Connecting America to the Digital age

Wouldn't it be great if the White House would do something like ask the American people what they think we should be funding and then actually fund some of those ideas?

It's all in good intention to ask about these things and take them into consideration, but to make some of these technological advancements possible, not only do we need the money to fund the research, but we need a multitude of brilliant, and more importantly, educated minds to conceive of the solutions to the problems we are about to face...

It all comes down to money:

But obviously, education and science are not exactly our focal points as a nation. 

So it's all well and good to say that education and scientific research are important to the American government, but is innovation really what drives them? Innovation isn't cheap, but imagine a world where grant money isn't something to be competed over, but something that is allocated on a need basis. 

I hate to be one of those people who posits that our government is only concerned about getting their hands on more oil, but I can guarantee you that if we spent half as much money looking for alternatives to oil as we do asserting our rights to the resource, we wouldn't be dependent on it any more.

We've spent a lot of time in this course thinking about video, the benefits of being able to transmit a message to our audiences in a new way, and the time that is saved by the viewer when they watch a video, rather than reading a paper. The dichotomy between showing an idea versus describing an idea is an interesting concept. My question is, do we get as much stuff out of watching a video as we do out of reading a paper?

We know that some of our brain functions actively turn off when we watch television because we don't have to actively participate with the information that we're trying to absorb. Rather, we can veg out in front of a screen. Learning aurally and visually requires an active listening capability that is something that must be fostered and nurtured in an individual. 

Everything is LATE this week...

I can't believe I forgot to type up a reflection post after I made my infographic. I guess I should have just done it all at once...




 So, for my infographic, I had a hard time deciding between informative and fun. I think that informative might have actually been easier to accomplish, but I'm getting pretty tired of being serious all the time. Eventually I decided to go with "pumpkin spice" flavored things because the flavor seems to be so pervasive this time of year. I found a website that would host my work and I made an orange background, formatted a title, and started inputting all of the pictures I had collected into my document.



I was nearly finished putting everything together when I discovered that some of the items I had described didn't actually exist! So, I had to go back and re-check each of the items I had found, and, since I was already doing that, I added links to each of the individual item titles, either to a recipe, to an ad by the actual company, or to a place where one could buy that particular pumpkin product.

Pumpkin Flavored Post

Create free infographics with Venngage

Facebook for President 2020

74 percent of american citizens use Facebook. In the last several years the beast that is social media has been growing by leaps and bounds. Because of the spread of people on my friends list on Facebook, I have seen a lot of memes coming from the Bernie 2016 campaign. This has sparked my curiosity about Sanders's campaign(which means the memes have already been effective in some way...) My question is: how are the 2016 presidential candidates utilizing Facebook memes in their bid for election? Is it only Bernie Sanders that is pumping out memes to take advantage of what is basically free advertising, or are there other candidates doing the same thing? How do the many campaign strategies differ from each other in terms of their use of social media?

I intend to create a google site that serves as a social media centered guide to the 2016 presidential campaign. I will look at the social profiles of these candidates and analyzing their use of use of memes and posts to reach a high viewer base. I will be attempting to look at how "effective" these campaigns are. 

In addition to looking at the 2016 campaign, I will be researching the presidential campaigns of 2012 and 2008 to see how these trends worked in previous years.

Modes in "text"

HAVE YOU EVER MET ANYONE WHO ALWAYS TYPED IN ALL CAPS?

Or Someone Who Felt The Need To Capitalize Every Word Of A Sentence Like An Improperly Formatted Title?

I'vE eVeN mEt PeOpLe WhO tAkE tHe TiMe To TyPe LiKe ThIs....

maybe you've run into someone who thinks that punctuation and capitalization are absolutely unnecessary who talks in long sentenceless rambling hardtofollow garble



As millennials, we've been taught from day one that we are supposed to think out of the box. We're supposed to be different from the next guy. We're supposed to break the rules and make ourselves stand out from our peers, but we still get annoyed when we see people breaking

conventions without a specific purpose. Where's the line? When do we decide that enough is enough and being unique and standing out starts to be annoying.

The point I'm trying to get at is, there is a time and a place for experimenting with "different."
Human beings are linear creatures,  so there is a reason we don't type diagonally or sdrawkcab. It simply becomes more distracting than effective.



