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,

How to sort-of make adulthood work for you: the documentary

So last night, as I finished my other homework and began uploading my last videos, I realized that my flashdrive (and all my work thus far) was locked in a far-distant computer lab. So, at the crack of dawn this morning, I rolled out of bed and began re-creating my video from the ground up. This was slightly less awful than it might have been since, having done this once, I knew what I wanted it to look like. But it took forever to find comparable music and I am somewhat less happy with the final product that I was with the 75% I had before. However, I am quite happy with the addition of my final photos and video and overall the project turned out like how I envisioned it. I also now know more about WindowsMovieMaker (or at least, enough to hate it) which I think was the point of this project.

Enjoy!

Due to a lapse in government funding, this account will be inactive until further notice.

Why my future Kindle Fire is igniting a war on the internet and other things we don't appreciate about hypertexts

Jakobs is impenetrable to me. I thought I understood hypertexts until I read her piece. Now I understand nothing. I hope tomorrow's class clears some of this up.

Sosnoski, on the other hand, speaks to my soul. As a writer, with aspirations of publication, writing and reading lengthy texts on-screen is a part of my daily life. All of my word processing is done online. I read blogs, news and short fiction on my computer.

But I edit in print.

Essays, stories, poetry, articles. Whatever I am writing at the time. I print it out, mark it up, and type in the changes. And I've wondered before, in a distant sort of way, if that was a problem, or something to consider changing, but I've never given it much serious thought.

Now, though, it takes me back to last weeks discussion and my assertions about the significance of the way we write. I applied online writing to the idea that one for, has more or less merit than another, but now I am confronted not only with my own desire to signify the way I write, but with a critique of the way we read.

I contemplated starting this blog post by talking about my recent obsession with e-readers. Despite the presence of hypertext both on and off-screen in my life, this decision has been most inspired by the realization that moving my (tiny) library is going to be miserable. Books are heavy and take up a lot of space. A Kindle Fire can ride along in my purse (and lets me play Angry Birds).

But as I've begun shopping around for the e-reader I want once I'm gainfully employed post-college, I've encountered a bizarre cultural movement that coincides nicely with this article. There is rampant hate in certain circles of the internet for the idea that someone would dare to read on an e-reader rather than pick up a hard back book. To me, this seems someone egotistical and a little bit classist. To assume that someone is uneducated, lazy, or stupid for choosing the "less romantic" reading option is also to make the assumption that they have the money and space to buy and store those books, to move them. But a part of that reluctance also comes from the idea (as Sosnoski recognizes in his article) that this hypertext reading is less attentive and sloppier.

I also think that a percentage of these complainers are following the comp/lit fault line laid out by Sosnoski. They are reluctant to set aside what they perceive as the true way to enjoy and immerse yourself in a book and welcome a new technology for the amenities it offers; their reluctance has more to do with applied significance than practical function.

I suppose that this debate, like many we seem to encounter in this class, will only be solved with time and settling cultural norms.

Pencils, pens and the slow but sure devolution of writing into the mere amusement of the masses, oh my!

Note: I won't be in class tomorrow and I'm sorry. I try not to get catastrophically ill during the first month of classes, but, alas, this sinus infection is getting worse by the day.

I had a friend once in high school who would only write stories longhand. She said it helped her to be able to see the words, even when she had them crossed out. The delete button had too much finality for her liking. She was a lousy friend and a mediocre writer, so I never paid much attention to her peculiar creative process, but Baron makes me think she may have been on to something.

My all-time favorite xkcd take on the evolution (or devolution, as some would argue) of writing can be found here. Indeed, the sentiment expressed in the post is almost entirely opposite Baron's early reminder of what in incredible invention the pencil was. We, as modern writers, tend to look on past technologies as bygone eras, useless but for their effect of paving the way to modern writing methods.

For example:
How we feel writing longhand:

  How it actually is:


The typewriter, as Baron points out, was considered "so threatening...to the traditional literatus that in 1938 the New York Times editorialized against the machine that depersonalized writing" (emphasis mine). How different is that from the opinions of modern word processors. But how, I wondered as I read his piece, can something depersonalize writing if its only function is to facilitate that transfer of words from your mind to the page? What about pen and paper makes writing more personal that keyboard and screen? Does our romantic outlook as writers really so define our ability to adapt to new methods of annotating our thoughts? And does it hamstring us along the way?

In all seriousness, the universal in the changing reactions to new writing methods is the fear that, somehow, this new method will make writing less sacred than the method it replaces. Writers attach a deep significance to the way in which they writer (much like my friend from high school). To displace that sacred form is not to steal the words from the writers head, but to convince them that without their pencil/pen/typewriter/computer, the words are not worth writing.

And in that sense, my old classmates dislike of the delete button is just as valid as Baron's idea of the innovation and evolution of writing technology. Both are thoughts on new technologies, and while one is far more eloquently expressed, the other is more visceral and, in that way, more effective as an emotional plea.



Here is another favorite comic of mine, dealing with writers and their processes, much more than with their mediums. However irrelevant to the topic, go ahead and have a laugh: XKCD - On Writing (bonus round)