The first two comments I chose to analyze were comments from an article “Phys Ed: If You Are Fit, You Can Take It Easy” from the New York Times website. The article briefly explained studies about exercising at an elderly age and how if people stop exercising when they are old they will rapidly lose health benefits from years of exercise in their youth, but say that exercising once a day can immensely help this deterioration. These two comments were, as most of them, all helpful and usually use a personal experience to compare with the article. These people seemed to leave these comments to try to give an idea to others reading the article of what they are going through and to give these people a real life example and help out as much as possible. Both commentators left their names on their comments to allow others to look for their individual profiles. The comments were also very appreciative of the article and the author. The first comment I chose began his comment by saying “Great article” then goes on by relating this to his personal life by saying how he had gotten a gym membership for Christmas and how he hoped that it would help him with his bad back, because he is a farmer. This man was just trying to explain a personal experience of his and allow others to get an insight into what he’s going through. The next comment talks about how his hot flashes and muscle cramps are gone and how he has been off his medication for 6 weeks. Although this was a little less helpful he still tried to help by using an example from his life.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/29/phys-ed-if-you-are-fit-you-can-take-it-easy/
The second article that I decided to use was “Super Bowl VIPs complaining about their game experience” located in the yahoo sports pages. This article was about how Super Bowl fans were upset about their treatment at the Super Bowl and the NFL’s neglect to help and only compensated them for their tickets. Many fans had complained that the service inside the stadium was not very good and also many fans were left without a seat to sit in. However unlike the other article’s comments these comments are mainly unhelpful and negative, focusing on calling out the NFL and talking bad about the organization. The first comment I chose was “NFL is getting too big and greedy!” which is only focused on talking negatively about the NFL and not trying to help people viewing the article at all. The second comment is “Life is rough” which is also not helpful at all and is there for no reason. These comments were mainly emotion based and gave no actual help to the viewers; they were only there to give the opinions of the people leaving the post, in an immature.
After reading these articles I feel that comments can be a very helpful tool for people viewing these articles but not always. I feel that since the first article was more formal and focused on an older, and maybe more mature audience, that there comments were very helpful and useful for viewers. Since the other article was posted on yahoo’s page I feel that since the audience viewing the page is more diverse and can maybe include younger adults, that many comments will be very immature and not helpful. I feel that comments can be very helpful if they have some thought put into them and I feel that I will continue leaving more educated comments or comments that can actually help someone out or state my opinion about a topic.
