A Non-believer in the Gaming Industry Sees an Alternative Light

So my mind's running a million miles a minute after watching all those videos...especially the McGonigal one. Chris Anderson was fabulous too, but it was McGonigal that really connected to two things for me.

I've never been able to look at gaming in another light; my brother has done it for years (headset and all - I would've been interested to see what she had to say about Call of Duty in that Ted Talks as well),and I've always been that girl who feels that, when friends complain to me that they have to compete with a game for their boyfriends attention, she is lucky enough to not have to deal with that relationship issue in her own. So...I've been on the "too much gaming, not enough outdoor activity" bandwagon. I mean, seriously. 5.93 MILLION YEARS of WOW gaming time? What about the trees and the mountains, man?

So the idea that McGonigal presents kind of made me look at all of this in a new light. We've kind of lost the battle on this one; gamings not going anywhere (and has apparently been around for thousands of years, though I'd argue that sitting on your bum for hours on end is slightly different than dice or tag...), so why not embrace it in the way that she suggests? By using gaming to change the way we look at the world and it's "unsolvable" problems?

I think her notion of the Super Empowered Hopeful Individual is a really important one - and I think the reason I connected to her in that video was because of the word "empower." I did a big project on child marriage and girls' education in impoverished countries last year, and when I was researching solutions for what could be done about the situations in which these issues exist, the one word that kept cropping up was empowerment. Over and over and over again. If we can empower these girls to feel confident, if we can give them educational opportunities, we can empower them to change the way they look at problems in their cultures (such as child marriage), and it goes on. So empowerment, that hope that things can get better, is where it's at.

I agree with that. I believe it - but I believe it more so in countries where the event of child marriage is taking place, where education is a hard won right if you are born female. The issue then, falls over here. And when we watch videos like McGonigal's, we feel that empowerment. We get it and we want to help. The problem is...how do we sustain that? How do we sustain that motivation to change the world? I really believe it can be done. I'm just not sure how, quite yet, we can pull gamers out of situations like the ones Call of Duty or WOW offers, and put them into others games like the ones she used examples at the end of her talk. How do we achieve that lasting empowerment?

Hillary

"Those who invade the linguistic domain of men must overcome their own sense of the inadequacies of a woman's speech. Unsurprisingly, then, political women are more "assertive, more venturesome, more imaginative and unconventìonal, and more liberal in their attitudes” than women in the population at large. The pressures of deviating from expected social roles exact a price. Female politicians tend toward "a serious and  manner and . . . a fretful uncertainty about themselves and their situation." "
-Jamieson (5)

It's awesome to see topics from three of my classes pulled together in Jamieson's article: eloquence and Margaret Fuller/women's issues. The thing that I can't quite get past is, if Fuller was writing in the 19th century (and I wonder what the date of this article is?) and we've evolved and matured and become more enlightened through the years, why do we still need articles and books expounding on this subject?

Apparently, because not too much has really changed.

The whole last part of Jamieson's article put me in mind of Hillary Clinton - that line about "women paying in shriveled uteruses for political standing" made me think about all of the comments I've heard about Hillary over the years, and and especially when she ran for president. There is only one guy I know who has anything good to say about her - even supports her political endeavors. But almost everyone else tone revolves around "she's a shriveled up witch" essentially, and "it's not that we don't want a female president, we just don't want her" which I doubt would change if another woman stepped up to the plate.

Hillary went from being the First Lady/mother to a high ranking politician in her own right - but that has not come without a price - and that price seems to be obvious from what I hear said about her.

It's interestingly terrible that female politicians have to give up so much of their femininity in order to run for office. The pant suits, the short hair that most women sport in those roles are all what we would traditionally consider "manly" changes to appearance - but why should women have to make those changes? Why should they have to sacrifice that part of themselves?

It's in circumstances like these that it seems like gender issues are even more apparent, and far from ever being over.

Our Dear Friend Wikipedia

"50% of all examined case of vandalism on Wikipedia were repaired with 2 or 3 minutes." (Kohl, 170)

Haha not so in Miles City, MT, Wikipedia, not so. Somewhere around my sophomore year of highschool, two guys that I know and was going to school with at the time, decided it would be awfully funny to test Wiki's "author" boundaries. They managed to change the knowledge in the government section of the Miles City page to read their names as president and vice-president of said town, along with a few other personal touches. A print out of that page, last I know, was hanging on their walls.

Wikipedia didn't find the inaccuracy for almost a full 24 hours - probably because Miles City isn't high up in the importance department of maintenance but still. That begs the question of just how well Wikipedia is contained - and when, and which pages are more important? If someone did something like that (albeit in a subtler manner) and I read two different things in two different days, which to believe? Sigh.

I know this isn't even close to the recommended 500 words, or very "deep" persay, but thinking about that story still makes me grin. My apologies. I will do better in the morn.

