Final Blogfolio- The big goodbye

Blogging has been a completely new experience for me this semester. It has definitely taken some time for me to fully understand what exactly professionally interacting in the media was like. I had spent plenty of time on twitter and facebook, but I had never put much thought into communicating to an audience that I didn’t already personally know. As I read through my semester’s worth of blog posts, I started to realize the kind of blogger that I truly was. I think that I am a ‘positive’ blogger, as in I like to find the good in everything, even if I don’t agree personally agree with the concept. I often raise my opposition to an idea in the form of questions, which I don’t exactly know if I like. I ask my readers to answer these ponderings in my head for me instead of providing my own, carefully thought out answers. On one hand, it gives readers a chance to think for themselves, but on the other, maybe I’m not following through and truly thinking for myself. If I had been able to incorporate this more, maybe my posts would have felt more intellectually stimulating. Also, I wish that I had spent more time putting my own personality and personal examples into my posts. I realized that I took them as simply assignments when I could have gone so much deeper into the back of my mind to produce more powerful and moving posts. By not connecting to my writing in some instances, I realized that I had missed out on many possible revelations and profound conclusions. I think, however, that my blogging personal was very consistent. My voice, wording, and style were all consistent throughout my postings and comments too. If my blog had in some way become popular, I would have had to keep a consistent persona or else I would lose followers.  As far as ethos (credibility) is concerned, I don’t think I did anything to hinder nor aid it. I did not raise myself up on a pedestal (make big talk) nor did I deteriorate my credibility (tear myself down). Finally, if I had one wish, it would be that I had been more creative. I wish I would have played with including more media, playing with font styles and size, and used more colorful examples. My blog, while technically correct and carefully planned, lacked an excitement. It lacked a personality. My blogging persona was consistent, accurate, and meticulous; however, I do wish that I had really put more of myself into all of my postings. Blogging was much more difficult than I had initially assumed it to be; it was not simply ranting or motivating. However, as I gather my final conclusions on my blogging persona, I recognize that I have learned so much more than I realized. I hope that, if I choose to do so, I will be able to incorporate my performances here and include the creativity and thought that was missing.

I am fairly confident that I will not continue blogging when this class is over. Or, at the very least, I will create a new blog. The persona that I created on this blog, is me, but a forced me, in some manners. For that very reason I would want to start fresh and new. I think that if I found the time to create a new blog, it would be focused on finding confidence in being true to your own character. In a world that focuses so much on the ‘ideal person’, I find that it is hard to find value in who you are as a person, especially for the younger generations. I don’t think that what I was writing on this class blog is anything that I feel obliged to continue on with. I do appreciate this class blog, however, for all it has taught me about interacting with the public through media. There were so many unspoken and influential rules that I did not even realize, and now I know that I can incorporate them into an possible future works. My hopes, if I were to find the time, would to create a new blog that would be more appealing to society ‘s current areas of concern and that would follow my own stream of thoughts rather than an assigned stream.

 

 

This image was found on Tumblr.com. Thank you to user, Anne Davis 773, for sharing your work.

 

–          The posting that was most helpful for your development of the final digital activism project, and why.

I honestly think that my first post related to the final project “It’s Project Time- Digital Activism” was the most helpful in developing my project. I went through several draft phases and edits which helped me come to exact decisions on my project. I knew what topic I wanted to raise awareness for, but I really had no clue how I wanted to go about it. The process of writing and revising this post helped me better understand how I wanted to approach this topic and what it was about rape culture awareness that was the most meaningful to me.

–          The posting where you stretched yourself most intellectually, technically, creatively, and/or rhetorically, and how so?

My posting, “Mini Symposium- Big Questions”, left me feeling intellectually stretched. I took the question of how writing was affecting our memories and tried to really put it several different perspectives. I feel like I really took time thinking through the question raised in our symposium and left this blog post feeling like I really learned something through my own personal thought process. I was intellectually challenged all throughout the process of making this blog post.

–          Your best use of an image or other media to illustrate or enrich your posting, and how so?

In my post “It’s project time- Digital Activism” I think my image brought a lot of power to my words. While it was an extraordinarily creative image it brought meaning, definition, and importance to the issue. Throughout this digital activism project I was really hoping to shed light on how prominent the rape culture issue is in America. I believe this image shed light on the public’s outcry against it.

–          Your favorite posting by some else in class and why.

I really enjoyed Conversing with Strangers’ post “Plato and the Interwebs”. The use of several different videos and different styles of text made it both intriguing mentally and visually. Everything tied together and was very successful in the relating an ancient question to a modern era of internet users. The points were clear, concise, and exciting.

