Solace Of Oblivion Rhetorical Analysis

The Right to be Forgotten Pathos and logos are two techniques used in the following article. To pull the readers into the article The Solace of Oblivion, the reader uses the literary technique known as pathos. To start the article, the author Jeffrey Tobin wrote, “On October 31, 2006, an eighteen-year-old woman named Nikki Catsouras slammed her father’s sports car into the side of a concrete toll booth in Orange County, California. Catsouras was decapitated in the accident.” This is an issue that creates sympathy for the family of Nikki Catsouras and gets the reader to empathize and side with the argument in the article. With a lack of privacy due to the Internet, the right to be forgotten needs to be advocated and upheld in the United States,

Back in the day when there was no Internet, criminal records and similar records would quickly fade away, however now a days its almost impossible to expunge such records from the Internet. Toobin states, “In Europe, the right of privacy trumps freedom of speech; the reverse is true in the United States. Europeans think of the right to privacy as a fundamental human right, in the way that we think of freedom of expression or the right to counsel. (2) The furthest the United States has gotten to freedom of privacy is the laws that Congress has passed prohibiting the disclosure of medical information, education records and video store rentals. All of these protections can be competently overridden by law-enforcement investigations. Toobin, along with Mayer-Schonberger, have a strong belief that “we can’t trust anybody – not the state, not a company – to keep its own role and protect the rights of the individual.” (3) Schonberger also published a book entitled “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.” Schonberger asserts that the European postwar, post-Wall concerns about privacy are even more relevant with the advent of the Internet. Back in the day, they used to keep records on paper and film in filed cabinets, making the material harder to retrieve and publish. Schonberger says today, “digitization and cheap online storage make it easier to remember than to forget,

Although their situations are completely different from Catsouras, they’re actually somewhat similar. They both have documents and articles posted about them on the Internet, which are unable to be taken down which effect them in different ways. Over one hundred million U.S. citizens have a criminal records, in which are getting easier and easier to access. Even with the expungement of criminal records, which are completely erased from the system, documents and articles still wander the Internet, making the information accessible to the public. Over thirty states allow different forms of expungement of criminal records, but even with the expungement, the articles still appear online because of Google searches. This creates many issues for past criminals in which they are unable to get jobs because of a simple Google