Blog Entry 6

The potential benefits of Paradigm Rhetoric in the work force would be to have specialized viewpoints per each field therefore allowing for more specific looks at policy or evaluating implementations of those policies.  This Paradigm Rhetoric is already permeating educational fields as each field works within different aspects of the Apparatus theory or a mixture of aspects within the theory.  By implementing similar paradigmatic websites like the screen self-portrait in education as well as research type jobs to see how one is thinking or describe ways that a program is working.  Themes can be presented through paradigm rhetoric in the form of different multimodal projects such as media representations created by different demographics of people.  This paradigm rhetoric can then turn electracy into quantification for sociological study purposes in the workforce.  Benefits of programs that use paradigmatic rhetoric could be the fluency of what can be learned by giving individual freedom.  I’m thinking specifically in programs like the foster care system of detention centers where multimedia freedom looked at through a different paradigms can benefit social systems.  Sectors of society and study could be opened up by perspectives that are given light through different paradigms, therefore allowing for broad knowledge gained in both education and workforce situations.

Portfolio

Digital Narrative of Belief

https://www.wevideo.com/hub?requestedPage=#media/ci/468249348

Analytic Webtext

Screen-Self-Portrait

“Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”

Screen Self Portrait

Site

“Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”

Poetics

My screen self-portrait is an accurate description of my digital identity.  I used WordPress as my website platform because it is highly organized and looks clean and professional.  It is easy to navigate with a navigation menu bar because if I am on a website I will go straight to a menu first to see what information the site contains.  I did however leave the titles of my pages fairly ambiguous so that the viewer would need to go to each page to understand a little better what that page entails.  I chose 4 pages that are somewhat broad but have a few boundaries. An example would be my philosophy page.  This page demonstrates a few of my beliefs through images with quotes and a video of something I believe in strongly.  This page can’t encompass everything about me as philosophy doesn’t include more on-the-surface items like my surroundings page which can demonstrate my ideal place and setting that I would like to be at or weather I enjoy. I would have liked to have the video on the page autoplay as I love the soothing background music as well as the concept of the time lapse of beautiful scenes in nature.  WordPress didn’t support autoplay on this video or allow for a background noise on the page.  This didn’t end up being a bad thing as I realize most people browsing the web, including myself, aren’t fond of videos playing without themselves hitting play button.  My digital identity is also displayed as uniform through same fonts and colors throughout while each theme has descriptive featured images on each page to further demonstrate how all aspects of my webpage are interconnected but also fairly separate.  My website is a compelling demonstration of my identity as seen through my own eyes and played out in media forms of images, quotes, gifs, and videos.

Reflection

While I am happy with my multimodal media infused website, I would have preferred to be able to write descriptive captions to expand on the photos or gifs to describe why it is there.  It was difficult for me to form a website that seems so incredibly random at first glance because it is a mix of funny gifs and simple or serious pictures.  This helped me to realize that it is difficult to get a full story across through media depictions and website restrictions like not being able to autoplay a video.  While my identity can be mediated through media I don’t think every aesthetic appeal can come across the same as the true human emotion or feeling.  I would also expect that a longer timeframe to compose a website like this due to reflective aspects and figuring out all of my private identity and how to demonstrate those exact aspects through media.  Visible experience is easily shown through media while sound and movement are more difficult aesthetics to put into media even when I did create a gif.  Gifs are an interesting tool and as helpful as animation is, it still isn’t completely accurate in portraying emotion.  I found it difficult to pick the perfect clip to portray an emotional response while also adding dialogue to support that same feeling.  This project allowed me to reflect on the different parts of my life as well as intersectionality despite not being able to portray me and my life perfectly through multimodal media.