 

I wanted to finish this out with a small statement on my Digital Activist Project. I was so excited to fight against rape culture, but it turns out that my project was not truly satisfying to me. As I dug deeper and deeper in to different opinions on rape culture, I realized that it was much more complex than I had imagined it to be. There is no accurate definition; there is no way that this is the most important issue facing us today. Pop-culture is creating an acceptance of the degradation of women, but I don’t want to stand here and say that it is only women. I don’t want to stand here and say that rape is the only issue being promoted in pop-culture. I learned more about activism though media than I had ever imagined. If I ever attempt to address another issue in society, these are the questions I will ask myself. I will stay away from simple surface level thinking and truly come to my own conclusions regarding the issue at hand.

Signing out,

The Fault in Our Freckles

Mini-Symposium, Big Questions

We recently discussed some of Socrates’ accusations of the (at the time) new advent of writing by reading excerpts from Plato’s Phaedrus. We discussed several questions, but there was one that stuck out in my mind: “Is our dependence on writing making our minds and memories weak?” I think memory is a fascinating phenomenon- how is it that some things will remain in our minds forever while other events seem to completely disappear?

In Socrates’ day the act of actually writing ideas, thoughts, and events down was a very new concept. The era was filled with great rhetors who vocalized their ideas, thoughts, etc. in public arenas. Today, writing is firmly established, however, more and more of it is being created digitally. How does writing in the media, and even writing itself affect our memories? Are we becoming dependent on writing?

In Phaedrus , Plato states that by writing people “will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” I think this statement can be directly applied to current society’s pursuit of knowledge. With the internet at our fingertips, finding simple facts is quick and easy. If someone were to ask me to remember a specific statistic, an actor’s name, or whatever else, there is absolutely no reason for me to stretch through my memory. I can simply type the question into a search engine; no thinking necessary. Writing has affected the amount we have to remember by being so available for us to read to recall information. I do believe, however, writing has benefited our memories in some sense of the word. With so many things recorded and written down, we have access to not only our personal memories but to practically every human being’s memories. We may not actively remember many things, but we have a memory record longer than every thought imaginable before Socrates’ day and age.

Writing and Memory is a fickle subject. Socrates is not incorrect in his assertions. However, I believe that we can use our writing to expand our memories. Instead of relying on writing to remember everything for us, maybe we can begin to translate past memories of people in combination with our own through writing.

This image of Socrates was found on flickr.com. Thank you to Derek Key for sharing your image.

Verum Factor- Genre, Genre, Genre

When we look at novels we can quickly divide them into different genres. There is non-fiction, reference, and fiction. Within fiction we have romance, historical, sci-fi, mystery, coming of age, horror, and on and on. Digital genres, however, are a completely different story. These genres all act as ways of communicating a message to a broad group of people. Often times, digital genres are conveying an activist text and trying to convince people to support a cause.

The digital genre that I am focusing on (and in the works of making) is a blog, and more specifically, a Tumblr Blog. For any Tumblr blog, the content is available to a wide range of people. Anyone with access to and a basic understanding of the internet can read the posts and formulate opinions on them. Tumblr allows a user to create their own webpage and format it to their liking. With links, postings, videos, question/comment sections, and more; it is very user friendly.

As I have started investigating the blogging process, I have learned about the “Tumblr blogging” genre quite a bit more. While a normal blog (such as this one) invites more personal texts, Tumblr is more of a location to compile a lot of people’s ideas together. I have found that this genre invites a more relaxed, personal atmosphere for conveying information. It is not staunchy, it is not extremely formal. Tumblr blogging allows everyday citizens to be introduced to an idea, topic, or activist project. As you compile ideas it becomes a good way to spark a reader’s interest in a certain topic. Once you have intrigued them, you can encourage readers to explore the concept further by posting links to more formal research websites or books.

I cannot wait to explore Tumblr even more, so that I know more about it as a genre and as a vehicle for activism. This genre becomes accessible to all because it is so diverse and will appeal in some way to every reader. Tumblr is an effective way to provide information in a simplistic, yet dynamic, way.

Thank you to Martin Michalek for sharing this photo on Flickr.com.

Finding the Awesome

In searching for the awesome and in searching for the not so awesome, I think I found a good example. Author Khaled Hosseini wrote, what I would regard as, an incredibly awesome book– The Kite Runner. In this book, the struggles of Afghanistan’s corrupted government is displayed through the life of a young boy. With drama, gory details, and real human relationships, I sped through this book with the utmost interest. Hosseini tried to replicate this success with his novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns. This time the violence of Afghanistan was told through the eyes of two individual women whose paths eventually cross. This time, the extreme terror lost its affect. The restricted and secluded lives of women, the meaningless deaths, and crass figures left this novel to be forgotten. Two novels that were written in the same style, about the same time period, and with the same historical background are, surprisingly, not equally awesome.

