Satiracally Sustainable

 This video seems to match up nicley with last week's comments!  These guys are so talented!

Tiny Virtual Bubbles

WOW!  Oh, where to begin! Trolls, digital muckraking, reputation economy, scary half-clothed racists, incredibly talented sardonic musicians, "Crowd Accelerated Innovation", "Filter Bubbles" (I think that would make a good song title - I should email Jimmy!), dialectic algorithms, knowledge compression, and "complex yet simple".....Pheww, did I leave anything out?!

Seriously...my head is spinning!

Let me see if I can make some linear (or circuitous, not sure yet...) attempt at piecing this information together.  There seemed to be a thread ebbing throughout these pieces for me in that our world is truly digital, increasingly smaller, yet eerily primitive in some ways.  Chris Anderson's TED Talk conveyed this message loud and clear.  He spoke about how reading and writing are relatively new phenomena but storytelling is age-old or primal.  There have been a couple of posts and discussion threads in this class asking if digital media is nothing more than advanced cave pictographs and Anderson's point seems to echo that sentiment.  Are we really only getting back to our "roots?"  I also liked the way in which David McCandless ties this thought together with his graphic that depicts our senses and how much we perceive visually versus how much awareness we have.  He claims that visually, we have the bandwidth of a computer network but only .7 percent of awareness...breathtaking!  It is no wonder that two people can look at a piece of art and come to such different conclusions as to its interpretation. 

And what about perception?  Why do some people decide that the "mask of anonymity" is enough for them to ditch societal norms, morals and values and engage in "virtual rage and fantasized violence?" (Adams, 2011).  Are some people predisposed to being assholes in "real life" and ramp up the venom in their online personas or is the guise of anonymity simple enough to bring out the worst in otherwise morally conscious people?  Which beings me to Alexandra Wallace...was she serious?  I can't decide if she was attempting some satirical improv or just downright ignorant and racist.  Regardless of her intention, I think this brings up another point; the girl got run out of town!  Apparently the backlash was so overwhelming that she felt she needed to quit school and leave UCLA.  Our lives are SO public these days (albeit, if we CHOOSE them to be) and moments that may have been embarrassing and regretful are now reasons to quit school and possibly even fear for our safety. 

Which brings me to another point.  I LOVE the idea of the "Reputation Economy"  as posed by the Thompson piece on wired.com.   The fact that truth (or some semblance of truth) and transparency in business and economics has somehow become profitable and expected is remarkable!  Don't get me wrong; I think we are far from knowing every trade secret or backroom deal but it seems that CEOs are realizing and embracing the idea that "CEOs who can write and blog have a competitive advantage" (Thompson, 2007) and we, the consumer are watching.  However, a statement made by one of the contributors of the piece concerns me somewhat when he says, "...I've always felt that political campaigns ought to be totally transparent. There ought to be embedded cameras and journalists who have 100 percent access to all meetings, with all content being posted on the Web. That would distill legitimate dialogue from the spin very quickly" (Thompson, 2007).   Hmmmm...

Would our world really be a better place if cameras where everywhere and every conversation were public?  I realize that this commentator is wanting more transparency in elections and government with which I agree, but I question the loss of privacy and intimacy that could be gone if our lives were that public.  Maybe I really don't want to know and maybe its none of my business!  

Hyper-Visual

Reading visually.  These two words seem at odds with one another, however, it is quite apparent that of course we "read" images, pictures, motion, etc.  McCloud's chapters were sort of an eye opener for me.  I actually really don't care for comics.  I have never seen the point and I really don't like the little boxes - they always seem so confining.  But McCloud made me think "outside the box" in a way that I had never considered.  I don't think I am going to go pick up a comic book anytime soon, but I can definitely say I will give the boxes more thought the next time I have a chance encounter.  I was particularly drawn to his discussion about the accessibility of the cartoon image.  As an image becomes more cartoonish, we are more likely to assign our own meaning and identify with the character - there is a certain "universality of cartoon imagery" (p. 31).   He made a really profound point about our self-centeredness when he states, "We see ourselves in everything.  We assign identities and emotions where none exist.  And we make the world over in our image" (p. 33).  Even as I quote these sentences - these words that he has strung together to convey a message - part of the message and profundity is lost without the imagery. 

 This idea was brought home after viewing the class A/V projects.  If part of the structure is missing, say no music or blurry text, the message is altered to either mean something else or have no meaning at all.  If I can't see "myself" in something, I am unlikely to identify or become emotionally involved with that something.  In particular, Matt's piece A Video About Sidewalks, is a terrific example of bringing alphabet, image, video and sound to convey a simple, yet seemingly complicated subject.  Why is a sidewalk something I should care about?  Matt provides a soundtrack and images that make me want to care.  His use of carefully chosen alphabetic text further provide his audience with the facts that he wants us to understand and use to come to a conclusion.  As he states in his post, "sidewalks aren't very sexy" but they are integral to a healthy community in the form of increased health, lower crime rates, and maybe a few less abandoned couches on the curb.  All of these observations and information were contained in a 2.5 minute short that makes me want to care that his neighborhood doesn't have sidewalks.  His rhetoric indeed has persuaded me to consider an issue that I had no idea I cared about.  If he had left out the alphabetic text and maybe just provided his audience with video of missing sidewalk, I don't think his message would have been as convincing. 

