New Media Writing

Now that I’ve added video and sound to my mashup, I think it communicates much better and doesn’t have quite the cheesy slide-showy feel that it had when it consisted only of still images. So let’s talk about the choices I made in producing this stunning work of genius.

Basically, the mashup can be divided into two main parts. In the first part, I used only still images, going back and forth between illustrations from an old children’s book and pictures of the darker reality of coal mining. It’s all about juxtaposition and irony in the first section; the giddy instrumental tune “Blue Grass Special” by Bill Monroe plays in the background while we look at a pictures of a filthy mine and a former coal miner who is hooked up to an oxygen tank. This is supposed to give the viewer a sense of distaste in the immorality of this issue being taken lightly. A photograph of the Appalachian mountain range dissolves  over top of the “some coal is in a hill” illustration. The intended effect of which is partially to highlight the understatement of the illustration.

The sound of an explosion cuts “Blue Grass Special” short, beginning the second part of the mashup. I overlapped several pieces of mountaintop blasting footage in the hopes that it would communicate that blasting is done with some regularity. I didn’t include music during this short segment in the hopes that it would give it some added presence (I know that’s vague, sorry), and perhaps that it would give the sense that energy companies blast without feeling, or something like that.

The song that comes in for the second half is the intro to The Magnolia Electric Co’s take on the Nina Simone classic “Trouble in Mind.” I wanted something that fit, but didn’t sound too regional. The hope is that mountaintop removal comes across as an issue for everyone, and my concern with playing something regional (I was originally thinking I’d use the Carter Family) was that I would inadvertently be making it an issue of the “other.”

The rest of the mashup relies on the visual element to communicate the environmental effects of mountaintop removal, and uses the visual and aural elements to communicate the health problems. The mashup tends to focus on the water issue near the end, and does not fully come back to the broader picture. The reason, or excuse, for this is that the broader issue cannot be distilled into something small enough to fit into a succinct video. The broader issue is a composite of several widely varied issues, and the water issue happens to not only be a particularly salient one, but also well suited to the video mashup format. Honing in on something specific gave concretion to the imagery. The message is clear when we are hearing a man listing diseases while we watch bright orange water pour from someone’s tap.

The interview piece at the end was essentially a lucky find, as it played off the text at the beginning of the video.

Currently, our New Media Writing class is working on “visual mashups,” which are comprised of a series of images that, together, make an argument (a bit like a PowerPoint presentation without any words). They are sort of analogous to the more familiar musical breed of mashups, made by artists like Girl Talk, in that both visual and musical mashups should use their constituent parts to create new meaning.

So what we are looking at here is the concept of remixing. Specifically, how these visual mashups we are making compare to traditional research papers. The idea, basically, is that visual mashups are to musical mashups as traditionally composed music is to traditional research papers. This might be a problematic premise, but let’s just take it as some basic framing and forget about it. We are not going to talk so much about music from here on out.

Research papers are explicit. Visual mashups are impressionistic. Research papers use linear reasoning to validate their theses. Visual mashups connect on a more immediate, emotional level. Maybe I should expand on these items. I will use my project as an example.

I am doing my mashup to argue against mountaintop removal, a method of coal mining which uses explosives to blast away the tops of mountains in order to get to the coal pits underneath. It is really bad, and I guess if my mashup has a thesis, it is that mountaintop removal is “really bad.” Therein lies the main argumentative difference between the research paper and the visual mashup. Sophomore year I wrote a paper on the same topic, and though I do not remember exactly what my thesis was, I think it was a bit more specific.

In my mashup, I include illustrated pages from a children’s book written in 1960s. It’s about a boy named Jack who wants to be a coal miner when he grows up. It is just one piece of propaganda from a large body of it. In my mashup, I can hope to communicate the creepiness, but the historical context is lost. Does the loss of this information make the argument less effective? I am not sure. When thinking about this kind of argument, we need to think about what information is crucial, and which information we can discard.

The mashup argument is aimed at the reluctant audience: media addicted people without the time or attention span to read a 10+ page paper without knowing what they’re getting into beforehand. My goal in making my mashup cannot be to substantively educate people about an issue. The best I can hope for is to make them angry, which in truth might be the result I would be looking for anyway.

Twitter is a lot like Facebook in that it is a constantly updating feed of people’s selected reality. It is important to remember that reality is selected online. By that I mean that people ultimately choose what information (or misinformation) they will give out. Twitter, however, differs from Facebook in a few key ways. On Twitter, you do not only follow your friends (or, you know, distant acquaintances, people you knew from first grade, and other qualifiers for a Facebook “friend”). Instead, the focus is on people you find interesting. This difference in the speaker-audience relationship changes the entire online conversation. On Twitter, one usually has something to interesting or funny say, bearing in mind that each “tweet” is accessible to a much broader audience. On Twitter, you probably would not see a complaint about some highly localized problem that nobody outside the Twitterer’s immediate circle will understand (“such-and-such professor is a jerk” or “I broke my phone and I need all your numbers,” for example). What you will get is things like humorous anecdotes, updates on creative projects, and social commentary.