The images of these Novel Covers were found on Flikr.com. Thank you for sharing your artwork.

The images of these Novel Covers were found on Flikr.com. Thank you for sharing your artwork.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my project, I am creating a rape culture Tumblr blog and studying other ones. I have two models I am using and the first is Rape Culture Realities. For all extensive purposes this is awesome. It is laid out in an organized manor and allows for viewer input and easy navigation. I know exactly what the blogger’s main focus is, and they portray that focus in a mature and professional way. In opposition, I am not a huge fan of the blog, This is Rape Culture. A plain, brown background, long posts, and boring text provides a dull read. No matter how interesting their information is, I do not feel obligated to continue reading and learning from this cite. While both pages are teaching their readers similar things, This is Rape Culture, does not do so in such an effective way. I appreciate the other for its inviting qualities and that is why it is truly AWESOME. I desire to follow the amazing example this blog has set for me in my own creation.

Visual Analysis

 

This is a screenshot of the Tumblr account Rape Culture Realities.

Rape Culture Realities, a Tumblr blog. There is a lot one can discover when analyzing the simply visual arguments being made. From the set up of the page, the links on it, to the general focus there is a lot one can infer from looking at a Tumblr page without actually reading the text.

I want to begin by analyzing the basis, the background. A stark white background draws upon simplicity which both focuses the reader and bores the reader at the same time. I can assume from this that the creator of the blog wanted the focus to be on the message they were portraying. By outlining each section in gray, dotted lines, it helps the reader of the blog differentiate what each section of text is connected with. Finally, in the realm of basic layout, the gray highlight bars, purple text, and larger fonts bring my attention to the key ideas and important focus points.

Next, there is a great deal that we can learn from looking at, what I assume would be, the major blog posting. The image is obviously a professional, staged, and retouched photo. The stress or confusion on the young woman’s face seems to point out that the message of the entire post is a distressing one, at the least. Also, the very large, bolded font successfully draws attention to the title and makes this story the focus of the entire page. To the right of the photo there are links to very recognizable social media websites. This implies that the author/organization/group is looking to spread their message on the internet so that as many people as possible can take something from it.

Finally, there is a series of interactive “emojis” of sort. The first being a purple circle with a camera on it right next to the major blog posting. This shows us that we will be viewing an image; however, more importantly, it shows us that this site is multimedia (photo, video, text, links, etc.). Also, at the top there are 5 different buttons to choose from. I can assume that these are ways to communicate with the creator of the blog. There is a question mark (for direct questions), a plus sign(possibly to add this blog to your list), and a few others that are not discernible to my eye. These “emojis” are vital in making us understand that while this blog is portraying its own personal message, the creators till want your input, ideas, questions, and commentary.

Visually analyzing a rhetorical text was much more helpful than I thought it would be. It made me see the page for exactly what it is and nothing more. There has to be power in the layout, structure, and appearance before any text can be influential to a targeted audience.

It’s project time- Digital Activism

The dreaded “Major Project” is coming up. The words that every student fears. IT HAS ARRIVED. However, I think this one is going to be different. Maybe just maybe this one is going to really going to engage my interest.

We were given a couple options for how we wanted to approach this project. Option One: write a longer paper on rhetorical analysis of a substantial and preexisting digital activist text.  Option Two: create your own digital activist text and reflect on the rhetorical strategies that you used and their effectiveness. I picked option two without hesitation because hands on work is always so much more of a learning opportunity for me. So I quickly decided that I will create my own Digital Activist Text that I can reflect upon when all is said and done.

Next, I decided that maybe working with a partner (especially one who understands how to work the computer a little better than myself) would help enrich my ideas and create a more professional final product. I chose my partner and we set to work brainstorming on a activist text we could produce and how we would go about presenting it to the public. We came to a decision to create a tumblr account/blog on the growing rape culture in the United States. Rape culture is essentially the belief that rape, and other forms of sexual violence, is a normal occurrence and is completely excusable. My goal is to create a digital activist text that speaks out against rape culture through reasoning and example while not condoning any specific person. By using Tumblr as our way of producing the text we will not only be able to incorporate our own writings, but we will also be able to include other videos, links to websites, first-hand testimonies, and images. I will be utilizing this project not only to learn about effective digital rhetorical strategies but to take a strong stance against rape culture in the united states.

This is a Creative Commons Licensed photo from Flickr.com. Thank you to Neal Jennings for sharing your photography.

