Charlie Brooker Article

• Purpose?

  To express an opinion and inform / entertain on the harmful effects of social media / communications
• Audience?

  1 - Guardian (and broadsheet) readers - socially progressive and left leaning target

  2 - educated, adult

  3 - fans of brooker + satire
• Context?

  1 - Brooker is a satirist, writer, producer and presenter

  2 - Public persona versus private life; he finds the idea of 'celebrity' as a distasteful concept

  3 - He is famous - wrote black mirror.

  4 - rising social media platforms

  5 - he is a regular writing of the guardian
• What voices does Brooker project?

  Acerbic / Satirical

  Self - deprecatory

  Humorous
• Topic?

  He has been critisized for turning the comments off in some of his articles: so he writes this article in response.
• Theme?

  In our modern society, we talk too much and do not reflect on what is being said.
• 'Now get out.' 


  Whilst this is a callback, his voice is extremely forceful and confrontational.

  Metacomment.
• Techniques

  Direct Address / meta comment through parenthetical aside

  Extended metaphor through lexical field of environment and pollution.

  Bathos / Hyperbole - all the way through talks about something important and then makes a joke.
• Genre = article / opinion piece
• Key quote: 'firing more words into the middle of all that began to strike me as futile and unnecessary' 


  Semantic field of war + pushing the extended metaphor into the idea of online communication being a battle ground.