Final Reflective Essay - Edited

I think I spent more time on my final documentary for this class than have for any other school project ever.  Luckily, it was a lot of fun, so it didn’t really feel like work.  Planning/scripting took a few dedicated days, the interviews (including sending emails, checking back for permission, and getting clearance) took about five hours, filming myself took about six hours since my first attempt had horrible sound, and editing the footage together took about twenty four hours, on and off.  I was also trying to teach myself Final Cut Pro 10 as I went, so that added a bit of difficulty.  However, I started early enough so that I was able to throw myself into this project without worrying about the time constraints.  I’m glad that I did.  I’m very pleased with how it turned out.  At the moment, I don’t really think I’d change anything.

The one thing that I imagine I’m never going to be completely happy with is the captioning.  The transcribing wasn’t especially difficult after I made the choice to keep it as simple as possible.  While a lot of the time I spent on preparing and scripting my documentary was spent on humor as a way to draw people in, I realized when I started captioning that I wouldn’t be able to translate a lot of the jokes to the transcript.  I’d be impossible for me to describe the different visual gags and still have them retain a humorous impact, so I decided to simply eliminate them from the caption completely.  I decided to let the black and white text of what I and others said speak on face value.  I think the ridiculousness of my contributions and the seriousness of what others said still came through well enough without the jokey framing.  I was lucky enough to get strong responses from the people I asked, so I believe that impact of the answers held up without the humorous foundation. 

Captioning was the last thing I did.  Once I had the documentary completed, I watched it on one computer while taking down all the dialogue in Notepad on another.  I then uploaded it to YouTube, downloaded it back, adjusted the timestamps, and put it back on again.  I might go back in and caption the highlighted responses, but I don’t know how that would fit in with the dialogue without seeming abrupt and out of place.  I may just add them to the description instead, but even that may be cluttered.  I’m unsure.  I’m never going to be completely satisfied.

I didn’t have a specific audience in mind as I was beginning the process.  I just knew I really wanted to ask the question “How has the internet changed the English language?”  My plan was to get my responses and let the conversation evolve from there.  The final product certainly didn’t get deep into a conversation on the subject, but touched on a lot of different perspectives well enough.  In retrospect, I think the audience would be people who haven’t quite made up their mind on the subject of the internet and English and are open to seeing the different ways people look at it.  As my sister’s response indicated, people don’t often consider this question on a non-superficial level, so it’s something that could use more investigation.  If nothing else, I hope they were at least entertained enough to stay with the video as my interviewees got to voice their opinions.  If this video made even one person think about this, then I’d be happy.

I’d also like to think that the way my documentary was presented means that it would have a broad appeal.  I learned this semester that “humor” could be an effective rhetorical strategy.  If anything, that was the one thing I really hoped to apply here.  Beyond that, I tried a few different methods of shot composition during my part by keeping myself mainly off screen during one part, and leaving the screen entirely during others.  Having a picture of myself in the background kind of made these choices a bit less severe, but they were deliberately made.  Additionally, I tried citing people’s qualifications to add to their ethos, but I also played off of that by citing odd qualifications for certain people and saying that I had written twenty three articles and received thirteen awards for them.  That was untrue, but it’d be an ethical appeal if it were.  I think my acting sad and upset would qualify as a pathetic appeal.  And getting responses from people that were purely text would be a way of focusing on the logical aspects of their argument.

The biggest challenge for me (outside of learning a new program and finding the time to do all the work I wanted to do) was compiling everything together in an accessible form.  I got a lot of responses, and they were all either extremely well thought out or important based on medium they were sent (steam webchat, gchat, etc.).  I didn’t want to cut people’s responses down too much because I wanted to let people speak for themselves.  However, in the interest of saving time I was forced to take highlights of people’s responses and present those separately.  If people wanted to go back and read the full responses, I left a moment in the video for people to pause and read them through.  One of the benefits of HD was that I could leave very small text on the screen and still have it potentially be readable.
My other major concern was that my humorous way of presenting my documentary would put off some of the contributors.  I think it was fairly obvious by the end that my position was “people who think that the internet is ruining English are just being silly,” but some of the people I talked to didn’t quite feel that way.  I didn’t want them to feel personally mocked.  I hoped that by including everyone’s entire response, they wouldn’t feel that way.  Despite what I said, they’d still get to speak for themselves.

The one thing I hoped to confirm in my documentary that I learned in this class is the legitimacy and importance of the internet as both an academic, personal and even artistic medium of exchange.  It continues to evolve, and the evolution of language is part of that.  Trying to stand in the way is not only impossible, but potentially harmful to the collective effort to share information and learn from it.  The internet reaches billions of people, and thousands more every day.  With Web 2.0, the line between content consumer and content provider is increasingly blurry.  With this change (and growth) in demographic, change in the format of the informational and interpersonal exchange is inevitable.  I tried to show in my documentary all the different ways people can use the internet to communicate, and I hope that I showed the fact that people are communicating is far more important than the nature and structure of the communication. The fact that I was able to make and proliferate my own documentary is proof of that.  I put a lot of myself into my final project, and if it was any good, then hopefully that’s just one more piece of evidence that this increased accessibility and ability to contribute to a discussion is a good thing as well.

Final Project

http://youtu.be/RVdRq3wzjoU

Documentary Question

Unless someone has printed this and the following sentences off as a hard copy and handed it to you, you are on the internet now.  That means you've had some experience with language on the internet.  That's qualification enough.

How do you feel the internet has changed the English language?

