be seen today as the pointless videos that we consume on the Internet everyday. Even though both medians have their early negative effects, however the Internet may soon evolve into something far more better than what it is at this point of its era.

The revision process brought a new perspective into the light for my essay. It allowed me to see the weak and strong points of my essay to see where improvement is needed most. The negative feature that my partner helped me look through was that my ideas were going off from one rhetorical feature to another and that they could use a better transition. In my draft, I had started off by talking about religious allusions but in then I start to talk about historical allusions. I had mistaken Dr. King when he talks about Nazism, as a religious illusion, but in fact, that was historical allusions and therefore didn’t fall under the rhetorical feature of religious allusions. I also realized that the structure of my essay could use some improvement to as I lay out the information for the reader and It should be easy to follow through. This was helpful since the whole essay is based on the rhetorical features that Dr. Martin Luther King uses in his letter from Birmingham jail to break through to the audience. If my partner had not pointed out this mistake, it would have led to me writing the essay in which the central point of the essay would not have been clear for the audience. These exercises allow a reader to improve their writing because there is always room for improvement.