Infograph

Child Marriage

CPE

My critical photo essay (which may be a video, I'm not sure yet) is going to deal with the psychology behind font choice in different book genres. This may (most likely) feed into the way in which digital texts are created as well. I'm still working out the fine details, but that is the main gist.

Mid-October

"By studying actual texts as they function in particular contexts, we can gain an improved understanding of what constitute appropriate, effective strategies of rhetorical organization. At the same time, we can learn from such studies how successful texts are composed and what part schools can play in encouraging students to become able, creative composers" (Bernhardt).

I found this article extremely appropriate given what I've been discussing in my blogs most recently, which is how font and visual features affect the way we read things (most notably for me, in the way I distinguish fiction or novels from essays and academic articles). The way the Wetlands handout is structured is often how I wish that some of these articles could be structured - in broken up chunks of information that are more easily digested than long form paragraphs. The amount of information that I'm able to retain from short form pieces like that is pretty different from what I can grasp from many of the articles we've covered this year.

It makes me wonder if I should break down my notes from these into formats like that example. I'll experiment and see what happens, I think.

"Through these laws of gestalt, visual features take over the load of structuring and organizing the reader's processing, thus reducing the role of those semantic features which organize a form like the essay. Instead of a smooth, progressive realization of the text through initial previewing and a chain of logic which ties each paragraph or section to the preceding or following one, the visible text relies on localization, on a heightening of the boundaries, edges, and divisions of the text. ... In the visible text, the goal is to call the reader's attention visually to semantically grouped information, focusing the reader's attention on discrete sections." (Bernhardt)

Though it's a different topic, the above paragraph drew my attention to something else that's come up in conversation with my roommates a couple of times: the psychology of restaurant menus. Random? Yes. Relevant? Also yes. Food for thought.

Mishra

So, basically Mishra is telling me that all the illustrations in childhood textbooks, etc...were all a lie? KIDDING. Mostly.

I find it really interesting that not many studies have been done on how illustrations affect education, whether it be on a small elementary scale or a university level. I would think that, in relation to the different ways people learn, whether it be visual, hands-on, aural, or any of the other methods, there would have been a couple of different ones. Based on the way Mishra sums up the article, it's seems like a pretty fascinating area of study, especially regarding how well we learn something when we see it in front of us in an image and not spelled out in words.

How useful are images for learning though? When two people see on one image, they come away with different constructions of it in their minds - and the point the image is trying to convey may take root in different ways in different minds. So maybe images are less of learning tool (at least at a higher education level - I think they are invaluable in kindergarten classroom) and more of a jump off point for discussions that they might inspire? A starting point for the swapping of ideas?

It actually makes me think a little bit about the responses to the McCloud pieces we read last week. They didn't really have a midway point, at least from the people I talked to; they either liked it or didn't like it, which is something I've heard a lot in discussions about the different ways we learn (i.e. the person who says, "I can't stand teachers who read off powerpoints to teach a class! I can't focus" or the person who really likes dissection labs because of the hands-on aspect). While I found the visual images of the comic really helpful when trying to understand the material, other people didn't. So how does that affect me as someone who is learning? Am I doomed in my line of study because it largely favors picture-less texts?

I think I got a little away from the main point of the article, but these were some of the things I was thinking about as I was reading it.

AV Short of Awesomeness

Here is the last minute, shot an hour ago, edited a half hour ago AV Short Video by me! OF AWESOME! Large enormous thank you to one of bestest roommates ever EMILY JO!

McCloud

For some reason, I think I vaguely remember Erin mentioning McCloud in another class we had together - correct me if I'm wrong, darling - and possibly writing a paper on it. If I am correct in my remembering, I'd love to hear what it was you were writing about when you mentioned this (I think was in Advanced Comp?).
My mind imploded on itself a little while reading to the first chapter of the three we were assigned, but while I think that concepts the author is speaking about are really interesting, what I couldn't help doing the whole time was comparing this reading to the other readings we've been doing in class. All deal with relevant issues in rhetoric, but what I think sets McCloud apart from the others - other than the obvious pictures - is the ease with which I was able to understand the wide concepts he was trying to convey, which put me in mind of the different ways we learn - aural, visual, etc. The visual point in this is one known well in the world of comics, but I wanted to apply it to another topic that a classmate and I were discussing the other day: the use of fonts.

Fonts vary in every text, every book - and I never realized how often they effect how I learn - and maybe how everyone learns. The all-cap thicker font of McCloud's writing kept my attention centered - is that because I make the correlation between all caps meaning I'm either being yelled at or someone's trying to emphasize a point? I put that up against how much trouble I have paying attention to the the small printed, dictionary-thin pages of my Rhet/Comp book in another class - possibly because I associate that print with higher learning I have trouble understanding? Or how larger fonts in books in thick books make me less appreciative of it's content (it just looks more juvenile to me). I think it's incredibly interesting.

