escribe how Bezos left his job in 1994 and began Amazon.com. This is ironic in light of the previous article that was analyzed. While Elmer-DeWitt was offering doubts about the validity and safety of this new thing called the Internet, Jeff Bezos was pioneering a shopping Mecca of sorts for consumers. While it would be tempting to declare Elmer-DeWitt incorrect in his predictions, hacking is still one of the Internet’s greatest dangers, and privacy issues are only becoming more important to those online.Ramo ties his grounds and his claims together primarily by pointing out how our skepticism about e-commerce is consistently misplaced. “But wait a minute,” he says, “didn’t you say… ‘Who would buy books online’? And wasn’t it you who said, ‘I’d never buy plane tickets online’? And mortgages?…Concert tickets and CDs? ‘But I’d never’, you said. Yes, you will. You are.” This article makes good use of grounds to support the claims that have been made. The warrants tie the article together well, and help to organize Ramo’s ideas about the effects of e-commerce as well as its future. According to Toulman’s informal method of logic, this article is a sound one.The final article to be analyzed is a short editorial piece published in Rolling Stone magazine in March of 2000. Written by Jeff Goodell, it is entitled, “Who Needs Privacy?”Goodell offers the claims that one, our consumer habits and much of our personal information is being logged into corporate databases every time we surf the web and two, that because this information is being used only for corporate benefit it is acceptable for us to be electronically “trailed”. He also states that “anyone who thinks anything on a computer…is really private is dangerously nave.”As grounds for these claims, Goodell uses his personal e...
