2.4 Label Me

This is a label. It looks a little different than the examples above, but do not be deceived. This is the personal label.

The personal label is most similar to the signage of ownership, but it can be both self-assigned and utilized as a personal version of the brand. In this way, it combines the most effective strategies of the top two methods of labeling.

The personal label serves as the mating call of social friendships, drawing geeks, nerds, jocks, preps and fangirls together across huge social strata, such as large school or work settings.

Not all labels are self-assigned. When I first pitched this project to the Digital Media class, I could see the blossoming horror on my classmates' faces as they recalled terrible names from childhood classes. I worked to make the video about more than name calling and hair pulling, because the function of the personal label means so much more.

The personal label can be a connection into a societal network, ready and waiting. Fangirls, a somewhat derogatory name from women madly obsessed with a type of media, is also a word that has been joyfully reclaimed by those it appears to exist to slight. To identify as a fangirl is, in many ways, to accept the mantle and trappings of a label given to you by someone else; and in making it your own also reinvent it.

The personal label can be a passing identification, a self-assured title that denotes what you feel, think, or believe at a given time. It broadcasts your emotion and communicates with others who also temporarily occupy the same brief discourse. In this way, internet forums have achieved enormous success by catering to the whimsical bitching needs of the multitudes online.

Lastly, labels can be arbitrarily assigned to you based on signs you express to the world at large. Short hair? You're a lesbian. Well-dressed and polite? You're metrosexual at best, probably gay. Tattoos and piercings? No good stoner.

These are the labels that harm and constrain. They can help disenfranchised parties to form groups in defense, but these groups are not high-functioning, collaborative discourses. The resentment produced by this last construct of personal labels undoes any good the labels themselves can enact, almost before it happens.

2.5 Conclusion

People like judgement. It feed social situation and the gossip in all of us. And labels make gossip easy. Really, really easy. So easy, in fact, that people forget the function of labels as community. They forget the network that labels helped them build, the product it helped them sell, and the friends it helped them find. In an age where quotes are judged twice-over by their ability to condense into 140 characters or less, the complications of subterranean labels is not something the average human gossip machine wants to contemplate. So the discourse communities that we construct with the labels of our lives, the brands, the signs and the incessant name calling, culminate in an anticlimactic rush of information we feel compelled to simultaneously share and downplay the importance of.

Everyone is an individual. The trick is recognizing that everyone does not begin and end with you.

Why the rhetoric of business is cheapening the way we connect to one another (and what we can do about it)

Because I'm a tasteless scum-bucket, I really like to read mainstream magazines. Nothing classy, like lit journals or independent presses. No, I mean things like Cosmopolitan. In an attempt to make myself feel more like a 20-something professional, I inevitably turn to the business and money section and inevitably come across the word "networking." Now, whatever Cosmo means by networking, it is not what Anil Dash meant by networking. In fact, the only thing that is for sure is that whatever networking is, people are doing too little, too badly as far as "business professionals" are concerned. I think it was largely due to this constant lauding of networking that for so long I misunderstood what it was.

It was, in fact, what I call "being nice to people" and "making friends."

So I want to talk about buzzwords and (self-)marketing today. Specifically, the idea of networking as something we can possess and control and of the colossal failure of Google+'s YouTube takeover.

To make my point, I would like to combine a series of the videos we watched, particularly Anil Dash and Chris Anderson. Dash's idea of networking appeals immensely to me because, as a 20-something about to charge into the world-at-large, the idea that communication is changing in a way that invites - and demands- that I join the conversation is reassuring in ways brown-nosing a boss never will be. Dash's networking has less to do with sucking up than with confronting whatever makes you world less awesome. Want a faster web browser? Better vlogging platform? Freedom from foreign oppressors? Networking is raising your voice and letting people know you are there to be heard. Better still, Dash's networking is skill-based, largely without the threat of privilege superseding talent.

Add to this Anderson's idea of crowd-fueled evolution of business and society and you find yourself at the helm of a powerful current that is poised to redefine

 Seth Priebatsch's idea that "the social building is done," is also of some interest to me, because it implies a backwards motion for most of the internet who are so intrigued by Tweeting, Liking and Re-blogging that they are largely disinterested at this point by the idea of moving on from those platforms. So this idea of evolution from social theory to game theory neatly connects my ideas about the hollow word of new-age networking, the deeper significance of true networking and the failure of Google+.

