Edited Project 3, Reflection and Summary

http://give6477.wix.com/gianna

Poetics
I divided my portrait into three parts. The first was my public profile self which consists of of posts and pictures that I have posted or pinned on my public profiles in order to portray myself through a certain lens. I used pictures of events and people who are important to me to represent my life in the present by putting them in the bubbles in the the middle of my page descending from present to past vertically. The second section I chose to include was my interaction page. This page consists of posts and a video that other people have sent me or posted on my profiles. I used this page to represent how other people see me. My third section was a little more abstract. I choose to call it “private” because I used media that I do not put onto the internet for other people to see.. I used pictures that represent something that is important to me or a certain experience that I had by myself that helped me grow as a person. I made my sections very simple and deliberate because I like the idea of a timeline when “telling a story” about a person’s life. I din’t use many quotes or words because I wanted the reader to “feel” the pictures, especially the puppy ones because I love puppy shopping. I would rather look at pictures and experience second hand what someone else has already experienced rather than read about it and try to imagine it in my head. This brings me to electricy, and why it is important when illustrating my story for an audience.

I also used meme’s in order to convey emotions that I didn’t necessarily know how to make my reader feel. I think pictures with words that can evoke a feeling in a reader have more of an impact on them. Not only can they identify with them because they are more familiar with memes than they are with my personal pictures, but they also create a feeling that relates the author to the reader making them feel like they have something in common. Usually memes used preconceived notions or stereotypes in order to convey a message which is frowned upon, but I think they help to bond people because they are able to cross over boundaries that people otherwise would have never spoken about out loud. Memes are a sort of code language where people can laugh at something with out feeling guilty because they weren’t the ones who came up with the idea.

Reflection

I realized that my pictures represent how I want to be viewed by others. It seemed like an obvious move to only put pictures that I thought I looked good in or that I enjoyed looking at because I want my audience to see me and my experiences through a certain lens or perspective. I like to think of it as my own little world that I can give others a glimpse into but they can only see what I want them to see. I ended up using a lot of pictures that I already have on either Facebook or Instagram because they were already pre-approved by me. Every picture on my website is posed, even the candid looking ones, and I think it is important to note that every aspect of this project, though it seemed creative, was very intentional and constructed in order to give off a certain impression. Electracy also comes in in terms of point of view. I use electracy to communicate through technology which also means that my intended audience will likely be younger or well educated because they have access to the internet and the technological training to understand the memes I used and why I used the pictures that I did.

I also found that I vetted each of my pictures to make sure that they were appropriate or represented me in the best light because I know other people would potentially see it and even the most trivial quote can sometimes offend people. I also found that I felt weird adding so many pictures from my private Pinterest page because most people don’t know how obsessed with disney princesses and puppies I am. This is an example of Apparatus theory because I constructed a paradigm rhetoric that consisted of appropriate things that I decided I wanted my audience to see and molded them into something that I deemed significant. My aesthetic mode was very simple because I only have a few things that I make public knowledge, I keep a lot to myself and I thought my website should reflect that. I like having profiles because I get to control what other people see and therefore most of what they think of me which is pretty much the opposite of real life. I can also gauge how they feel about me through the pictures I post and the replies or comments that I receive back that I can then use as critiques for other posts. Each picture has a purpose, including the memes, either to make the audience feel something or think something and to give them a glimpse into my friendships through media. I also think that it is important to note that I used a video, not because I liked it but because my roommate plays the song non-stop and it has become the theme song of my last semester through no effort of my own. I enjoyed this project because it helped me understand what my worldview is and how I want to be perceived by others through the mode of technology. I did not really think about technology as a foundation for language but it is more powerful in different contexts and I think media today is the most effective because of all of the multimedia that people can use to their advantage.

Optional Blog Post 11/21

I never thought of making the connection between Aristotle and the Academy and Lyceum as equal to us and media. I always thought of learning in terms of Aristotle as concrete and learning media as more subjective based on how we use it what we use it for etc… The apparatus table helped me understand this concept a little better. When you look at electracy in terms of practice procedure etc… next to literacy in terms of the same apparatus’. The difference is that Aristotle was studying the ways of the earth that had already been created and philosophy that had been around where as when we study electracy it is something that the human mind invented fairly recently. When we talk about Aristotle’s understanding of God and his invention of the alphabetic apparatus we don’t necessarily think of media and internet because they all come from different genres. However, in this day in age I feel that it is just as important to understand electracy because that is how we get our information. Though Aristotle laid the foundation for writing and perspective, we still need to build on that understanding in order to navigate the source of information through electracy.

Machine Vision

“Being able to mea­sure some­thing gives us the sense that we can con­trol it.”

“We are watched to a far greater degree than when Foucault was alive, with surveillance cameras on every street corner and the NSA and many other entities able to access our emails or phone calls.”
Images my computer history uses to categorize me…
owlradio
computer 61m61Pk+7xL._SL1500_

Reflection

Overall I thought that Project 2 was a helpful and relatively fun project in terms of creation and technological freedom. I liked learning how to make my own website and it was fairly easy to add in hyperlinks and buttons to help enhance the website. I added in pictures to help my reader relate to the people I am writing about because it is easier to identify with people when you can put a face to a personality. In Latsha Harlins’ case, I put a picture of her on my introduction page to evoke feelings of empathy toward her and her loved ones rather than just telling her story with an article.

