Digital Rhetorics 2: Electric Boogaloo

Over at Holy Rosary, Fr. Leo once explained that it takes a really creative preacher to connect the day's gospel passage, epistle, and Old Testament reading together in the same homily. Some days, Paul and Mark are both grooving together, talking about prayer or the Holy Spirit, but then you have to slog through a recounting of the generations between Adam and Noah. Sometimes its hard to connect the dots (it's Wysocki; her piece is the genealogy). But when life gives you lemons: if I squeeze hard enough, these pieces raise different aspects of the relationship between visualization and the human people either about or meant to be used by. Or maybe its just that visual presentation affects our lives (but that does sound a bit like the thesis statement from a literature paper I might have written in high school eg "Conflict is a central theme in  The Crucible.") Goetz's presentation got to this connection most clearly and convincingly. The medical field ostensib...

This chapter on line effectively showed me, as most of the rest of this book has, that I do respond to visual information in very specific ways, but again I'm left to puzzle out the why. There's something mysterious about what makes a particular line have any kind of character at all. On 126, McCloud notes how the characteristics of the lines suggest something of the internal experience: "bold lines, obtuse angles, and heavy blacks... suggest the mood of a grim, deadly world full of adults." I think the temptation is to say that the connection is obvious, that those lines work because dark and heavy lines match a dark and heavy world, but then I'm just stretching the same metaphor over both, and I notice that McCloud very carefully doesn't do that. His language for line is different from his language for what they express. Last semester, for a class on Spanish history, I was treated to a crash course on intellectual movements and their expression in art and ...

I had several thoughts about how to go about making this argument that I felt would meet my rhetorical needs. One would be to stage a takeover of the lounge, in which I get a group of friends together in ski masks, with the long sticks and homemade shields, to make it look like some Black Bloc tactics. NWA or Run the Jewels plays, and then everyone just pushes the furniture together, unrolls sleeping bags, and goes to sleep. It looked funny in my head, but pulling all of that together was challenging for multiple reasons. I decided to go for something that imitated what an institution would put out for promotional reasons, whether that's to attract money from donors or attention from prospective students. Think of what would go up on the website: facilities presented in pristine condition, enjoyed by a multi-ethnic group of friends, while a soundtrack that's upbeat yet inoffensive plays. What I felt was really key was the attempt to portray a close-knit community animated by th...

https://vimeo.com/256326042

McCloud attempts to explain the power of cartoons to connect with the reader in the craziest way possible (it all comes down to not being able to see our own faces??? 34-36). Its the type of thing that usually throws me in rhetoric or media theory. But he observes something very true about the effect different levels of abstraction have on what an image communicates. The magic of comics and cartoon images for me has always been in how they can capture vital and vibrant experiences, familiar human emotions, while deviating so far from imagery that tries to accurately imitate what the eyes see during those moments. What McCloud said about what the art calls attention to (p.37: "You would have been far too aware of the messenger to fully receive the message!") gets me to thinking that, by trending towards universality as opposed to representing reality, the cartoon style is positioned to turn faces into icons of anger, laughter, exasperation, etc. through representing the uni...

Wysocki-Eilola I’ve read Lisa Delpit. I picked up Other People’s Children over Christmas break for a little extracurricular reading, and I don’t think Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola are using her work in a way she would exactly agree with. The crux of Delpit’s thinking is that, while all cultural groups have their own communicative norms, or codes, in the United States a specific dialect of English, as well as various properties of interacting with others, is the only way to obtain economic success. She calls these proprieties “codes of power”, and what makes them dangerous is that they are seen as the natural way of communicating. There are multiple literacies, each responding to the needs of the community that uses it, but in the classroom they aren’t recognized as being literacies at all, just defective language use. Delpit argues that teachers should learn to recognize the worlds contained in the codes of other cultures in order to connect with the vital lives of their students and c...