Comparison:
Ms. [Linda] Stone has since expanded the concept and renamed it ‘screen apnea,’ referring to the disruption of breathing many of us experience doing all kinds of tasks in front of a screen.
Powerful new combination comparisons can arise when a public communicator (a rhetor) combines a well-known concept or piece of cultural knowledge (e.g., sleep apnea) and reformulates it as a new label or designation (e.g., screen apnea). The transference is nearly instant and quickly serves by recasting the new portion of the designation (in this case "screen" as a shorthand reference for the many electronic screens we use each day).
Context:
In 2007, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft executive, realized that even though she did breathing exercises every morning, when she sat down at her laptop and opened up her inbox, it all went out the window. ‘I would be like, Huh, I was just breathing but I’m not breathing anymore,’ she said. Her inhales and exhales became barely detectable and shallow, she noticed.
Ms. Stone decided to conduct an informal study (‘dining room table science,’ she called it), inviting 200 people into her home — friends, neighbors, family members — and monitoring their heart rate and breathing while they checked their email. Roughly 80 percent of participants periodically held their breath or altered their breathing, she said. She named the phenomenon ‘email apnea’ and described her findings in a widely read 2008 piece in The Huffington Post.
Ms. Stone has since expanded the concept and renamed it ‘screen apnea,’ referring to the disruption of breathing many of us experience doing all kinds of tasks in front of a screen.
Citation:
Gupta, Alisha Haridasani. “Checking Email? You’re Probably Not Breathing.” New York Times, 21 Aug. 2023. Web.
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