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.

I'm a Matt, I'm a Marquee

Daniel Anderson's "I'm a Map, I'm a Green Tree" is an extremely dense work.  Even after watching it a couple times, trying to understand it feels like trying to cut a piece of paper in half with a leaf. 

To me, he seems to be making the point that text is a baseline.  Text is a border, a class of bondage, and a clear distinction between black font and white paper.  However, the way it's used, the language it can express, the feelings it can evoke, the connections it can foster, the metaphors it can make is where it's greater function lies.  It's the vehicle of communication, so as a vehicle it shares a border with metaphor. 

Metaphors blur boundaries.  It takes qualities of one thing and attributes it to another to find a thread of meaning that wasn't there before.  While in the past this could mean a red wheelbarrow, or a map, or tree, today it means us.  I am a mac.  I am a PC.  This claim isn't just confined to characters on the mac commercials.  Real people make these claims as well, not only in regards to what type of computer they use but in regards to music choice or sports teams or school mascots.  I am a Wolverine.  The line between who who we are is blurred by metaphor.  If text is being held in relation to metaphor, then it becomes blurred as well.

And this isn't a bad thing. 

This blurring isn't just due to text being conveyance for metaphor.  Text used to be ink on paper.  Now it's the shape of ink on paper on Google docs. You could read it, highlight it, and speak it.  You could work around it, but you couldn't interact with it.  Through hypertext, you can.  Through Adobe Flash, you can take the word "font," zoom in on it, filter it, animate it, and proliferate it.  Text is not the final product of a printing process, it's the first step in coding, online conversation, and circulation of ideas.

"Click here and win a free IPad"


Of course I could be wrong.  If I am, I can always just go back and erase this text entirely.

Group 2:

Gabrielle, Rashmi, Mattt

Color Theory: Red

In the visual arts, color theory is a body of practical guidance to color mixing and the visual impacts of specific color combination.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory

Red is the color of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire, and love.

Red is a very emotionally intense color. It enhances human metabolism, increases respiration rate, and raises blood pressure. It has very high visibility, which is why stop signs, stoplights, and fire equipment are usually painted red. In heraldry, red is used to indicate courage. It is a color found in many national flags.

Red brings text and images to the foreground. Use it as an accent color to stimulate people to make quick decisions; it is a perfect color for 'Buy Now' or 'Click Here' buttons on Internet banners and websites. In advertising, red is often used to evoke erotic feelings (red lips, red nails, red-light districts, 'Lady in Red', etc). Red is widely used to indicate danger (high voltage signs, traffic lights). This color is also commonly associated with energy, so you can use it when promoting energy drinks, games, cars, items related to sports and high physical activity.

Light red represents joy, sexuality, passion, sensitivity, and love.
Pink signifies romance, love, and friendship. It denotes feminine qualities and passiveness.
Dark red is associated with vigor, willpower, rage, anger, leadership, courage, longing, malice, and wrath.
Brown suggests stability and denotes masculine qualities.
Reddish-brown is associated with harvest and fall.

Source: http://www.color-wheel-pro.com/color-meaning.html

Visual Orientation: Gestalt Law of Continuity

The mind continues visual, auditory, and kinetic patters even after sensory perception has ceased — or when the pattern is technically “broken.”

Examples: An image of a cross is typically perceived as two lines intersecting rather than four separate line segments meeting at the center. Also, a shape that is partially covered by another shape, say one rectangle by another, is typically perceived as being a complete and continuous shape rather than a segmented one behind the front shape.

Source: http://rhetology.com/2009/04/23/law-of-continuity/

Photography: Point of View Shot

The point of view is the perspective from which a picture is taken in order for the viewer to perceive a picture in a certain way.  The position, direction and height of the camera define the point of view of a picture. You can change the way your subject is perceived by changing the camera position. If you are photographing something that you want to seem very tall, arrange the shot so that the camera is looking upwards. This is done routinely in movies to make a actors look taller or shorter than they actually are. John Wayne, for example, was almost always filmed with the camera looking slightly up at him. He wasn’t a small man, but by filming him this way he looked bigger than life. The mood and effectiveness of a picture can be very much altered by what is in the background. 