Genre Analysis- Twitter

1.     Tweets

2.     Recurrent Rhetorical Situation:

Since Tweets are limited to 140 characters, twitter users often disregard traditional grammar and spelling in order to get their ideas across.  Often, abbreviations like w/, bc, rn, u, and omg are used along with run-on sentences full of “and”s and “but”s in order to stay within the character limit.  Another popular trend on twitter is to begin a thought with text and then embed a picture that finishes the thought in a comical way.  Finally, hashtag use on twitter is prolific.  Hashtagging a tweet allows users to index their tweets with other tweets that contain the same hashtag.

 

Mediating private and public:

With social media’s current state, people are very comfortable with sharing private parts of their lives with strangers. Many twitter users have the tendency to tweet about extremely mundane subjects such as what they just ate for lunch and the most random thoughts that come to their mind. There is no need to filter your thoughts or play to an audience.

A popular subset of tweets and live tweets, where twitter users will live tweet an experience, show, or life event with their immediate reactions as it’s happening. For example, here’s Shia Labeouf’s live tweet of his trip on acid.

Shia LaBeouf Livetweets An Acid Trip

Thefaultinourfreckles, conversingwithstrangers, shesajarwithaheavylid, and MetaphoricalSarcasm

LINKS

https://twitter.com/siekres/statuses/448713478744719360

https://twitter.com/TweetLikeAGirI/statuses/447567431788015616

"Wank Me Up" by Avicii @midnight #SchlongSongs

— Jason Craig (@MrLzrd) March 27, 2014

Let it Pee #schlongsongs @midnight

— ☞ 𝚊𝚗𝚗𝚒𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚘𝚍 (@anniewood) March 27, 2014

Midterm Blogfolio

I must start out in saying that analyzing my blogging is definitely going to be a challenge for me, but I am going to give it a shot. I often find myself focusing on such small details in my writing that I forget to look at the work as a whole. I forget to look at the end results in my writing, and I cannot make an accurate conclusion on my writing. As a novice blogger, I know that I have a long way to go in how my blog appears, what it represents, and what message it intends to portray. I do not feel, however, that I have not achieved some success during this process. I have learned how difficult it truly can be as you tip-toe the line between casual and formal writing. I do not want to appear unprofessional, but in the same way I do not want to bore my readers with hard to understand text. When relooking through my blog- I can see that I am starting to really get there.

When looking at the themes I approached in my blogging, I see that I was attracted to social issues that are currently in the media. I worked with a poetic YouTube video addressing Gay-Straight Relations and I worked with an article on an organization fighting against the growing rape culture in the United States. While my first post was more about love between military and civilian couples than political issues, I believe that it could have been taken differently according to a reader’s personal beliefs about not only the military but also the popularity of the internet. I found that I was most attracted to themes that I was informed upon and most that information had come from the media. However, I still stuck to topics that were more socially charged rather than strict politics and policy. I find the emotion behind them easy to build off of and draw from.

I will proudly admit that my design theme has not been as carefully thought out as it should have been. I simply choose to write my text and insert an image at the bottom without putting much thought into the importance of images and media. I hope to be more aware of design and layout as they affect my writing more than I could have ever imagined. I did, however, make big strides in my writing style over the course of time. I became more comfortable with the level of formality I needed to obtain. My sentence structure included more parallelism, more interjections, and more conversational quality as I progressed through the weeks. I tried to start experimenting in not only what I wrote, but how I wrote. Now, I am not saying that I have perfected this art, but I think that I have made some progress. In examining my blog posts I see a definite correlation between my writings, but I hope to include more of that as I progress in the blogging process. As I look over my works, I have decided that I want to find what makes my blog unique to me rather than a series of posts that fulfill specific assignments.

 

• A posting I revised, and why?

I revised my post “Enough about blogging, how are we commenting?” I had struggled, initially, in what exactly I was trying to point out in this post. There was so much information I felt like I needed to include, but none of it seemed to connect for me. I tried my best to put my information together in a concise and informative way, but in the end I was not as successful in completing this as I probably could have been. I definitely improved from my original posting, however, because my revision allowed me a second chance to look over my blog and clean it up.

• The posting when you stretched yourself the most, intellectually, technically, and/or rhetorically, and how so?

In my post “Discussion on the Internet- flawed or not?” I really tried to stretch myself in many ways. I tried to consider both sides of the argument while, ultimately, making my opinion clear. I feel like I explored, in depth, my opinions from the internet communication class. Also, I feel like I considered different rhetorical strategies in presenting definitions, varied sentence structures, and in well thought out ideas.