This was a good test of the intersections in the Experience Paradigm.  It combined aesthetics with interpretation of information from unit two.  Another viewer of this site may interpret the media I used as a completely different aspect of my life than what I intended it to portray.  A site like this cannot be quantified even if there is a gif with words that someone could attempt to quantify. The high possibility and probability of viewer interpretations makes this site the opposite of data in a scientific proof setting.  Electracy is important in realizing that media is another way to represent one’s emotions and senses in comparison to pure textual explanation.  Apparatus theory demonstrates the restrictions on specific types of writing although I am still skeptical about if Electracy is better or more advance than written literacy because there is less interpretation with descriptive writing. The skills of Electracy are valid to learn in this age of technology while I still think the mix of literacy and Electracy is the best compromise to portray aesthetics and emotional appeal.  Both Electracy and written literacy allow for creative licensing while technology makes it easier and more efficient to get one’s own viewpoint across through multimedia as gifs and videos that are seen is a second versus spending ten minutes reading a chapter of another’s experience in written word format.  Overall this project demonstrated that identity experience is difficult to portray through one mode of communication whether that is all technological media or written but that a mixture of many forms can create affect for the audience to feel and interpret.

Blog 5

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.”                                                                                                               ~Brendan Gill

“I’m sorry, I know you’ll do everything you can to help me,” he said, his voice quieter. My instinct was to comfort him, his pain seemed so sincere (pg 22)

~Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

 

Exercise 4

Quantitative

Wicklow Mountains, Ireland	Date	Rainfall	Miles Walked	Calorie Intake	Calories Burned in 90 minutes of walking/hiking	Wind Chill
53.0811° N, 6.3900° W	July 16, 2015	2400 mm	4.58	1350	1086	43 degrees Fahrenheit

Qualitative

Above is quantitative data for a time when I went on an accidental hike in Ireland.  It had been pouring rain on us through our whole boat ride to the location of the horse drawn buggies that would be taking us back to our bus.  As I stepped of the boat it had felt like the blood in my arms and legs had frozen and all of my clothes were drenched with cold rain water.  Me and three others were the last to the carriages, therefore ending up with the oldest horse and the oldest driver.  The wrinkles on his face were genuine from smiling as he taught us a few Gaelic words that his horse responded to. Barley ten minutes into our rise he politely asked us to get out and walk as our weight was too much for the horse to carry up the steep Wicklow Mountains. We skipped in the rain to try and warm up as we were still soaking, shivering, and taking selfies along our journey.

The quantitative aspect of this story would never be able to describe the painful cold yet shocking joy that we found wandering the hills of Ireland one overcast, dreary summer day.

My Digital Identity-Blog 4

‘Life events’ are valued by data brokers who gather data about

us from multiple sources and sell it to marketers.”

My digital identity would be a student that lives in a cold area.  Amazon would recommend to me a brand new coat as well as various Foulcault books about crime or race.  “Dataism is becom­ing ‘a belief in a new gold stan­dard of knowl­edge about human behav­ior’, van Dijck writes, and argues that it is cru­cial to be aware of the dif­fer­ent reasons for and con­texts within which data is gath­ered.” This portrait would be a form of dataism as the internet is pulling my previous searches as knowledge of who I am to advertise to similar items I might want to consume.  This would be based on the links I click onto from social media of the most common google searches of food recipes sociology terms that search engines now guess I will google.  Data I provide on the web could even be consider instagram photos which may not be used as advertisement knowledge but instead what I am advertising myself as in today’s society.  This would not be a situation in which I would assume data is gathered about me but it is to some extent from what I am wearing in photos or so forth.

Blog 3

In Belief and Storytelling the author has all of the knowledge and the audience may assume they are getting the whole story therefore gaining knowledge on that situation.  The author is privileged in this case as they can choose what is conveyed and learned by the audience.  In turn the audience would then be excluded from the true knowledge and given only a portion of a perspective of a full situation and able to interpret that as they wish.  The audience can only truly hear information because the knowledge of the author can be easily interpreted and isn’t fully concrete.