Pictures and comics aside, that is what I kept thinking about while reading from McCloud.

Sosnoski & Jakobs

From Jakobs article, I gleaned the definition of Hypertext:

"Hypertext will, therefore, be defined as an on or offline accessible, functionally determined subnet of modules with a  certain communicative purpose, organized by an overarching thematic idea." (Jakobs)

So...the web? Text online or on-screen in general? I think... And yet for all of the explanation in the article, I still couldn't put that understanding into a more comprehensive  line of thought than that, until I read Sosnoski's article.


I feel that the direction of this post aligns itself with what I wrote about last time. Sometimes I wonder if I really am odd and too much old-fashioned when it comes to technology on a screen. Sosnoski's article started out by describing how much he truly enjoys reading on a screen, and ended with how he thinks it will become more popular as is become more aesthetically pleasing (i.e, the comfy chair, fireplace, etc) - which it already has. Maybe it's because of the negative experience I have with reading on a screen (eye issues and the migraine like), but I don't think that's it.

Part of it lies with this quote: "Good Writing is often distinguished from bad writing on the grounds of coherence." (Sosnoski, 5). It takes me far longer to read something from a computer screen than it does from actual paper; when on my computer, I constantly have to reread passages, as if the set-up distracts me. It seems much less coherent to me - whether or not the writing is good or bad. Maybe because I don't have something in my hands to keep them grounded in the subject I'm currently reading?Or maybe it's just because I have trouble focusing and am also inclined to dislike reading on screens.

There's a paragraph towards the end of the article that I want to believe: "I believe that a more sensible view sees; hyper-readmg, whether exploratory or constructive, as another way of reading (and writing), which is not likely to supplant the ones we already have since they accomplísh different objectives." (Sosnoski, 7)

But do they always? All I can think about is the little 1st and 2nd grade students I know in my hometown who told me they gave up their kindles/nooks for Lent, to which all I could think was, Why aren't they reading from physical BOOKS at that age?

Whether that's a parenting decision or a dialogue between the way children used to read, the way they are reading, and the way the will read, I'm not sure.

No iPad for me, dears.

I still prefer to write with pens - a specific, cheap Bic kind, actually, that I can buy in black packs. Whenever I take notes in class, I prefer them to be on paper (because I have trouble paying attention if I do them on the computer), I have to write poetry on open wide pages that allow for me to cross out and scribble and generally make the paper look like a hodge-podge mess, and I love fleshing out story lines and character sketches on lined composition notebooks. I even have a typewriter that sits on my desk that I still use occasionally.

But I could not write an essay or novel long-hand to save my life. My fingers can't keep up with my thoughts unless they're on a keyboard, as they are now, and I can't imagine how the Greats (whose work we still read today) did it when they were accomplishing their great novels or collections. My words never sound fluid when I reread them from a handwritten sheet of paper, they way those authors words must of. Does that make me less of a writer?

So, though I refuse to own a nook/kindle/whatever else they'll come up with (my boyfriend and I have a bet going - if I buy something like that in the next 10 years, he gets as many roofboxes for our cars as he wants. I win, and we move to the UK), I've been tainted, in a way, by computers, and I'm almost waiting for the days when technology renders us useless without it. I'm one of those skeptics.

Which is why it's really interesting to look back and see something like this "Writing lacks such tonal cues of the human voice as pitch and stress, not to mention the physical cues that face to face communication..." (Baron, 4)  and remember how Plato thought that writing was going to ruin us. Reading the above quote, my initial response was, That's not entirely true. If I know someone well enough, I hear the inflections and the tones in their voices through the writing they send to me, be it letters, emails, or texts. I know that that is also true for some other people. That evolution of thought for me would never have occurred for Plato.

Does that mean that all of our fears are ungrounded - books no longer being in print, newspaper journalists losing their jobs to machines, etc?

Even so, what makes me sad is that half of what we are doing today will never last. Outside of writing - our skyscrapers won't be here in 1000 years the way the Colosseum still is; if the internet were ever to crash, half of the information we know would be lost - and with the rate that memory loss is climbing at, how would we remember all of it?

Are we dumbing ourselves down even as we at the same time learn new ways to communicate?

Intertextuality

"Examining texts 'intertextually' means looking for traces, the bits and pieces of Text that which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new discourse." (Porter)

That sounds like an awesome patchwork quilt that I'd like to have lying across my bed. But it's also the subject of what I am constantly thinking - no, worrying - about whenever I sit down to write. Not just in essays and research papers, but when I sit down to work on my novel. And that worry is that, if all of my ideas were struck by something that influenced me, either from a straightforward point or a rhetorical point, what is truly mine? Porter says:

"[Clreativeness does not consist in producing new sentences. The newness of a sentence is a quite unimportant and unascertainable property  and 'creativity' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation." (Porter, 5)

Several things to take into account for  the above would be: 1) Genre, 2) Time Period, which falls in with, 3) Style. In the 19th century, Porter says something akin to be published meant to be writing in a style based on Shelley or Tennyson - how does that transfer to our own generation? What authors are we following now, be it in non-fiction or fiction?

