Wan Jin's paper

Wan Jin’s paper stood out most when he described images, and describes reactions. The soft river is comforting and the graphic disturbing images are graphic and disturbing. He does a very good job of projecting these feelings; and helping to explain why Gore does such good work with them too.  The drafts introduction was very weak, and there is no reference to the actual science in the paper, so he edits the first couple of tidbits about carbon emissions out to completely focus on Gore’s dynamic rhetoric, which is a good thing. If a paper is a Jenga tower, the intro is the very crucial foundation that either holds it up or sends it toppling down.  His final includes much more references back to the research, so he doesn’t seem to rely only on his primary source for his rhetorical analysis.

I found the parts about Gore’s own personal suffering strengthening his resolve to be the weakest part of the paper. I was under the impression that maybe that section could fall under the lonely leader caption, because most of that seemed less to strengthen his resolve and more to induce sympathy, but that’s probably just me.  He also seems to overanalyze his body movements at one point, when describing Gore’s mobilization. Maybe Gore was just trying to make eye contact, he didn’t have to be acting out mobilization like a game of charades, that would make less people take him seriously.

so here's the deal

g.clemson.edu wasn't supported by blogger, so I had to figure out what gmail account I hooked up to the g.clemson, so I'm finally back.

I just figured out how to get back onto my blogger, and it was kind of a mess to deal with. I will commence with the latest three blogs, in reverse order.

I really hope this abnormality doesn't affect my grade. not too much anyways.

Synthesis on drafting and outlining and revision.

The reading that is being synthesized currently focuses on organizing and drafting a research argument paper, with a tad of information on how to revise it.

Outlines can help you organize your paper by deciding where you want to put what points, and then making it easy to switch them around as you figure out how to transition from point to point. It also helps with how you want to incorporate the sources that you have cited, and pairing articles with the points you are making. Eventually you will figure out how you are going to tack on your own opinion and add your own twist to the facts you are presenting. This skeleton provides the springboard that will be the research paper soon.

In drafting you have to remember not to just regurgitate your sources, but provide your own original voice to the issue.  Learn how to paraphrase the sources and don’t use too many quotations. Most of the meat of the paper will be in summarizing your own points, and the main idea of the sources.

After drafting, revision is critical. Your first draft is going to be far from perfect. Sometimes it will be a big problem, such as a thesis that’s too broad, but sometimes it’s a quick fix like removing quotations. More than likely, there will be an overbearing problem that will have to be taken care of in the next drafts. You can either identify these yourself or get a peer or fresh set of eyes to analyze it for you, but one things for certain, there’s always something to be fixed.  

interviews

These interviews are on two very different subjects. I think it's safe to start by pointing out the most fundamental differences and then branch out from there

First off, there is very little to say about embedding journalists because it seems they have little to report. Anytime things get overly exciting, the reports get blurry, so many of the questions can just be answered with an "I can't answer that." There's also the problem of operational security. There are problems with the restrictions that the interview has. The most I got out of it was "Journalists are put in danger and experience maybe too much excitement" We can't make any conclusive statements from this interview.


The McDonalds interview, on the other hand, is very in depth. Ritzer doesn't have any restrictions constricting him from voicing all of the information he has on the subject. The interviewer constructs his questions in a way to either tear down or reinforce Ritzer's points, depending on his ability to answer the questions. His "Iron cages" analogy works well for him when he is challenged with "Do you eat at McDonald's?" I feel like this interview was much better constructed than the previous one and helped provide much more information.

Analyzing research sources

In the reading, we learned very specific things about the daunting task of researching prior to writing a paper.
There are two types of sources: Primary- which we analyze independently, and are usually in the context of our topics, and Secondary- which provide their own professional analyses to the aforementioned primary sources.

In searching for a source, the library is probably a good place to start, and Google is something to be wary of.
There are a number of questions to ask in analyzing an online source
1. Who is the author, and what authority does s/he have on the topic?
2. is the site affiliated with some organization?
3. Does the site cite its own sources?
4. What is the purpose of the site and who is the audience?
among others.
 Primary research is also an option, interviewing knowledgeable people on the subject.

A dialogue of sources allows you to identify how your paper will flow, and what sources will provide what points, a generally useful tool in helping format the paper.
Another tool to help with this is the annotated bibliography, which contains your works cited and annotations for every source, where you discuss the usefulness and applications of each source and how it will apply to your topic. You discuss pros and cons of the source, and how reliable the source is.

