Summary Of From Wasteland To Wonderland By Jeff Greenfield

Television today is basically unrecognizable compared to 40-50 years ago and in the best way possible. In the article, “From Wasteland to Wonderland: TV’s Altered Landscape”, Jeff Greenfield discusses his opinion on how TV has evolved through the years. He proves his points using many different forms of rhetoric. In this article which is aimed towards the American people who own a TV, he discusses, with a passionate tone, the history of TV and how it has changed over the years and through doing this he explains how it has literally gone from a wasteland to a wonderland. There are 2 main forms of rhetoric that Greenfield uses to get his point across which include his tone throughout the article and his use of appeals such as pathos, ethos and

Right from the start of the articles he pulls his audience in with a few fun names for the TV, ““The boob tube.”, “The idiot box.”,“The plug-in drug.”,“A vast wasteland.” and he keeps this interesting tone throughout the article. It is quite obvious that he really cares about what he is talking about and he speaks in first person in order to better connect himself to the topic. His language is very interesting and all of his words add life to what he is saying. Using words such as imagine, infinitely, countless, crumble, overwhelming, help his audience to draw a picture in their heads in order to understand the extent of what he is saying. Throughout the article, his tone is all around passionate and intelligent when it comes to the changes that have come to TV and he uses vivid words in order to keep the audience engaged so that they will care about what he is saying just as much as he does. An example of his passionate tone is in the first paragraph of the essay,”But it has happened. Why? For me, the answer lies in one essential fact: When technology replaced scarcity with abundance, every core assumption about TV began to crumble.“ In this excerpt he uses concrete, descriptive words and even though he is only talking about television he makes it out to sound like something much