This is where I think we struggle with the point that Porter alludes to: is every writer guilty of plagarism? In the broadest sense of the word, I suppose the answer would be yes - nothing that I have ever seen/read/watched, etc, has not influenced what I think or write. Just last weekend on Labor Day, I watched a movie with my father and throughout it, we kept saying, "Oop! They borrowed that from Star Wars and that from Predator and THAT from Star Trek and that from Moon..." and on and on it went. While we enjoyed the movie itself, we knew that it held "traces" of all the other great works of it's genre; it was continually borrowing from its ancestors.

The second half of that second quote says, "...'creativity' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation." I partially agree with that...but even if you take that and put it in the rhetorical sense, as Porter said, it still doesn't remove the writer to his/her own newly completely created way of looking at things. Two people can - however rarely - look at something and think the exact same thing about it. And there's billions of people on the planet - the odds are pretty good.

Being a contributor to a web is great, but many people want to stand out. So what gives us the ability to do that?  What is creativity at its root?

I know I'm focusing only on the Porter piece, but it's something that I literally think about all the time.

Maybe I have this all backwards and are looking at it the wrong way. Thoughts, anyone?

Introductory Video!

                 My introductory video! After many different ideas, this one seemed perfect. Yay!

Overload

There has been one thought from me after having read these articles and two others associated with Rhetoric this weekend, and it fits well into the section which Geisler calls "Information Overload."

Rhetoric for me, up until now, has always been one of those words that you hear in the English world, and go, "Yeah! Rhetoric!" and nod accordingly, as though I know exactly what is being said. And this semester, having two classes that explore the subject and its different facets has been slightly daunting - and its only the first week.

I was walking home with my roommate last week and we were discussing rhetoric - her knowledge of it, and my lack of knowledge about it. At the end of the conversation, she said something akin to rhetoric as a way of breaking down and discovering the layers in not only people, but the way they interact with each other, etc. And I realized, that as a fiction writer, that was exactly what I liked to do too; maybe the two were not entirely different.

I've finally latched onto a term that gives me a starting place to understand it: the Art of Persuasion (term used in other class). From there, I feel that I can go on and begin to slowly understand  the concepts involved. The Geisler article stood out to me because it remembered both the classical origins of the craft - where I understand the persuasion part to come in, because it was mostly oratory back then - and the issues facing us now with access to so much writing and information on the web (where the ITexts come in).

During class discussion on Thrusday morning, the term took a political turn in our group, as we spoke about propaganda and the way politicians use rhetoric to convey convincing speeches, which circle back around to the classical use.

From there, my mind spiraled during the notes we took at the end of the class:

Voice is irrelevant (words are more important than sound)
Identity is irrelevant (who's talking shouldn't matter to the meaning of what gets said)
Time and space are irrelevant (anything true here is true there so what's true for me is true for you)
A valid conclusion is a good conclusion. (Dialectic can be used to make the worse argument seem the better argument)
Motivation is irrelevant (why someone says a thing has no bearing on its validity - but passion invalidates)
Bodies are irrelevant (a good idea is a good idea independent of bodies, while bodies, through passion, corrupts thought)
Instances are irrelevant, principles are dominant (don't let a bad instance get in the way of a good principle - deduction trumps induction)

And all of that I applied to the speech I listened to Obama give for the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington - and in thinking about that, the "philosophy of argument"  seems pretty wrong.

And from there, that it seems rhetoric creeps into every part of daily lives, and we don't even know it.

This seems all scatterbrained and unconnected (I realize) but bear with me - it's only the first post, and I'm simply trying to put together a basis of understanding for a topic that I am just beginning to learn about.

Apologies for the late posting - it will suffice to say I hate technology.

Hello all!

I'm Autumn Toennis, who during class said she is the one that likes to sing and loves trees, and frequently mixes the two together. I feel as though I should have a longer introduction, but as we are making a personal introduction video, I will refrain from saying too many of the things that I would put in here that I will be placing in the vid (hopefully).

I would cheesily say that I enjoy long walks on the beach, but as there is a lack of beaches where I've generally lived most of my life, I will say that I enjoy long walks in the woods. Which, because I am the the one who said she loves to sing in trees, seems much more appropriate. And true.

I would've stayed in the Sequoia groves in Yosemite forever, if the park and my manfriend would have allowed me.

Looking forward to learning about rhetoric - this concept that I do not yet understand and my roommate loves ;) - in it's many forms.

Toodles!