Source: http://www.goodphotographyinfo.com/lesson4_point_of_view.html

What are your thoughts?

Can you think of any examples of any of these rhetorical strategies in action? Get creative!

Let's Play Facade

Link to a file in case this is post is too unreadable [It's a little over four pages in my document, so I'm not sure why it looks so much longer on Google Docs.  Whatever.  Here's content:]

  “Virtual reality” as a concept is fascinating at a brief mental glance. The phrase calls to mind an idea of a futuristic, colorful world where cars and people can fly, houses can talk, and disabling limitations of everyday life don't exist. That vision is as imaginative as it is inaccurate. That is not virtual reality; it's fantasy. However, that confusion is excusable, because the unfortunate reality of reality is that it’s boring. Reality is everything we take for granted. A virtual reality is simply a synthesized version of what one already knows. At its root, all it can be is an attempt at mimicry. It can never be as good, let alone better, than the actual. A virtual reality is just reality, except coded, incomplete, flawed and ultimately inconsequential.

  In 2005, as if to confirm this, the video game Façade was released. At the time it received remarkable reception. Façade was meant to introduce completely different strand of gameplay. Instead of strategic or puzzle-based contest, it was a relationship adventure. The draw of the game was not based on graphics or franchise; it was based solely on communication. Facade was an interactive work of fiction, and the player was supposed to, as with any work of fiction, get lost to the point of forgetting it was fake. To an extent, it was extremely successful. The New York Times even claimed that “this is the future of video games.”[1]

  It's been seven years, and the present still hasn’t caught up to promises of the past, but the game still has an impact. Like most games with longevity, its premise was simple enough to stay relevant over time. Within the falsehood of Façade, you are a guest at two friends' apartment under the assumption that you’re there get back in touch with them after a long friendship hiatus. These two friends, Trip and Grace, are having relationship issues, and it's your job, as a friend (and functionally as a player hoping to score nonexistent points) to help them. Winning the game is decided as saying whatever words it takes to inspire the two of them to talk out their problems to their (and your) satisfaction. This conversation, as determined by the programmers, is success; this ultimate conversation was the original purpose of the game.

  However, as with any freely available content (compositions with lapsed copyright, freeware programming, etc), it can be used in ways far different from its original intention. Façade has since become free to download, and the draw of the game is no longer to save Grace and Trip from separation. Its draw is now an opportunity for the player to say outrageous or ridiculous things to Grace and Trip in the hopes of receiving rhetorically ironic or humorous responses. The mission of the game has been taken on a completely different course, and this new course, in full rhetorical irony, has become a meme.

  This kind of shift is not uncommon, and it often happens without notice. Different marketable or artistic renditions of the Mona Lisa are created fairly commonly. The picture’s original form is changed, and its purposes are changed with it. However, the picture still needs to be recognizably the Mona Lisa for the rendition itself to mean anything. The Façade meme finds meaning the same way. The conversations with Grace and Trip are bizarre, comedic, and purposefully inauthentic. However, they take the form of real conversation and take the form of an actual attempt at genuine gameplay. The construct remains recognizable regardless of the fact that the content is corrupted. It is the corruption of conversation that makes the meme.

  The actual practice of making a Façade meme is as complicated as the concept. The creation is carried out in a much more difficult way than posting “cool story, bro” on Twitter. One has to take the time to download the game, procure the necessary software to capture your game in video, and then take the time to upload their creation onto a public website. Unlike twitter, consumption of the meme can take up to a half hour. Also, unlike Twitter, the creation of this meme is entirely virtual. However, like Twitter, there is a conversational character limit. At the same time, unlike Twitter, the interactions aren’t between two people. On the other hand, like Twitter, you can pretend to be someone else. But more importantly, unlike Twitter, you won't get a DMCA for it. It has as many common markings of a meme it does fiction, and it's in that unlikely overlap that the Facade meme splices.