That being said, I can't argue with the fact that a certain amount of flair works to enhance meaning. Knowing where to push against the confines within which we've functioned thus far in our academic careers gives us an opportunity to mix the textual and the visual in a way that allows us to communicate with each other in a way that our parents could not.



On another note from our reading, every time we start talking about mixed modes and visual texts, I start to think about memes and the huge amount of information we can transmit to each other. The images have become familiar, iconic, if you will, to a point where the background picture sometimes conveys more information than the text.

Can we start referring to "meme" as a genre? I think so...

AV project reflection

Originally, I had an entirely different intention for my AV project. I borrowed a couple of cars and a couple of goPros from my dad, and my sister and I set out to video "people driving like jackasses." We figured out the camera issues and managed to get one mounted to the dash of my jeep (which resulted in pretty poor video quality, as the camera had to view through the windshield), and started driving around.... and then we got pulled over for driving like idiots (that was the point, right?). The police officer was not amused at my choice in topics for my "anything goes" video and let us off with a warning, provided I find something else to record... I complied, and after some frustration, the sushi video was born. 

Armed again with a goPro, I picked up several bottles of sake and joined some friends for a "sushi night" I was expecting a more traditional array of sushi ingredients, but the fact that my friends are weird actually worked in my favor. I recorded some shots of rolling sushi and drinking sake until my camera died(you have to charge those things?!) and then we played Cards Against Humanity and ate "sushi" all night. 

I hate editing video. 

I hate it with a fiery passion.

 Maybe if my laptop were capable of running video editing software and playing video at the same time, I would hate it less, but as it stands, I hate video; I hate my laptop; I hate Microsoft: and YouTube can suck it. 

There... Now I feel better. 

I began by attempting to download Windows Movie Maker onto my machine. It's easier to download Windows Essentials, so I went ahead and did that and I got a nice message that said that everything BUT Movie Maker was successfully installed, so I hit "retry." The same thing happened. I googled the error code, which led me on a wild goose chase through my program files trying to isolate and delete whatever program was not allowing me to download movie maker. After a couple of hours of this, I gave up. Why would Windows Movie Maker work on my computer, which runs Windows 8? That wouldn't make any sense. 

In my search, I found that my computer is pre-loaded with a program: CyberLink Power Director. (In hindsight, this is probably the program running a script that won't let me download Movie Maker...) This program is just about the same as Windows movie maker. I started importing my clips and arranging everything, and everything was going fine until I wanted to speed up a shot. This requires an upgrade in the software. I'd already come too far to go back now, so I shelled out sixty dollars to upgrade my software. 

CyberLink sent me an e-mail with a bunch of download links for the various portions of software I'd just purchased. Total download time for this: about 3 days. Apparently, not only does my laptop suck, but my friend's internet connection sucks too. ( I borrowed his house to do homework. There's a toddler living with me and he can be very hard to work around... I'd begged a friend to let me hang out in his house while he was working so that I could do my homework in peace...I do this on a regular basis... Don't tell my sister... ) At this point, I had a giant "FUCK IT" moment and used only the parts of the software that I could use without an upgrade. I'll let the rest of the software download this weekend so that I can use it for the next project. 

My computer is not capable of giving me a good preview of my project, so I was not able to watch the finished project until after I spent four hours waiting around letting my video render and upload (not to YouTube, because I can't get CyberLink to recognize my YouTube account being tied to my gmail account) to Vimeo, which I'm using for the first time. They also take extra time in posting if you don't upgrade your membership. Once I finally viewed my video, I fixed the text issue in the end scenes and went through the entire process again. Finally, success.. Needless to say, this assignment drove me to drinking. (Twice, actually, if you count the sake.)

Overall, I'd classify my process as perseverance in the face of frustration and the desire to bang my head against a wall. 

Av project without text error

Look! It's a link! Clicky clicky!

AV project

https://vimeo.com/141588472

I hope this works. My Internet just went down so I'm on my phone..
The end of the video has some weird text issues that didn't show up when I previewed the video before rendering, but since the render/upload process took me about 4 hours, I'm going to post it anyway and I'll fix it and re upload it again later.