Facebook, the news feed, microblogging, twitter

When I heard about the social network craze, I was in 8th grade and I thought it was stupid. Why in the world would I put myself on the internet and talk to all my friends that I already knew in person? why not talk to them in real life?
I went to a pretty small school system, my graduating class was around 206 people, and I knew most of them, so I really didn't think that I would jump on that bandwagon as quickly as I did. I had a couple of rules though.

-not too much personal information
- Don't friend strangers
- (eventually) no emo statuses, people in general won't care

With the death of myspace, I didn't have to worry about changing my profile song or arbitrarily ranking my friends anymore, that was nice.
Then we come to Facebook and its infamous news feed.
I don't know what all the initial fuss was about, I post everything with the assumption that everyone would be able to see it, even if it wasn't true. It's a social network, privacy almost doesn't belong.

The description of the change of our social dynamic was interesting. We keep in touch with many more people now, and maintain several weak ties with people that we know, literally "networking" across all of our social circles, and when we lose contact with people, they remain our Facebook friends. I have facebook friends that I haven't talked to in over a year. I still think that this doesn't affect the way we see our close ties with close friends. We all, as of now, follow a relatively normal schedule, and with that comes contact with the same people and the closeness of a shared experience. This overtakes anything that our virtual "weak" connections have on us.
I found the ambient knowing bit to be intriguing as well. I've found that I can still keep up with what my close high school friends are doing, and still feel a little bit of connection to them, albeit not very much.
I also find my status updates a useful tool for introspection. Even though most of them are jokes, I find out a lot about myself with how I project myself to others, kind of like looking at an ideal portrait of myself.

Under all that armor, we're all still human, probably.

I would like to start today with what my avatars in World of Warcraft were.
Johnlocke- eventually was my main, 80 troll shaman. Male
Whowhatwhen- Level 61 Blood elf Paladin. Female-OK LET ME EXPLAIN MYSELF

When me and my brother started playing Horde, we immediately thought "wow, all these races look tragic, why would we play any of them?" We eventually warmed up to their appearances, but the first thing we thought was "Man those blood elf females are the only attractive thing the Horde has."
Also, I wanted to be a paladin and the males looked like sissies.
Me and John had arguments over which one of our avatars was hotter, it was kind of funny looking back on it. We did eventually start getting hit on, and it got really weird really quickly.

But I felt much like myself when playing that troll, I'm not sure why. I'm sure not only avatar creation goes into subliminal description of the player beneath, classes matter too. A warrior or Paladin is going to have heavy armor, be the tough guy that takes all the hits. The mages want to seem intelligent, and the damage dealers want to be the ones that matter. The healers are the benevolent ones that would rather help their allies than fight.
That's what I think anyways.

What originally had me hooked on shammy was dual wielding. Anytime anyone forgoes a shield in favor of another club or axe to beat enemies down with, you know that guy means business. I wanted to be a guy that meant business.
I found myself in a weird support role, dropping totems to increase the party's stats, along with my own. I was a jack of all trades, using magic, support abilities, healing and physical strength all with equal prowess. I helped people out in a party and could take care of myself on my own. I was very well rounded, and that may have been a projection of what I wanted to be.

I'll be honest, I miss those guys a bit.
But I digress, a little anyways.

in the realm of other games combat oriented or otherwise, avatars serve to break barriers and take out the social aspect of physical appearance. People all look how they would like to be seen, and that's how prejudices are broken. We're blind to color and appearances, and can all just communicate on level ground with similar interests and goals. I'd argue that gamers are more social than the average person because of this.  Sure, they may be less interactive with people in the real world, but there are more people on the virtual realm they can relate to. They can even create real friendships in the virtual world, support each other and help get through things in the real world; and they don't even know what the other looks like. Some people create guilds and linkshells and clans for the sole purpose of socialization.

Be gentle, it's my first time...

Okay, so maybe that title was a bit risque, but it holds true when I talk about this paper. I've never faced a task such as this, using one source and analyzing it to the point where we've developed five pages.

It's quite daunting. The more I think that this paper was crazy to write, I could see some sense in it.


It really has helped me identify my very sporadic writing pace, I can come up with 200 words in 15 min, and then be stuck for an hour, but that must have been the procrastination setting in. I sat stuck at around 700 for a very long while, analyzing away until I found a whole new layer of rhetoric to develop. This was a challenge I warily accepted and it ended up paying off. This assignment was a real eye-opener for me and let me know that I was in a whole new playing field as a writer in college.

