playing with smoking arguments

I have stopped smoking some time ago, what a relief! While still struggling between eating and making everybody's life a living hell, I started reading more on tobacco issues and I came across some older devious anti-smoking campaigns designed by big tobacco companies. There are sooooo many things to say here, but I'll just focus on some linguistic features of their discourse, leaving others to deal with other aspects.

People would sometimes assume that it's commonsense for big fish in tobacco industry not to be very honest about their intentions, 'cos that's what happens when the big bad wolf watches the sheep, right? Things are not that simple, and their anti-smoking intentions can really LOOK very sincere; this is how they ended up "fighting against juvenile smoking", which is quite surprising, when we know that's the prey they're mostly after.

To cut the story short, in 1991 Philip Morris issued a short article which seems straightforward: "Philip Morris Doesn't Want Kids To Smoke". After reading it, it seems that something is amiss. I mean, at the surface, the arguments seem reasonable efforts to prevent kids from smoking, but are they really? Let's see how their argument is constructed:

Claim1> We don't want children to smoke.
Reason> Parents should encourage children to make the right choices, not just to follow along.

Claim2> We don't want children to smoke.
Reason> Smoking is not for young children.

The arguments deal not with reasons why it's good or bad to smoke, but they appeal to the young whether to consider smoking or not. If it's ok for adults, why isn't for me? And to make sense of claim1, we have to insert another premise, which people think of intuitively: if it's my own choice, then it makes it right, right? What they really say is this: young people are not adults and they tend to smoke because they follow others. Parents should help children make their own choices and not follow others. Period. But why is smoking bad for children???? That's the beauty of this paradox: while the arguments appear to be balanced and objective, they undermine the credibility of their own advice.

PS> I'm not a hypocrite, I am aware that a cigarette is there in my mouth in my profile pic, but I'm not playing role-modelling here. It's the only picture I like with me, and not because of that smoke...

REW (what I know about blogging)

It's already the 4th week of the blogging workshop and we reached the 1502nd message in our yahoo group... and counting. I knew the world was shrinking and knocking at my door, but I'm still old-fashioned (i.e. slow and a little overwhelmed by all this), so I stop for a second and, in a few phrases, summarize what I've learned:

1. blogs make it easy to use a lot of modes - especially image - but also music and sound effects. In this way, they change the representational potential of action of their users. Yes, you knew it already, I'm talking about "multimodality" and "interactivity", which can be interpersonal (you can write back to the text producer) and which means also that you can play hypertextuality with your friends (you can link texts with links and other texts and produce new texts and meanings a.s.o.);

2. this multimodality is made usual, easy, natural by the new technologies (I can still argue with that, I'm trying to add a photo to my profile for three days now). And this affordability and naturalised uses of multiple modes leads to a greater specialisation - blogs can be used successfully in many domains, education is my point here, given the context;

3. blogs are the perfect example of fictionality to the notion of author as source of the text; you all remember your primary school teacher asking you to put something "in your own words". But we know already that no one in this (in any) community has "their own words" other than the citing fragments of previously encountered texts, in the making of new ones. Now it's even simpler to bring texts into association and elements of texts or links reorganized as new texts, which in the end change the whole idea about authorship as originator.