Twitter often gets grouped in with Facebook as part of some cultural ill in which people’s lives become somehow artificial due to the social media’s brand of impersonal, yet constant connectedness. Twitter is not Facebook, however. True, there is a degree of vanity in publishing every little thought one has, but Twitter, without the extensive profiles of Facebook, makes the experience more about the content. As an agency, it is akin to a Moleskine notebook, albeit a public version; the purpose is to share anecdotes, not to formulate identity.

Every generation seems to think that the next generation is ruining everything. Sometimes we will even hear this kind of talk from linguists and rhetorical theorists who, frankly, should know better. Freishtat and Sandlin’s article “Shaping Youth Discourse About Technology: Technological Colonization, Manifest Destiny, and the Frontier Myth in Facebook’s Public Pedagogy” posits that Facebook is a habitus—that is, rhetorical “place”—of the online community, and that the limitations Facebook establishes somehow stifle communication and expression and corrupt the public discourse.

Freishtat and Sandlin’s material is valid until they attempt to make a conclusion out of it. Yes, Facebook serves as place with a somewhat discrete set of rules for conduct or boundaries for behavior. Yes, it inhibits meaningful discussion. BUT; all language and agencies for language limit meaningful discussion. They do this at the same time as they facilitate it. Language, and by the same token, discourse, is always going to be a way of selecting and—imperfectly—communicating reality. Modes of discourse change over time just as language naturally changes. It is not productive to fight it.

In order to understand the rhetorical role of Facebook, we need to understand that the habitus, or to use a term from Kenneth Burke, the scene that is Facebook does not mean that Facebook is not also an agency. That is, we cannot forget that Facebook is as much a tool as it is a place. There may be certain encouraged and discouraged kinds of behavior, but that is formed through people using Facebook as a tool, there are not so much inherent, unchangeable rules. If Facebook will continue to be a popular tool, then the rules will change over time. That’s nature.

Put on your exploring hats, because we are going to explore the blogosphere!

There are a number of ways to check up on the latest buzz, including search engines like Google Blog Search or specialized aggregators like The Hype Machine or elbo.ws. We are going to look at two ways to get your blog on, each with a healthy dose of Social Media.

PubSub

PubSub tracks RSS and ATOM feeds in real time, providing a constant flow of trending content from blogs, Twitter, and other social media. The main page displays a feed of popular stories. Search queries act essentially as filters to limit the feed to relevant content.

BlogPulse

Like PubSub, BlogPulse shows you what is currently trending on the social media. BlogPulse, however, takes an analytical approach, displaying the information as data. Where PubSub leaves the user to find items of interest (either by sifting through the feed or by searching), BlogPulse welcomes the user with graphs and charts that show exactly what is going on in the blogosphere.

First of all, it feels off-target to criticize a five-year-old article about Web technology—something akin to pointing out to Christopher Columbus that it would have much faster to take a plane. Nevertheless, that is what I am going to do.

Web 2.0, as a term without a concrete definition, is essentially shorthand for “Internet that is markedly more advanced than how the Internet used to be.” Alexander’s article attempts to characterize these advancements, and at the time it came out (early 2006), it was accurate. Now (early 2011), however, it is somewhat obsolete.

Alexander’s Web 2.0 is comprised largely of social bookmarks, wikis and aggregators—all things which pertain to accessing and sharing content. His Web 2.0 is defined by the flow of information, with “folksonomies” like tags, blogs, and social bookmarks replacing the databases of yesteryear. Alexander’s Web 2.0 is characterized by openness and collaboration. That explanation today is not incorrect, but it is limited in scope.

Openness and collaboration are still very much characteristics of the modern Web, but as an increasing number of powerful applications can now be accessed within the browser, we must also consider utility to be a defining feature. The web is no longer simply a platform to distribute and access content, but also an expansive toolbox which allows users to create content. There are several online alternatives to Photoshop (pixlr.com is a good one), for example, as well as highly functional office suites, media players, and other staples. The social aspect of Web 2.0 is only one side of the coin; in truth, the Web is becoming a viable replacement for operating systems for everyday uses.

If you are still convinced that openness, collaboration and sharing outrank stand-alone utility on the value hierarchy of today’s Web, consider Google’s flop Wave, the now-abandoned collaboration application which promised to streamline work on group projects. Compare that with Google Docs, an office suite which addresses utility first and collaboration second. While Wave fossilizes in the Internet’s bedrock, Google Docs continues to thrive, even beginning to pose a threat to the mighty Microsoft Office.

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