As I was reading about the difference between rhetoric and culture, I found a few interesting facts about this comparison as I drew a chart about it, while taking notes. “Rhetoric had its beginnings in classical Greece 2,500 years ago, whereas cultural studies had its current roots in Great Britain in the 1970s” (O’Donnell, 2007, p. 137). The most interesting part about reading O’Donnell’s Rhetoric and Culture, while thinking about the comparison between those two terms, is how they each have a different origin. For example, the rhetoric is actually Aristotle’s definition as he viewed persuasion as “an instrumental of social adaption” (2007, p. 140). When I saw the word, logos (“words” in Greek), this term reminded me of the various logos that I was familiar with, such as the mermaid logo for the “Starbucks Coffee Shop” and the 31 logo for “Baskin Robbins.”
On the other hand, cultural studies have major concerns over television, which is a form of communicating with the audience and it is a source of social understanding. This means that numerous TV shows and films have the ability to tell the audience the story and send a message to the viewers about what is going on in our society. For example, we would watch or listen to the local news that is broadcasted on TV every night. Otherwise, there are most recent TV shows that give the audience the message about the real serious issues that are actually happening in reality. There was one episode from the TV show, Black-ish, where an African American family was watching the news about police brutality and racism still existing in our world.