Color

I really enjoy thinking of particular colors as pseudo-iconic modes. Like McCloud mentions, color is a very powerful thing. He's right, of course, even someone with very little exposure to comics, like myself, knows that Batman's uniform is blue, yellow, and grey (until he turned into Christian Bale... but that's another story). I could think of many other instances that would show that color itself can become an icon.

The best instance I can think of to illustrate this point is flags. Each nation in the planet has a specific banner, as we know. We use these symbols (which are often simple bars of color, and sometimes shapes. The American flag is pretty gaudy in comparison...) to identify ourselves as members of a certain country. These icons grow to be very meaningful to the citizens of a country. We love our flag so much we wave it at sorting events, display it in our offices, we even make it into underpants. 

Our world is in color; unless there are only two prisms in your eye(this CAN happen, actually) you see the world in color, so why not express yourself in color as well? I think this is where the comics have a distinct advantage over alphabetic text. I can tell you that this apple is red. I can attempt to describe the water droplets glistening on the skin of it, but I cannot, with text, show you this apple. It's impossible. 

With a picture of it, drawn as a comic or imported as a .jpg, I can express to you exactly what I mean when I say, "The apple is red,".

So why the resistance? Why do we feel, even now that comics are a lesser art form? (I'm sorry. This is the stigma. This is going to remain the stigma.) Do they not let the writer conversation a deeper, more connected visualization of the story? Of course they do. 

Yep, I'm THAT person

Sorry I didn't have this up for you on Tuesday, guys! There was a lot of fail going on that day, I guess. I typed it up and never actually published it ad then I wonder why no one has viewed it... probably because it doesn't exist yet... (yes... my WHOLE day was pretty much like that... )

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So, on Thursday, Doug mentioned that at least one person was going to hate reading comics and have a hard time with this book. I am that person... For me, comics have always been those bright, colorful, magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories, and guys in tights.  I freely admit that I had a hard time letting people see me in math class reading a comic (and not simply because I wasn't listening to the lecture).

Not only was I never really into comics, they were a thing of the previous generation. My older brother (whom is twelve years older than I) read comics when he was a teen, but by the time I was old enough to start consciously absorbing media, I was hopelessly lost in a sea of literature from which I rarely came up for air. Comics were just too juvenile when compared to the novels that so voraciously held my attention.

That being said, I hadn't even thought to make a connection between modern comic-storytelling and ancient visual stories. Even when encountering these things, I never thought to myself "Hey. that kind of looks like a comic book." Maybe it's the panels. They make me feel like I'm just looking at one long children's book. Only four chapters into the book, and I am not convinced. I'm not saying that there isn't merit in the visual medium that comics present, but I like reading about the glossy sheen on an apple, rather than looking at a picture of it. I feel like the way in which a writer chooses to describe something is a reflection on the author himself and that is an important piece in the puzzle of a story.

Once I got around the pictures, I found that Morrow had some really good points about icons and the visual representation of things through pictures. He's right as well, text is nothing more than an iconic representation of phonemes that form auditory icons for objects. The difference being, that a "g" is always going to be a "g," no matter how I look at it and there is very little room for misrepresentation it the matter. When I'm looking at a pictorial icon, though, I could mistake it for another image. Not only that, but I would have to memorize many, many more icons than my 26-letter alphabet contains.

I guess I'm prejudiced by westernized education. When I think of adding this many pictures to my text; I think not of a graphic that enhances meaning, but of an addition that enhances understanding in a less literate community of readers. I liken them to the illuminations on the edges of ancient Bibles that were meant to portray the story to the illiterate masses...

Writing about new media

I feel like there is a division between our own and the graphic design program that we need to broach. While I have never personally taken a graphic design course, I had a friend in the program and the issues that Wysocki is expressing are addressed in detail, but not in our writing program. She's right: at no point during my academic career have I ever had the opportunity to take a class that centered around designing a website, or a blog, etc. (The only exception I can think of for this statement is the class for which I am currently writing this topic) No one has ever asked me about what font would best engage my reader to my purpose, but I remember my friend in the graphic design program taking either an entire class concerning fonts and the creation of such, or at least a unit in a class.

We end up with econ majors in our writing classes because their program administrators want them to be able to write well, I feel like the writing students should be encouraged to explore more areas in the digital spectrum of things. We would benefit from taking basic web design courses, or even graphic design courses. It would encourage us to think about the aesthetic elements of our writing and allow us to venture away from the "writing" process while still keeping us in a creative, relevant realm.

