Blog Post #4

This is a very interesting prompt. It was very different analyzing readers comments opposed to analyzing the actual article and it’s contents. The articles I choose were both about sports and how it affected society as a whole, this corresponds to my ARP paper. The first article I found was all about sports and commerce, and how it affected society. It talked about the money that sports brings in, and even though sports was not originally intended to make money, society places such an importance on sports that people choose to exploit it as a business opportunity. The author also talked about how this was wrong for people to us sports as a major income source because it is important to society, and essentially people are exploiting society for money. He argued that this was wrong to do. The great thing about this article, is that it is very controversial, therefore the comments had a wide range of opinions.
There were several things I noticed about these comments. The ones that were the most influential had several defining characteristics. First of all, comments that respected the views of the author were more influential. No one appreciates a comment that is disrespectful, it automatically discredits what that person has to say. Where as when the person respects the authors opinion, it shows not only maturity, it also shows intellectual ability. It shows that the person can understand the authors point of view, and just has the ability to argue against that point of view. Second of all, they present their arguments in a rational, logical way. They provide a step by step, detailed train of thought, were the reader can easily follow them and understand their perspective.
The next article I found was more focused on coaches, and how they can affect the players lives. The author thought that the measure of a successful coach should be how many players return the next year. His logic was that a coaches job is to make sure sports is a positive experience, and that can be shown by the number of returning kids. However, this is also controversial, many people believe that it is the values and the lessons the coach instills in the kids. This created controversy again on the posting walls. This time I noticed some other things that were interesting. People who let passion take over their post, don't make a very convincing argument. While passion shows they care, sometimes passion blinds the person to the facts, and they don’t even use facts, or logic. The other thing that noticed was that people who put one sentence responses such as “I agree with the article” or “that is a good point”, they don’t bring anything useful to the conversation, they do no analysis. It just interrupts the flow of the conversation.
These observations I made were very interesting and show me some examples of what to do, and what not to do in my blog post.