I'm sure my editing is going to take a huge hit too, usually my rough drafts and final drafts look incredibly similar, but I'm almost positive that won't be the case this time.

I was one of the lucky ones who was only up until 1:30 finishing up the draft, but I'm still going to have to pace myself in the future so stuff like that doesn't happen often.

Convergence and beauty.

Dove's campaign for breaking down the impossible standards expected of women today is a very good thing.
Diversity is what makes us human, and all of us as individuals should present a different image. Emulating a magazine or billboard doesn't make a woman more beautiful, it makes her less attractive and less diverse.
Think about it, if everyone achieved their ideal beauty from a magazine and presented it perfectly, the idea and concept of beauty would be lost.
I'm sure everyone has a different concept of beauty of course. That in itself should be already tearing down the impossible bars women set for themselves. We even have different words describing attractiveness: cute, lovely, beautiful, sexy, hot, attractive. These all have slightly different connotations depending on how we use them. The English language itself proves that we all have differing concepts as a whole, and therefore shouldn't have converging concepts of beauty settled on one or two images. We'd lose a little bit of diversity, something we should be celebrating as a whole.

I feel it should be said that not all women feel that they need to fit this mold. The same way I don't feel I need to be muscle bound and lifting weights to be awesome, I'm pretty sure most girls don't feel like they need to be 6 foot tall sticks in heels to feel attractive.  Yet this ad campaign gives the ones that do feel the need to emulate models a well needed kick in the pants and a compliment to boot.

What kind of name is Skenazy?

These readings were more on the topic of photography, with emphasis on it's advancements and delving slightly into amateur cinematography (Youtube).

First were Skenazy and Williams et. al. Skenazy recognized the ability to capture and express the good moments in photography and nitpicking what is portrayed into the ideal family album.  We, as families, don't want to soil our good names and want only to be seen in top form when looking back on memories. This is an extremely bad thing, according to Skenazy, because we are neglecting truths and essentially giving our memories a makeover to where they are hardly recognizable.
Williams et. al. Tracked the progression of photography, and its descent into the impersonal and easily accessible tool it is today. It seems to condemn the end result, saying that it went from painstaking and carefully constructed  to snapshots easily taken and uploaded to the cloud in an instant. They do seem to appreciate the rise of amateur photographers in the middle, who seemed to break the mold and not follow the concrete rules of photography and created new boundaries for the art.

Pogue writes about various sites, and seems more of an objective informational article than anything. It seemed to be put into the reading solely for the purpose of showing how many sites that hosted photos there were and how easily accessible they were. Strangelove knows what's going on, relying on kairos to defend the development of Youtube, letting us know that our affection with viral videos is something thats very important. It reminds us that with all this impersonal technological development, we still haven't lost one of our most important human characteristics; we still have a firm grasp on our sense of humor.

Photography, rhetoric, and synthesization.

Today's topic is photography, and how it is used to convey messages, and to portray and perserve what the artist sees.

Most rhetoric in photography relies on pathos or kairos. It uses mostly context and feeling to evoke the desired reaction in the observer. Photographs aren't meant to capture a moment, they are meant to prolong and preserve it, so that others may observe the event much later. Sometimes this leads to exaggerations in the situation portrayed. A photo of a family fighting may unintentionally make observers believe that family's home life is a wreck, even if it was one fight. On the flip side, a photo of a family saying grace at the table peacefully may portray a serene home life, when that moment is fleeting and home life is nowhere near that.
This means that photography could be a good vessel for propaganda, finding ways to exaggerate and extend situations like environmental disasters, or wars.

The reading also included commentary on how the world of photography has changed over the years. In it's infancy, photography was painstaking and tedious. Exposures took hours and developing the pictures took even longer. Over time, photography has become easier and more accepting of amateurs. These new photographers revolutionized the art by breaking the standards, and creating much more diverse pictures. Over time, we've developed the capability to take photos instantly on our smart phones, making our memorable moments much easier to catch, and the number of pictures taken increase exponentially. These photos still hold value to the people taking them, but there is such volume, and such little true photography involved in these pictures that most of them don't make any impact to the masses. In some ways, this new wave of photos has sacrificed quality and impact for quantity in personal value.

Will it Blend?

