Critical Photo-Essay Project

Here’s the link to my project! It was actually a lot of fun to make, so it was an awesome experience. Thanks for the great “mini semester” everyone!

https://sites.google.com/site/writ371/

Mean People, Individualization, and Rants Oh My!

First of all, I do need to apologize for this being so late. I’ve been wrangling new students for freshman orientation this past week. It was a blast, but I’m so glad it’s over! Absolutely exhausting.

I was very impressed with each of these readings. I like how we got a chance to see the other, somewhat negative side of internet communication. With the reading by Adams, I was totally enthralled with because this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. People really are so mean in blog comments! It’s not fun to see how people can completely rip apart another person like that for the entire world to see. Don’t judge me for this, but I was watching a Justin Beiber music video on YouTube the other day and there were so many people talking trash. I don’t know what all of your stances are on Justin Beiber, but, he is still a person. Things like that can destroy a person emotionally. AND he actually had the courage and drive to do what he loves wholeheartedly, how many of us can say that we’re doing the same? Ok, I’m done with that rant now, back to the Adams article… He says on page 6 that, “To have substantial exchange, you need to be fully present.” This is important in any communication either online or face to face. I’m a firm believer in the fact that I don’t care what you believe really, you just need to know why you believe what you do. People posting nasty comments on blogs simply show the evidence of a highly uneducated viewership. This leads me as to why I think people hide behind internet aliases. I don’t know the exact numbers, but the internet’s primary users are definitely younger generations. Grandma’s (for the most part, my g-ma is actually awesomely involved on Facebook!) usually don’t have Facebooks ya’ll – teenagers do. Many of these people posting negative things, YouTube especially are young. However, this is just a theory, I’m sure there are many other reasons far beyond my knowledge level as to why people hide behind internet alias.

In the See-Through CEO article, I read a lot of things that I have never even thought about before. Because of all of the media attention in major corporations now, they have to fight really hard in order to hide. All of their business is posted on the internet for all to see in many instances. This is awesome because, theoretically, this full disclosure can make major corporations stay honest to what they stand for and what they say they do. In the end, all of this “visibility” has been shown to benefit certain corporations.

In the Eli Pariser ted talk about “filter bubbles”, I had a lot of ideas going through my mind. He used the quote by Eric Schmidt where he said, “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.” This quote was almost upsetting to me. Americans value individualization and personalization. We like being called special in our own way and singled out as something extraordinary. Google has definitely tapped into the knowledge of this fact by personalizing their products. This is interesting to me because with personalization, you can miss out on other things you’re not used. Personally, I think people need to be exposed to different viewpoints other than those they are used to. You get a better-rounded, diverse, education society that way. This is what was upsetting to me. The fact that Google is tailoring their search products for individuality is a huge sign that our society is becoming more individualized as a whole. While being an individual is important, I’m afraid that it’s going to start making Americans eco-centric and ethno-centric. We’ll only see, hear, eat, and do things that we know. And when those things happen, we lose culture and values. So, with filter bubbles, I think we need to ditch the filter and be open to more “dirty water” of sorts. It will expand our worldview and create more innovative thinking.

So, this blog turned out to be a lot of rants, and for that, I’m sorry. I just had a lot of opinions on these things!

Comic reading for class? Ok!

At first, I was really confused as to why we were reading comics. They reminded me of my philosophy class that I was tortured through last semester, “What are you sitting in? No, that’s not a chair. No, that’s not a seat either. What is truth? Does that desk even exist?” All of these questions hurt my head every time I think of them. The opening of the McCloud iconicity pieces had the same sort of effect. Something that I never discovered in that silly philosophy course was the concept of an icon being an idea, which is what these chapters have shown me. The difference between abstract and realism were portrayed effectively. But what does seeing things vividly have to do with writing? This question I thought to myself reminded me of a writing professor I had freshman year. He always told us, “Don’t tell me the story, show me the story.” He wanted us to be able to take our writing from passive to active, general to specific, and most important, universal to specialized.

The Hyper-Readers reading definitely brought it all together for me. While these cartoons were online and not printed, I definitely found myself skimming them more than actually reading them. In my mind, they were more of an e-text and not a full text text. When things are printed out, I read them easier and critique them more. If it’s on screen, my mind just doesn’t really seem to care as much about them or take them as seriously as the articles in print. It seems like I see the story, but I don’t really read the story. This is what I think reading visually is all about – reading with your eyes and not with your brain. There’s definitely a specific niche for this type of writing, as shown explicitly by McCloud. It’s a learned process, and honestly, I’m not it’s biggest fan.

The A/V projects have been an absolute joy for me to watch. They’ve each had their own special unique flair that has really been interesting to see. Some have been enjoyable like Carson’s elmo story or informative like Matt’s sidewalks. I think it’s neat how we all had the same project, but they each came out completely different. I really like the way that Savannah’s was filmed, but I legitimately have no idea how to do that stuff. I also have a greater appreciation of film majors after this project. They have to have such a creative eye for detail that I never knew about. The biggest problem for me was figuring out something to do that actually mattered. I’ve made picture slideshow things before, but never video with text. There was a huge chunk of nothing that was going on in my video that I was trying to split, but never got it to work out. I couldn’t make it “seam-less” of sorts, and it just looked silly, so I eventually gave up and decided to maybe try it in the future. As for color, my whole video is black and white, text included. I dabbled around a little bit with yellow and blue text coloring, but in the end, I settled for all black and white because I wanted the sort of gloomy-ness. Which is why I chose the music that I did. The music for me gave the whole poem more character and I wanted to see if music could change the watcher’s perspective other than just being based on the video and text alone.

A/V Short Project

This is a video that I made of my favorite poem, Where the Sidewalk Ends. I hope you all like it! Also, please let me know ASAP if it doesn't work well, or at all for that matter...