I'm not saying that the Digital Rhetorics class is insufficient, merely that we would benefit from more immersion into the graphic realm, even if it meant taking courses that "have nothing to do with writing" (everything has to do with writing... ).

Literacy in terms other than a print-narrative..

The Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola article posed a discussion of literacy in terms of an internet-based information center. Are our young people capable of acquiring the skills necessary to access this information pool and navigate through it?

I grew up in Montana in the 1990's/turn of the century. I can remember a time when my classrooms did not contain computers. We didn't need to use smart boards and projectors to master the curriculum, but there was change in the air. The older I got, the more technologically advanced my classrooms became. Rather than learning basic typing skills on an enormous computer with a black and white screen with no internet access, I began to see new and innovative technologies popping into my computer labs. When the Microsoft foundation donated computers to our classrooms, our dynamic changed. Our teachers were encouraged to start presenting materials with this new medium. The encyclopedias that I had been so painstakingly instructed with became all-but-useless. By the time I was in high school, we were turning in assignments on the internet! What a change we experienced in such a short time (13 years). If I had been born just a decade earlier, I shudder to think of the abysmal technological literacy I would claim as my own. From my point of view, the push to create a technologically-literate generation of citizens was a successful one.



On a baser level, they argue about the term "literacy" in and of itself. Are there other ways that one can call a person literate without using a print based medium? Can we value these other forms of literacy as much as we value our own regime of print-based information?

I really dislike the equation of a sense of "print-literacy" with intelligence. If we look to our own heritage (an English one) there was an enormous paradigm shift in narrative relation when the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxons in what is now Britain. These Normans brought with them the written word; a new technology that changed the nature of storytelling and the way we related the stories of our forefathers to our children. Before the written word arrived, a Bard(who was very highly respected) would basically make his living by telling stories that contained the histories of his people. To showcase his talents, the bard would memorize novel-length stories that sometimes included a list (a list of gifts, names, events etc. ) The amount of memorization involved to learn these stories was a phenomenally huge undertaking that a print-literate man can barely even fathom, let alone accomplish. I have a hard time considering such "illiterate" tales with anything but the highest amount of respect. If you think about it, the advent of the written word replaced the memorization and made any man who could read into a storyteller. Is this ingrained ability really more worthwhile than the arduous efforts of memorization?

Crikett's video

Videos are not my strong suit, but I finally figured all of this out.

Suppose I'll have to add a title so that it won't just display the first sentence...

At the very core of my being, I want to believe that homo seriosus is out there. I want to think that there is some person on the face of this planet that can be so wholly removed from bias and emotion that at every turn he is himself: unafraid of himself in such a way that ego cannot stand in the way of truth.

At the same time, I can't picture such a being in my mind; and if I were to come close; I think I would probably be dealing with a sociopath... (but that's a conversation for another time)

Homo seriosus (I'm already tired of typing this clever moniker) would have to be capable of anything, as long as it made sense. He would see the world in two absolute poles, black and white, to be cliche about it. I would not trust him; being that sure of one's self does not inherently mean that he is wise or all knowing.

But I realize that I am a product of western civilization, and as a result of this, I am inherently a humanist. I possess the ability to look at another man and acknowledge that his truth is different than my own and I feel the need to allow him his truth so long as he shall allow me mine. The fact that I am curious about another man's truth at all is solid proof that I am not homo seriosus, and neither is anyone else. 

The first thing we do when we meet someone new is endeavor to learn this man's truth. Who is this man? Do his values mirror mine in such a way that we might be able to be friends? Did he vote for G.W? If we were seriosus we wouldn't care. He could be he, and I could be I, but we wouldn't endeavor to know each other.

Wouldn't it be great If we could convince everyone we met to see the Truth( The grand truth... not my truth). Isn't that why we practice Rhetoric, though, so that I may have the ability to give you my truth and you shall be able to give me your truth? As a result, your truth, and my truth, will be forever changed. 

1st ever blog post!

Let me just say, this is my very first blog. I have hidden away from the technology for a long time, but now I suppose I must join the rest of the world.

On a side note, I just downloaded snap-chat after much prodding from a friend.. I'm not impressed and I already want to delete it.