Body

John Hodgman is better than Justin Long.  These videos are inaccurate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5z0Ia5jDt4

THIS IS A LIST

No Invented Material with Adequate Framing
1-Nature Documentaries
2-Kenny Burns
3-Autism Reality
No invented Material and No Framing
4-Surveillance
Some Invented Material/Situations
5-Jersey Shore
6-Ghost Hunters
7-American Idol
Completely Invented
8-Parks and Rec/Borat
10-Pirates of the Caribou

I would put the documentary I watched (My Fellow American) Between Autism Reality and The K.B.D.  I don't like having to rank these things, but I imagine that Autism Reality and My Fellow American have an inescapable skew just from their perspective.  This is fine and great and not a detraction, but the more of one person's viewpoint you get, the less of a full picture there is.  Autism Reality and My Fellow American were both clearly from one person's point of view, but My Fellow American had less absolutely personal testimony, so I had to rank that one slightly higher.

I would put my documentary below Autism Reality and above Surveillance Footage just because mine will have more personal skew and creative license than Autism Reality does, however it will have the necessary framing to make it fit the documentary criteria more than Surveillance Footage would.

Oops, I Think I Was Supposed To Post This Here Too [Proposal]

Date:               3/26/12

To:                   Professor Yergeau

From:               Matthew Rutkowski

Subject:           Video documentary proposal

Topic:

I plan to make a documentary about the linguistic aspects of digital communication.  My intention is to juxtapose two ideas:
1) That digital culture is changing language in a way that hampers effective communication

2) That digital culture is allowing us to communicate more freely than ever before

The question I hope to ask is whether or not the "corrosive" language changes outweigh the fact that language is now more freely exchanged.  Is it something we should stop or fix?  Is that even possible?

Goals:

I'd like to communicate the opinion that language change is not only unavoidable, but not even a bad thing given the fact that we are now able to communicate so much more easily.  I know it's a broad statement to make, and it's one that people have strong opinions on one way or another, so I'm not out to directly change anyone's mind.  All I really hope to do is give enough evidence throughout my documentary to allow people to pause and consider how quickly technology has moved recently and how much. 

I'd like to approach this in a more casual, possibly humorous way.  I'd like to present the more academic questions and interviewees in a serious light, but given the fact that meaningful communication does not need to be rigid and professional, I'd like the majority of my documentary to not to feel that way.

Key elements, scenes, and social actors:

I plan to conduct a series of interviews through very different means.  I hope to do an in person interview with Professor Anne Curzan, a phone interview with another professor (TBD - hopefully within linguistics), an email interview with Rhetorics Professor Alisse Portnoy.  Moving beyond the academic scope I'd like to ask questions, via texting, facebook messaging, the "ask a question"  function on Tumblr, the chat function for the Steam community, gchat, MIRC, and any other method I can think of. 

The way I have it pictured is for each of the questions to continue the conversation of the interview.  If the first question to professor Curzan is "how do you think digital media affects language," I'd like the followup to that to continue down the same path.  For this to be effective, the interviews will have to be conducted in the order they will be presented.  The answer or the directions this goes will be determined by the responses.  It will be more honest that way, but possibly more time-consuming. 

I don't intend for all the people I ask to be doctors or academics.  I'm hoping for clear, honest answers that advance the conversation.  Language is not the property of a specific group, so getting the thoughts of as many groups as possible seems important.

Timeline:

3/26 - 4/1 - Map out the direction/questions of the documentary.  Figure out who exactly to interview and attain permission.  Figure out which method to ask questions, and make sure the broad scope of the project will fit under 4 minutes.
4/2 - 4/6 - Conduct/document interviews.  Assess progress and adjust scope if necessary.
4/7 - 4/8 - Compile everything into IMovie or Final Cut Pro.  Record voiceoever
4/9 - 4/13 - Tweak final project until it's something I would be embarassed showing to grad school admissions' people.  Execute transcription. 
4/14 - 4/15 - Spillover in case I have a massive freakout and can't finish on time.

Blog Post 5 - Maybe This Would Be A Good Time For A Topical Joke About The Matrix

Like the article states, we all have some idea of what a documentary is.  We may not be ableto define it absolutely, but there is at least a bit of consensus.  There was common outrage at A Million Little Pieces not quite being non-fiction.  However, there is little uprising at documentary scenes being dramatizations.  There’s a line somewhere, but it’s not clear where.  

So I guess I’m as able as any to have some thoughts on this.  To me, the difference between documentary and fiction is their representation of reality.  [For the sake of simplicity, I’m just going to think of reality is the world’s common storyline that will continue to progress whether or not anyone is filming it.]  Documentaries will never be entirely realistic.  To make a final point, there must be a conclusion.  This means there has to be some sort of built-in conflict or action to move through that will make the film’s ending mean more. 

The way this is achieved in a documentary is different than the way it is achieved with fiction.  Fiction invents reality whereas documentaries attempt to frame it.  

A documentary is an extraction from real life that is edited in a way to make a point.  Security footage could form a basis of a documentary, but it's difficult to find someone who would want to watch 8 hours of tape of an over-the-shoulder shot of a speedway station attendant.  It’s real, but lacks inherent purpose.  It's less about making a difference than making a point.  It's still the viewer's choice on whether or not he wants to translate the film's message into his own personal views.

That is something that is shared in fiction.  Fiction takes things from real life too, and in turn people in the real world can take lines and lesson out of it.  Otherwise they would be irrelevent or even impossible.  However, fiction distorts (not in a bad way) the real world rather than focus it.  It offers an alternative context to view problems within the real world, but does actually represent the real world itself.

I guess it comes down to the a basis of framing vs. fabrication.  Documentary does one while fiction does the other.  That’s far too simple to cover everything, but it’s a starting point.