7. Reacting to Miley

        Weiss, the literary editor of New Yorker, wrote about the reactions of different people toward Miley`s performance at the V.M.A. She mentioned that even though Miley got criticized by the audience, she still got the attention from several people. She described that a young singer dancing half naked on the stage is not something new, but the more important part is the manic visual reinterpretation such as GIFs, mashups, animations and photo montages that were created right after the performance. Many GIFs and Vines were made on the audience`s reaction and it showed how the celebrities responded toward Miley`s performance. Her performance also draws our attention away from the more important news, for example the secret government programs and the battle scenes in Syria, which shows us how easy it is to be drawn away from the seriousness into frivolity. The author concluded that the people are more interested in the visceral response of the performance than the performance itself. The series of erratic movements and loopy facial expressions were strange and interesting for the audience, therefore many people were making videos on top of Miley`s performance.

             In the first paragraph, Weiss made it clear the main topic of her article by contrasting two sides of Miley’s performance. Her thesis was clear and well constructed with good vocabulary and sentence structure. She used many examples of reactions after the show, for example the combination of the “Breaking Bad” with her performance. She should have included the opinions from different specialists about the topic in order to increase the credibility of the article. The only name that she mentioned was Camile Paglia who she does not specify her position. In the fourth paragraph, the idea of Miley’s performance taking away the people’s attention from the serious news was distracting for the readers because it does not follow the previous idea of the paragraph.  She set a comparison between Miley and Lady Gaga in V.M.A because Lady Gaga is known for having a distinctive persona; therefore the author used her as a reference to compare her to Miley. Overall, the article was unique and the Weiss was able to express her own opinion about Miley’s performance to the readers, but on the other hand, she failed in supporting her opinion with other resources and keeping the flow of idea throughout the article. 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/08/miley-cyrus-vma-performace-response.html