  This ambivalence of purpose takes the meme creator down two separate, but parallel paths. The first falls under the category of roleplay. On the internet, a person can assume whatever identity they can get away with. This isn't necessarily done for nefarious or impurely personal purposes, and in many cases it can simply come down to a chance for one to purge the dissonance between who they are and who they want to be. It’s an opportunity for someone to act out a storyline that real-life can’t or won't let. The large userbases of sites like www.fanfiction.net or the active roleplaying sections on dedicated message boards for different fandoms bear out the commonality of this mentality. It also shows that these things are often only carried out in places where the roleplayer feels safe to pretend.

  Facade gives players that safety. They can play a caring friend or autodidactic psychologist or self-abusive ex-lover without any worry of repercussion, and they can do it as quickly as it takes for the mood to strike and the game to load. In fact, there's no way to avoid it. The second Grace says "it's been so long since we've seen each other" the player is forced to act as someone they’re not, even if they attempt to go the route of my remix. Witting or not, one who plays Façade will roleplay regardless of how authentic to their own personality they attempt to be. The creators of the memes, on some level, seem to realize this. Their conversational contributions often take on forms of different fantastical characterizations such as Genghis Khan or a zombie horse named RayJay the Immaterial. Part of the enjoyment of the meme is the ridiculous characterizations played out at Grace and Trip's respective expense.

  It's that expense, however, that takes a player to the second path which, generally, is of greater relation to the draw of the meme. This path is that of a troll. Wikipedia (the self-idealized academic construct of the internet, and likely the academic source most intimately familiar with the concept) defines a troll as "someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response" In simpler terms, a troll is someone who acts like a jerk on the internet.

  Acting like a jerk on the internet is different from acting like a jerk in real life, and oftentimes the people who act this way in these different circumstances are entirely different groups of people. The real-life jerkish are those who have little interest in the opinions and reactions of others. They act the way the do for the pure, authentic sake of it. Those who partake in trolling need the response but, rather than keying peoples actual cars or interrupting people's actual conversations in actual coffee shops with nonsequiter 4chan interjections, have the benefit of doing it fairly anonymously. The "Say that to my face fucker and not online and see what happens" meme is rarely ever, if ever, brought to its proposed conclusion. The assumed reaction would be a news story worth covering under the headline "The Internet: How it Will Get Your Children Assaulted." Instead, in regards to trolling, what's mostly seen in media coverage are personal-interest stories about victims who are forced to live with internet bullying and the horrible things left on their Facebook pages by people they’ve never even met.

  In spite of these consequences, many people (author included) still feel a compulsion to that anonymous authority. However, many of these people (author included) don't feel like showing up backlit and defenseless on Fox News act the dartboard for Nancy Grace’s dull moral platitudes. There's a definite social psychological interest in asking "how will this statement make people react?" However, the reactions to that statement are irrevocably real and are not as definitively guarded or guided by curiosity as the inciting statement may be. They are real words said to real people that have real consequences. Real life is not a game, so a game was found. The Façade meme gives people the chance to carry out any sort of perverse trolling desire in a safe, sandbox environment. Instead of simply hiding in an anonymous username, you’re hiding in a completely different world. The victims are fake, the story ends, and the only person personally affected by the outlandish fiction is the writer. Those who consume the meme are observers, not actors. Everyone is safe, because everyone is real.

  Unlike with regular roleplaying, if done in real life, the common reaction to the type of interaction carried out within Façade memes would not just be met with confusion by passersby; they would be met with derision. It’s commonly accepted decorum that one isn’t supposed to mock a friend’s decorating job with a wine bottle in hand before casually kissing her and calling her husband a wanker. It’s so commonly accepted that there may never have been any call before this moment for that sentence to exist. However, within Façade memes, these things can and do happen. These things exist so far outside of the usual that they can turn the unavoidably boring virtual reality into the fantasy that people want it to be. That fantasy is then consumed in the world of reality. If done well enough, the fantasy then consumes its consumer to the point where they need to record a fantasy of their own. The meme lives on.

Recommended Resources:
Facade Homepage
Facade: Genghis Khan
Facade: Success
Facade: Alternative Strategy

Citation
Seth Schiesel, "Redefining the Power of the Gamer." New York Times.  June 7, 2005
http://www.interactivestory.net/NYTimesArtsArticle.html
[I can't get access to the pay archive.]

I'm Tired

This is Mitch. He is me.