Google+ is a fine network.It function exactly as its supposed to and is conveniently located in the Google mega-plex of Chrome. Yet it has objectively failed at its initial goal: convince Facebook users to consolidate all of their interpersonal whining needs into one easy package. Why? The answer comes from all of the above argument. Google is a little late to the party and they did not bring anything new. They did nothing innovative to offer to new users and brought nothing new to the social networking conversation. Then, to top it all off, after failing to take off of their own, they installed themselves into the YouTube comments to bribe users of another site into using their product as the only way to make themselves heard. This, in Dash's example, is the exact opposite of how you network. This is note reaching out and building connections, but rather re-hashing a tired idea in the hopes of continuing the building of an online empire.

The dialogue is changing, as our videos for today showed. The price for not keeping up, apparently, is scorn from those who are at the forefront and confusion form other still behind you.

Also, for your viewing pleasure, a video on the ways we connect (or don't) with people using social media.
http://elitedaily.com/news/world/this-video-will-have-you-completely-rethink-how-you-conduct-yourself-online-and-in-person-video/

Critical Photo Essay Premise and Excecution

*All photos are not mine. Pending posts will be my photography.

Things I want to talk about in my photo essay:

The hippocracy of signage:

The significance we apply to otherwise insignificant items or occurrences:

The significance we apply (literally and figuratively) to our own environments:

I want to see the ways we label and apply language to our lives, especially places unconcerned with language and label as (such as idea and areas we wish to label as "possessions").

Everything You Never Wanted To Learn About The Kentucky Derby

My Infographic

The Words We Use To Make Ourselves

Like always, I want to start this blog post off with a story. Once, while I was playing pool in the summer, I found a piece of graffiti in the bathroom of a bar I would never choose to walk into. It read (if you'll pardon my French) "Fuck bitches get money." Now, clearly our inebriated author is slightly confused as to what exactly he is trying to say. And I realized that I had a Sharpie in my purse and a period would correct the sentence into something the original author clearly did not intend. But somehow, "Fuck. Bitches get money." seemed so much nicer on that puke-beige bathroom wall.

The point is, punctuation is the guideline within which we build society. Our communications are ruled by its inclusion, omission, and nuance. And we are painfully aware of this. When I searched typography art for images to add to this blog post, I steeled myself for the deluge of "Keep Calm And ___" memes. But instead I found something moving and profound.

We are intimately aware of the words that make us up, of the way we need language and how we lean on it throughout the day. Typographic are is a visual representation of our conscious and subconscious recognition of the nuances of type and punctuation Solomon introduces. Going back to our earlier studies of sign and signifier even, these pieces blur the lines between those things, making us question in we are sign or signifier ourselves. Certainly, we made words, but in some way are we ourselves not made by words as well?

Bad Science in CSI Miami: Visual Rhetoric Meets Iconography

Pictorial imagery catches us at unawares because, as intellectuals, we are trained to analyze texts and to treat drawings or photographs as trifling adjuncts. - Mishra

If computer simulations are documentary, they are subjunctive documentary. Their subjunctive nature lies not only in their flexibility in the imagining of events, but in their staging as well... - Wolf

Alright, kids, it's time to have a talk... a talk about fake detectives. Detectives of the following variety:

 You're mamas always taught you not to hurt other people, but they never thought to warn you about the dangerous siren-song of police work, did they? Actually, that probably has more to do with our generations increasing exposure to on-demand crime scene investigating that anything esle. We sell our children CSI kits as TOYS.

See, CSI is emblematic of a much larger problem: we, smart animals that we are, process information as it is given to us. And the visual rhetoric of CSI is entirely compelling. You can carry a gun, look like a model and put the bad guys away in a neat. 45-minute episode. But perhaps the most infuriating misconstruction of the franchise is the heavily visually-influences explanations of forensic science. In order to compress the show into its time slot and not overwhelm the readers, the franchise sacrifices authenticity for the Idiots Guide To _______. Obviously, not everyone who watches CSI feels the overwhelming assurance that they are ready to solve crime. But, like any other oversimplification of visual media to compress a complex idea, it introduces the allure of a vocation without acknowledging the work necessary to reach that point. Like selling products with an iconic brand, CSI has built an empire on the assurance that psuedo-science will sell (Big Bang Theory, anyone?). Audiences crave superficial reassurance, and with the compression of elegantly shot, useless machines, they barely need to pay attention to the dialogue to achieve it,