Rhetorical Evaluation Of Jason Boog

Jaana Paske
G. Christopher Williams
English 150 Sec 14
2/20/2016

Rhetorical Evaluation of Jason Boog’s article, “Hello Barbie’s war on imagination: The childhood-destroying gift you don’t want to give your kid” on Salon.com

Jason Boog’s article “Hello Barbie’s war on imagination: The childhood-destroying gift you don’t want to give your kid” on Salon.com talks about the consequences of technological advances in the children’s toy industry on the natural creative development and personal relationships that parents form with kids. In “Hello Barbie’s war on imagination: The childhood-destroying gift you don’t want to give your kid”, Jason Boog is using powerful, fear-invoking language to make a point of how technology, and specifically the

The guilt of having had fallen victim to these toy companies is well planted, so Boog draws on the consequences of the toys to evoke fear on top of what is already producing turmoil in the hearts of his audience. Boog raises this level of fear when he makes a startling comparison for today’s parents. He relates Hello Barbie to another tech character that the generation of parents likely already has fearful memories of. Boog says, “Hellos Barbie even learns about your child through conversation, a lo-fi HAL 3000 from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ channeling a perky and dopey teenager” (7). Being such an iconic character in itself, the reference Boog makes to “HAL 3000”(7) carries more than enough connotation to invoke the response Boog is looking for and is masterfully placed so that his audience can truly see something sinister that they recognize within Hello Barbie. Channeling this fear already generated from the sci-fi icon, Boog now demonstrates just how similar Hello Barbie is when he gives an example of “the literal script that Hello Barbie would follow if I let her take control of my daughter’s morning playtime” (8). The script Boog chooses to showcase then exemplifies Hello Barbie asking specific questions and even creating games to play for the child. Here Boog both implies and proves his point by using the phrase “take control” (8), then demonstrating the ways that Hello Barbie guides the creative process in playtime. Boog slams down the hammer stating, “I am most worried about how this doll hacks straight into my daughter’s imagination-it could easily kill her family of imaginary friends” (11). This use of evocative language is no longer even subtle and directly states that Hello Barbie has the