Bogost’s Rhetorical Moves

Here are five rhetorical moves I see Bogost using in “The Problem With Diversity in Computing” and a few comments about them.

1) Bogost opens his article using an anecdotal story about Amy Webb’s experience at a TSA checkpoint. This helps us visualize an example of human and technology interaction and also creates empathy in his readers, because Webb’s experience is not pleasant, and most of us can relate to it. Bogost uses this example to introduce his main point (diversity is much needed in the tech industry but it’s not an easy problem to solve). This works for me, although I would have liked to have the TSA experience of men described to highlight the difference in treatment.

2) In the 5th paragraph, Bogost uses a direct quote from Webb to emphasize and support his main point. Because Webb is a professor who has written about human-technology interaction, he draws on her view as an expert to support his argument. Webb says: “someone like me wasn’t in the room.” This works as supporting evidence for me, but since Bogost leads into her quote using the words “the fact that” I’d like to see some facts or statistics too.

Several times, Bogost uses a strategy of stating a commonly held belief or quotation (they say), followed a bit later by a transition phrase that signals that he is not necessarily in complete agreement (I say). I liked these moves because they allowed him to discuss the diversity issue from various sides and helped support his overall point that there is no easy solution. Here are 3 examples:

3) In paragraph 5, he writes: “That idea echoes a popular suggestion to remedy computers’ ignorance…increase the diversity” Then he starts paragraph six with: “But that’s an aspirational hope.”

4) In paragraph 7, he writes: “Fixing the flow of talent into this system, the thinking goes, will produce the workforce that Webb and others are calling for.” At the beginning of paragraph 9, he acknowledges this idea but returns to his point when he writes: “Those efforts have merit. But their impact might be a drop in the bucket…”

5) In paragraph 12, Bogost quotes Charles Isbell, a dean of computing, who says: “Diversity is just membership…. Integration is influence, power, and partnership.” Bogost immediately follows this expert opinion with yet another statement that returns to his point about the complexity of the problem: “But integration is much harder than diversity.”

Overall, Bogost’s rhetorical moves allow him to explore the diversity issue from many angles and help him make his point that we know what the problem is, but fixing it is a lot harder than it looks.