Which brings me to Sosnoski's piece Hyper-readers & Their Reading Engines.  Sosnoski says, "...reading is a highly selective process, one in which the majority of details are forgotten..." (p 165).  He also states that "graphics often play a more meaningful role than words" (p. 169).  Matt's graphic presentation summarizes a complex issue that in my mind is more meaningful than a carefully prepared oped in the Comicle.  He obviously had much more information that could have been included, yet the simplicity and directness of the video conveys the message in a way that will not be forgotten.  Matt has created a conceptual framework with his choice of music, video and alphabetic text in which I can understand his message and come to a conclusion about the importance of something as ubiquitous as a sidewalk. 

McCloud provides us with a very helpful triangular analytical tool for dissecting the "pictorial vocabulary."  The vertices are reality, language and the picture plane.  He points out that in comics, there seems to be a divide between received information (pictorial content) and perceived information writing/language content) and asks if the two sides can be reconciled.  I think Sosnoski believes that these two sides inevitably will be reconciled.  As many of us have blogged about throughout the course, today's techie generation demands digital communication and the ability to "filter, skim and peck."  He says, "...hyper-readers feel liberated from the constraints of such textual guidelines and feel that they are now free to organize textual features in patterns relevant to their own concerns..." (p. 172).  To me, Matt's video emphasizes Sosnoski's point.  Through multimedia, Matt is able to convey a message in a pictorial vocabulary in which I, the hyper-reader, am able to organize the information in a pattern that is relevant to my concerns.  I am able to empathize and respond more deeply because his message is acceptable on my terms. 

Rocket Men

Critical Photo-Essay

This week's readings and particularly Ken Robinson's Ted Talk got me thinking about the future of education in America and changes that need to be made to engage the next generation of students.  I have two children so this issue is particularly important to me as my boys navigate the public education system over the next dozen years.  In my opinion, the system is broken and we need new pedagogies to inform our communication of knowledge sharing and instruction.  Rather than focusing on how broken the system has become, I would like to focus on innovative techniques, inspirational stories,  and/or current research investigating the benefits (or purported failings) of whatever new methods or theories that are out there to inform the future of education.   So I think my thesis becomes, "How does digital rhetoric inform our teaching pedagogies across curriculums to engage the next generation of students?".

Irrelevant

So much to think about this week!  Even though the readings were relatively "light" compared to prior weeks, so many thoughts have surfaced and personal connections have been made.  I was particularly enthralled with Sir Ken Robinson's Ted Talk (yes, I used enthralled on purpose...) and I think he beautifully summed up the current status of education.  Our education system was imagined during the industrial revolution when we were concerned with churning out laborers, not engaging people's talents.  It is a linear system that is extremely hierarchical and its time has passed.  We need to start engaging our students organically and "reconstitute our sense of ability and talent."  Jeremy Rifkin in his book Third Industrial Revolution, which is a visionary tale of a decentralized power grid, also addresses this very issue.  Rifkin claims that in order for our society to address climate change, we need to embrace a new vision of a power grid that is fed from multiple points (solar panels on roof tops, wind turbine in the back yard) rather than coming from a centrally located source (coal-fired plant, etc.) and he believes that our education system plays a key role in making this drastic change.  He believes that our current and future challenges cannot be met with technology and education of the past and that our classrooms need to be collaborative and customized to the student so that the student then has the ability to be truly creative.  We need to ignite a passion in our youth if we are going to address our social problems and clearly from all the posts last week our system is failing to give students that opportunity.  As Robinson said, "Education dislocates very many people from their natural talents" which to me means, our children need to be taught to be critical thinkers and learners and to engage their innate talents - not taught how to take bubble tests. 

So what does this "organic" education system look like?  The 10 million dollar question...We are truly smack-dab in the postmodern age and yet our major systems are stuck in the industrial revolution.  I thought Wysocki in her essay The Multiple Media of Texts was informing on the subject.  She hits upon the idea that our perceptions of what a particular writing ought to be, for example, an academic text, informs the relationship that we will have with the text.  She then questions this assumption and asks, "What kinds of new arguments are possible (for example) if writers of academic pages take more responsibility in choosing the visual presentations of their arguments?  What sorts of relationships can writers establish with readers through different visual presentations?" (p. 125)  So what if academic texts were more visually informing?  Would this generation of disillusioned youth find some value in a paper that was animated, that had movement to the page or was digitized using sound, sight and text?  Is is time for the establishment to address the social circumstances that now face it and move towards engaging our youth in a way that makes sense to them?

Bernhardt in Seeing the Text compares the movement of homogenized, linear, paragraph style rhetoric and that of visual text and states, "And the closer our models come to literary norms, to the norms of the polite, personal, anthologized essay typical of the Eastern literary 'establishment, ' the greater are the demands on the student to produce essays which are subtle in their organizational schemes."  Is this really what a professor is looking for in an essay, the sort of writing that is "enshrined in the handbooks of our trade."  And if so, what is the student gaining by producing a piece that clearly does not reflect the current social paradigm or their innate talents and creativity?  Our texts are changing.  The way we are getting and interfacing with information is changing and yet we seem unable or unwilling to make the shift.  We need to instill a sense of efficacy as Goetz states in his Ted Talk. Our students need to believe that they have the power to make change and we need to engage them, give them the opportunity to act.  Bernhardt sums it up nicely; "Classroom practice which ignores the increasingly visual, localized qualities of information exchange can only become increasingly irrelevant.  Influenced especially by the growth of electronic media, strategies of rhetorical organization will move increasingly toward visual patterns on screens and interpreted through visual as well as verbal syntax."  I guess the audience really does hold all the cards!

Hello Again!