I also found that there were a lot of design and format choices so it was easy to find one that was well representative of what kind of information I wanted to use. It also had some great outlines for what kinds of visual aids I might want to use in order to make my points stand out a little more. I especially appreciated the freedom to choose what we felt was meaningful in our field to write about because it added a sense of authenticity to our websites rather than being expected to regurgitate information that we do not necessarily relate to. The customizability of this project was great because I felt like I was doing something that was specific to me and my major which also helped me further my own understanding of my field of study while also contributing to my own worldview.

I mostly wrote about possible reasons for the riots in LA during the 90’s for example, miscommunication between races. I also added in some background information so that my reader could get a overall feel for why my article is important and who these events effected at the time. My focus was more on the communication perspective by which the riots were studied rather than a narrative of the actual events. My webtext was based off of an intercultural worldview that the reader has to adapt in order to understand why there were discrepancies amongst the Korean shop owners and African-American customers in LA and how those discrepancies lead to violent acts against one another. I based my analysis off of Bailey’s article because I felt as though it was a very good representation of why communication so important, not just in ones personal life, but also when analyzing current events and international relations. My webtext also illustrates why communication is such a valuable field of study because it creates a new lens to look through when observing human behavior and contributes to a more tolerant and understanding worldview. Overall this was a helpful assignment because I was able to better explore content in the communication field through another non related class. It also helped me to form another perspective, different from the ones we look at in my communication classes, on what I am learning and how it relates to everyday life.

Summary (Design Memo)

For my webtext I chose to keep mine simple so as not to distract too much from the message. My main topic was the study of the communication between the Korean shop owners and the African-American customers and how it lead to the murder of Latasha Harlins which is why I chose a picture of her to put on my front page. I was trying to cater to people in the communication field who are more knowledgable about key communication concepts so I tried not to do too much explaining or defining of terms. I also wanted to give my audience the opportunity to read more about Latasha and watch the YouTube video so I put both of those links at the top of my page. I found that once I knew more about Latasha’s story, it made me more interested in when Bailey had to say in his article. I also added an introduction to try to summarize the idea of my webtext and get my audience engaged so they would want to keep reading. I tried to label them in a way that made it clear that if someone clicked on them they would be taken to a new website. For example I labeled them as their website rather than just Latasha’s story or “video.” I added Bailey’s article as well so that people could go back and look up the quotes I used in the webtext in order to get more context. I also put links on the top of the page to the different sections so that people could jump around and not have to read through the whole page. I added in pictures on the page to give an illustration of what Las Angeles was like back in the 1990’s in these grocery stores. I avoided embedding the video into my article so as not to distract my audience.

Field Sketch

See-First-To-Understand-Than-To-be-Understood

Customer Service, Human Resources, Management, Public/Media Relations

Organizational Communication

Steven Covey

Scholarly Source- Organizational Communication: A Critical Approach by D.K. Mumby

Video Reflection

I think my video would be received well by people over 40 because they tend to have more of an aversion to technology than younger people. I think it could be easily overlooked just because people do not want to be told that they need to do less of what they are used to or change their lifestyles. For example, if you tell someone who is thirteen that they are on their phone too much, they will probably just role their eyes and tell you that you do not understand what it is like to be them. I think my video caters to an older audience because in order for it to be appreciated you have to look at it from my friends perspective and really look at pictures that she took herself and appreciate them for their raw beauty. If my video was put on youtube I don’t know if it would have many views. The videos that are most viewed on youtube are of fainting goats and cats with bread on their heads. These videos are not exactly videos that make people think about the ways in which they live their lives and whether they are living to their full potential.

Composing Summary

I used a story telling narrative to explain how my friend’s trip to Africa affected her beliefs about technology. I talked about all of the things she noticed that people would do in Africa that her friends in America would rarely do. For example, the African family she stayed with always ate meals as a family where as in America either no one has time to eat together or people are on their phones and doing other things at the dinner table. I used juxtaposing examples between the people in Africa and the people in the U.S to communicate my friends belief that technology is hurting American culture and relationships through story mode.

I used a generic audio clip in the beginning of my video to use before my narration started because without it the beginning of my video would look like more of a powerpoint and it wasn’t interesting enough. Then after my narration had started I explained that all of the kids in the village really liked Waka Waka by Shakira and made that song the background music. After certain points I made I took pauses in the audio so that the audience could focus on the pictures and the music for two reasons. The first reason was that I wanted to let what I had just said set into the audiences heads because when people are given a lot of information at once they tend to forget the things that are said easier on in the video. The second reason was because I think the pictures say a lot about the people and their personalities and I didn’t want to detract from that, the music really gives people a look into how the people were and I wanted them to be able to experience the personalities of the village without a second voice in their head the whole time. I also used landscape pictures of parts of the villages to show how beautiful the country was and how it would get lost or taken advantage of if everyone was constantly using technology. The pictures of animals at the beginning was to give the audience a glimpse at the setting of the video rather than me just jumping into the story as soon as you press play.

The audience I am trying to reach with this video could be anyone. The videos point out all of the things we take for granted and I think that that applies to everyone at some point in their lives whether they are students, business people, or retirees. I think this video has potential on youtube or vimeo because people are interested in people’s lives around the world and I think they would be interested in seeing what it looks like to live in a rural village in western Africa. This video could be used to communicate what we miss out on when we are too busy watching a screen. I also think that parents who think their kids use technology too much would use this video to get their kids to stop texting at the dinner table.