In the Information paradigm there is a similar aspect when talking about studies but it is frowned upon.  A researcher could convey information in a form that backs up their hypothesis to give the audience an impression of expertise and knowledge.  This paradigm excludes emotion to an extent to allow the convention of information without bias, therefore proven information.   Those reading professional notes or field studies are privileged to be gaining knowledge straight from the source as those authors also have privileged and educated knowledge in their field.  This means that there is a privileged group of people reading this information as well using and gaining knowledge from others who are highly educated.

Project 1 Reflection

Reflecting on my Summer “Staph” video I would say that I am happy with the overall outcome while I could have focus more on my format of narration when it came to the lesson/value.  I tried to portray Justin’s lesson learned while I think an audience takeaway would be more closely related to my value put on friendship and opening up that was portrayed through my video.  I was skeptic of making a video so I would say what it turned out to be was more successful than I expected but I failed to do everything I had hoped to do that was in my storyboard.  I was hoping the story would be more from his perspective which seemed to make more sense for telling another person’s story but that created logistic problems with change the person tense throughout the story.  I felt it could have been more stylistic as far as my tone of voice but it is generally awkward to hear one’s own voice and edit it on a recording. This was a good experience to work on technological techniques as well as narration styles.  I think, although I wasn’t fully satisfied with my outcome, I learned some valuable lessons on techniques like affect and space that improve storytelling and technology usage. 

Composition Summary

I wrote the story of “Summer ‘Staph’” as somewhat of a memory or a story within a story.  The intention was to not tell an exact sequence of events in order to add motion and also to more effectively make the transition between story and the lesson portrayed at the end of the importance of friendship. I didn’t explicitly state the lesson because I thought that the ending wrapped up the story while touching on the importance of opening up and caring for strangers because you may not know their story.   My intended audience was broad but could be narrowed to those in younglife who have done summer staff, those whom have had an infection or have heard of staphylococcus, or anyone that has been to a summer camp.  My goal with the opening chunk of my video about road trips and the clip of kids tubing at camp was to be an attention grabber and capture the audience those who have had a similar experience.  I kept the background quiet for the main duration of the video so that nothing would distract from the story as the sequence isn’t quite easy to follow at some points.  My language was in turn no difficult to comprehend and I spoke slowly with adjectives so that the narrative would be in depth yet allow for parts of the story to be left more vague.  The only music that wasn’t either at the beginning or the end was to add emphasis on the importance and severity of the staph infection as the main event for the protagonist.  The music at the beginning and end is the same song to bookend the video with a song that was popular during summer of 2014 and the lyrics are about meeting people with an upbeat background.  Most of the images i chose were real life pictures from that summer.  The audience may not realize that but the people in the story are shown throughout which was intentional to allow the audience to connect with the main players in the story.  Some other pictures with places like the empty hospital bed or the pesky mosquito were to put the audience in a setting or relate to the feeling of having a terribly itchy bite.  The empty hospital bed had a more lonely and severe context than the humor that the cartoon mosquito created.   The genre that I intended is the same as what the final product was.  I would say it is somewhat of a drama with a bit of subtle humor.  My goal is that it is easy to relate to which is why it isn’t to incredibly specific as far as medical jargon for what a staphylococcus infection is and I used visuals instead.  I relied highly on the images because I felt that with my story it incites more use of senses and the audience can watch what is going on without having to rely on description.  My video is supposed to be on topic and straightforward to have an easy to decipher lesson and keep the audience engaged.

Summer “Staph”

Pitch: My friend ended up getting a staph infection while doing summer staff.

Sketch/Map

My story will be in video form with the audience in mind of anyone who has been to a camp or volunteered with those whom they don’t know.  I would try to use language that would capture a young adult audience such as bits of humor and sentimental feelings separated by points of space and flashback.  The form might be from the perspective of Justin, the protagonist, telling me his view of the situation while we road trip from camp in Minnesota back home to Colorado therefore creating a more personal feel. This would allow for me to give his perspective to set the scene than give my thoughts on the situation from an outsider’s perspective and bring in the moral/lesson.