Convincing and persuading: The rhetoric of maternity on social networks

This essay analyzes the argumentative basis of the maternity debate on the main social network sites, in relation to the debate on the draft of Cirinnà bill on gay and lesbian civil partnerships in the Italian Parliament, to evaluate its congruence. The study of suasion (Eco, 1986), defi ned as a technique of covert persuasion, i.e., concealed and hidden (Mortara Garavelli, 2001), in relation to new media, represents “a new area of rhetoric, which deals almost exclusively with words and the act of writing in largely predetermined contexts” (Marazzini, 2001).