AOW #19: Cartoon

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/3ynBGp/www.portfolio.com/images/site/editorial/illustrations/2008/02/cartoon-fish-large.jpg/

Summary: This cartoon is a metaphor for current internet search engines.  The largest fish obviously represents google, a search engine that dominates the internet.  It is eating less popular search engines, in order to represent a pond's food chain.
Author/Source: I found this cartoon on Stumbleupon, and you cannot easily see the artist's name on the cartoon.  Because of this it is possible that the cartoon is not from a reliable source, and the ideas it portrays are wrong.  However, it does look like a cartoon that would be shown in newspapers and magazines.
Context: This cartoon is clearly depicting the overwhelming power of google over other search engines.  People in society today would most likely say that they use Google over other websites and google has definitely become the largest.  The artist plays off of that in that the largest fish (Google) overwhelms all the other wesites' fishes.
Purpose: The author must have wanted to make fun of google's power compared to other websites.  In a way it is making fun of the other smaller websites because they have been eating by Google, and have no chance at ever being as large or powerful as Google is.  The author accomplishes this purpose.
Rhetorical Elements: This cartoon alludes to the idea of fish and the food chain, which represent the websites.  In this way it also appeals to communal memory, because someone who did not know about the food chain would not understand the humor in this cartoon.  One also has to know what Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo are.