As I bid adieu to 583...

Making a film for the Boise Library was surprisingly easy and fun. I think what helped in a huge way was working with another person who was technically proficient and with two others who not only had great work ethic but a true passion for the subject. It was fun because we got to focus on seeking the best rhetorical options for our client instead of spending time learning the technology.

<<I must have been dreaming when I wrote the above paragraph.

This was one of the most difficult, yet most rewarding things I have done for school.>>

I came to this program and this class with a strong amateur new media and graphic design background. Prior to school I worked as a freelance copy/art/production coordinator, a position that gave me wide latitude to learn and employ digital media skills. So the service-learning assignment we faced was not unfamiliar nor intimidating. What was challenging for me, at least in the beginning, was working with a group. I have never experienced group work in a way that was satisfying. While my most recent group work was done in the professional field, it seemed much like what I had experienced as an undergraduate: disorganized, time consuming, and an overall disjointed, unproductive experience. This project, on the other hand, proved radically different. Our group of four was easy to work with, our connections (both logistic and personality-related) with the City of Boise librarians was painless and welcoming, and our production method fairly effortless.

The production of this project, as well as this class as a whole, has fueled my interest in new media and its use in public discourse. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich writes of the particulars of cinema sinking into invisibility as it got to be more common and more commonly used. And he seeks to record the rise of new media before it sinks into invisibility as well. From this project, I feel quite confident in saying that there is no chance of that happening for BSU’s first-year students any time soon. My introduction to the many and various free applications on the net spawned the confidence to introduce them within my English 101 classroom. While my students were eventually able to negotiate the use of both Prezi and podcasting, it took effort and handholding on my part to get them through it. It seems that they have been more passive than active in their internet use. In instructing them about the use of Prezi, I mentioned a royalty-free stock photography site that I have used in various personal and professional projects for years. Using the overhead, I quickly took them to the site, found an image that was applicable to a student’s topic, saved it to the desktop, and imported it into the Prezi example. The entire process took 5 minutes and seemed quite straightforward to me. I did not have one student that was able to negotiate the creation of a Prezi without technical issues that threatened to derail the project. I can’t tell you how surprised I was.

I was further surprised when I asked them to record a podcast for another unit. Almost all of them own late-model laptops, on which cameras and microphones are built in and readily accessible through a host of software programs and drivers. Remembering the struggles of their experience with Prezi, I even allowed them to video-record their essays, the process of which even my 6-year-old son can do. Most of them chose an audio recording anyway, yet were mostly perplexed on how to record their voices, how to export the file, and how to share it with me.

At the end of our class time together, I am left pleasantly full of good feelings about the future of digital rhetoric along with confidence in my ability to both produce this sort of project as well as teach my students how to do their own.

My Attempt to Teach My Mother-in-law Technology

On Manovich

Prologue:

As a cycling fan, I have come to love prologues. In cycling, they are our chance to see how our favorite cyclists are prepared to race in the coming days. So Manovich’s use of this prologue is a welcome addition to his text; one that I am highly receptive of. And in this first page of the prologue, I encounter an interesting idea. Manovich writes, “in contrast to cinema, where most ‘users’ are able to ‘understand’ cinematic language by not ‘speak’ it (i.e., make films), all computer users can ‘speak’ the language of the interface” (xv). This is an interesting idea…. Why? Do I believe that all computer users can speak the language of the interface? I honestly believe that most of us are speaking a pigeon version… because doesn’t speaking imply fluency? And I would absolutely argue that most interface users are not fluent in the language of that program. Manovich certainly doesn’t assert that all users are fluent speakers, but there is something about his statement that makes me think that it is perhaps overstated… I would almost argue that I know as much about movie making as I do about using computer interfaces.

On xvi, Manovich says, “cinematic perception [in computer games] functions as the subject in its own right,” which makes me think of the use of the Steadi-Cam in film. I remember reading about a scene in Friday the 13^th, in which Jason walks down a hallway and we are viewing the hallway through his hockey mask. The Steadi-Cam, by the way, was only invented in 1976.

Further into the prologue, I read the following,

“When photographs are brought together within a single magazine or newsreel, both the scale and unique locations of the objects are discarded—thus answering the demand of mass society for a ‘universal equality of things’” (xxi). It may just be that the idea is explained completely in the chapter that contains this pull quote, but I am not sure I understand this idea. Does removing scale and unique location create a “universal equality”? How exactly is scale removed from a photograph? Isn’t that an inherent quality of a photograph? Doesn’t the same hold true of unique location? I mean, the photograph itself isn’t in a unique location, but the information that is viable and valid about a photograph is mostly what the image consists of. And this idea that mass society demands a “universal equality of things”… what?

I applaud Manovich’s desire to record for posterity the emergence of this new media we are experiencing. It’s an interesting idea that once we become familiar with an idea or technique that it turns invisible to us. It’s incredibly true, but still something that I have not considered. This reminds me of children who are learning to speak. They grasp grammar rules on such a subconscious level that when they get older and can understand that their speech is guided by rules, it is still difficult to identify what the rules are. They have become invisible.

Finally, I love the description of the St. Petersburg art festival on page 5. Dancers, on stage, improvising to the music of the painter’s painting. Amazing.

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