• My best use of an image or other media to illustrate or enrich my posting, and how so.

On my post “YouTube as an Agora”, I included the video I was referencing in my post. With the actual video clip embedded into the message, readers were more likely to actually watch the video. Even if I had posted a link to the video, my readers would have been less likely to go to the link and watch it. With my post, it was necessary for the reader to watch the video to understand the points I make in my writing. Without the inclusion of my video in this post, readers would not have been able to understand my message as clearly as they could if they saw it.

• My best comment to another person’s blog, and why.

My best comment would be my comment to shesajarwithaheavylid’s post, “Rigged Game.” I built off of her post to discuss diversity within the United States through the message she portrayed. I also think that I was successful in incorporating my own findings from that same week of blogging and tying it to her post. I found good connections and portrayed them efficiently in that comment.

• The best discussion-building comment posted to my own blog by someone else.

Shesajarwithaheavylid’s comment on my post “Discussion on the internet- flawed or not?” definitely brought up a good question. She asked whether or not I thought that everyday communication had changed because of the growing amount of internet communication in our society. That is a question that is very pertinent to today and it really intrigued me and inspired me to think about the effects internet communication has had on us.

• My favorite posting by someone else in class, and why.

Shesajarwithaheavylid’s post “Individuals with Ph.D.’s Still Act Like Children” was so incredibly fascinating to me. Not only did she include clever ecards to express her disdain- she went on to prove that these were, in many ways, very accurate feelings. She was successful in expressing her strong opinion without being downright offensive. (Not to mention the hilarity of the comments she was analyzing!) And finally, I loved how she expressed that education does not equate intelligence. That is something we often forget to think about in our society.

 

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

We were recently given the opportunity to hear the great rhetor, the great expert on genealogy, the great Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Earlier in the day we had listened to a short clip from the Time Magazine website entitled “10 Questions for Henry Louis Gates Jr.” This clip displayed an interview of Gates comprised of common people’s questions from America to South Africa. Listeners had a brief 5 minute long chance to connect to Gates and understand the works he was contributed to the world. I was connected at a personal level because the questions and responses were geared toward an audience of non-expert listeners.

Today, however, we were in a whole new situation. I was sitting in a crowded gym of students, members of the workforce, scholars, and professionals prepared for an hour long, formal presentation. This wasn’t how it turned out. Although I was sitting rather far away from the stage, I felt personally invested in the presentation. Gates was just as amiable and personable in his formal presentation as his brief recorded interview. Honestly, he may have been even more so. The greatest part to me, however, is seeing how the friendly, intellectual, and interesting man I had seen in a brief clip on the screen earlier in the day was the exact same in real life. The video wasn’t a persona, and if anything, Gates was more natural when he had an actively listening audience to speak to.

Often, rhetors on the internet cannot translate that personality into a more formal situation. They become nervous and robotic and instantly bore the audience with facts and statistics. While Gates still included all of this information into his presentation, he was able to keep his everyday listeners engaged with the inclusion of examples and relatable stories. For me, seeing Gates in person was truly amazing because I could see his knowledge and passion for the topic come alive right before my eyes.

YouTube as an Agora.

In Ancient Greece there was a public commons where rhetors were able to fascinate citizens with discussions over issues. This place was called the Agora. These commons provided a ground for publicly spreading ideas and arguments to a large group of people. Today, we are not graced with a physical location like this. However, there is something quite similar. The internet video database, YouTube, is becoming a place where a rhetor can do just this.

YouTube gives everyday people the chance to spread their ideas to a vast group of people, a group that spreads around the world. When exploring poetry slams on YouTube, I came across a work entitled “Dear Straight People.” This poetic word, spoken aloud by Denice Frohman, is an incredibly powerful and moving original piece. Denice, a lesbian woman, is sending a message of tolerance and equality through this performance. She goes on to present her ideas towards straight people and their treatment of gay people. How she shouldn’t be disrespected by straight people that look down on her. How she shouldn’t feel unsafe holding hands with her girlfriend. How there is no reason for bullying because that makes you exactly what you fight.

It is rather evident that Denice is sharing her story, sharing her poem, to encourage tolerance of gay people. To show that there is a problem that needs promoting- that needs awareness. To show that gay people are just like straight people and that they should be treated as an equal. While this video is titled “Dear Straight People”, Denice is truly presenting this to both a hetero and homosexual audience. Not only does she condemn the actions of certain straight people, she celebrates the straight supporters and provides encouragement for anyone struggling with being gay in a largely homophobic world. Her audience is clearly not the explicitly stated “Straight People”, but it is ALL people because this truly is a global cause that needs global attention from everyone.