This is an ad selling not only a Blendtec blender, but the idea of a Blendtec blender being better than an iPad, and after watching this video, I have to agree, at least from a durability standpoint. The ad takes a side, which is unusual for a product that would want to appeal to as many people as possible. It appears to favor fans of windows products.
This ad was posted on Youtube, and that's its main medium. It serves the audience very well. They expected to be entertained when killing time on Youtube, and this video provides that entertainment. The video features Tom Dickinson, blender extraordinaire, a middle-aged man in a lab coat, and some old-time big band music. It feels like a game show, and projects that environment very well.
His inflection kind of contrasts the sequence of the video, because he remains calm and jovial while smashing and grinding a very expensive coaster.

The ad, playing like a game show, builds excitement for viewers as the iPad is blended. For the first few seconds, it doesn't look like it will take, but sure enough, it grinds down to a powdery dust. The idea is to make you think the Blendtec blender can do anything, and reduce anything to a powder.
The ad utilizes the new fad of the iPad to shock the audience- they have the audacity to destroy this great new hip creation!? The shock factor increases the appeal and widens the spread of the video as it is linked over social networks and is a great way to reach a wider audience.

Cartoon analysis

This comic discusses the issue of misplaced worries and paranoia, and how we deal with situations that are much more dangerous than we perceive.

In the comic, a woman refuses to ride a plane while talking on the phone in a car that she's driving. She then sends a text message in heavy traffic, which statistics have shown is much more dangerous than riding in a plane.

The comic was posted December 2, 2010 and the most recent notable attack on an airplane at the time was the underwear bombing in 2009. It's posted from America on the internet, so anyone with the web address could access it. It is very straightforward in telling us that we have misplaced our fears.

Zach Weiner is an American cynic with seemingly liberal tendencies. He is a pure comedian that sometimes focuses on making fun of occasional illogical fallacies in common human thought trends. He also writes comedic skits archived in SMBC Theatre.


Weiner pokes fun at the fact that we are so scared of airplanes due to a very small number of incidents, when we do such dangerous things on a regular basis. Texting while driving is MUCH more likely to kill you than a relatively safe airplane. The delivery of this is very ironic, in that it has the ignorant woman refusing to do something safe while doing something incredibly dangerous.

Here, the words and images contradict each other, the second image clearly shows how much danger she's putting herself in, while she herself in the text concludes that a plane is much more dangerous. In a sense, it's showing how much the terrorism has worked. We, as a country, are now illogically afraid of some pretty safe airplanes now that terrorists have wrecked some of them.

The woman pretty much resembles the whole of the ignorant society that believes that planes are incredibly dangerous, and haven't seen the statistics behind texting while driving.

Concerning rhetoric...

Orange, Clemson University’s primary color, is very very bright. It’s no wonder all the flyers and posters hung up around the dorm hall are speckled, striped, splashed or otherwise completely strewn with the color; it catches the eye and creates a sense of school spirit with whatever organization is advertising. I only found two types of ads without flashy orange designs blinding you as you tried to walk to the elevator to get to class.

The first was the flyers for intramurals. They made up for the lack of color with BIG BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS. That definitely grabs your attention. The ads a relatively simple, shouting a certain date and time to come and see what they have to offer. And even if the BIG BOLD CAPITAL LETTERS don’t get you, the sheer volume of placement will. It seems they thought it would be more effective to use the funds they could’ve allocated to buying color ink to buy REAMS of paper, because these things are hung up every three or four feet. 

The interesting thing about these flyers is the absolute lack of rhetoric. I guess they figured a black and white picture vaguely depicting what the sport might be was enough, and anyone interested enough to look at them and note the time, would probably come.

The second advertisement not covered in that fluorescent orange is primarily green and has its and way of standing out. “Become an Eco Rep!” it advocates, with a pair of hands (some pretty good looking ones at that) holding up the world- sans oceans. It’s trying to convey the message that the world is in our hands, and becoming a Clemson Eco Rep could be a good platform to jumpstart our world saving careers (or hobbies?) and be part of a fun community.  It’s the only true piece of rhetoric I can find up here.

One interesting thing I found was that the Christian organizations “teamed up” with each other. They look as if they share a common goal of spreading the Good News, so they plopped their posters right next to each other. They considered that anyone that was Christian or interested in Christianity would look at one of the posters, and see both. That way, if one churches time wasn’t good for the student, the other poster invited them just as freely.

I also saw some awesome commercials, but I’m sure I’ll get to talk more about different rhetoric later. I don’t want to put all my brand name eggs in one basket.

it is done!

WHOO! also, test.