NOMORE.org

Hey guys, so it was funny seeing a commercial for this organization NOMORE.org after our class last night, because it is so very similar to the itsonus.org video/website that we spent nearly the entire 3 hours discussing. The commercial was essentially the same, although it seemed slightly more laid back (frames not as close to the actor's face, music not as depressing) but it used the same technique: the affinity ploy. I took a quick tour of the website and it looks like the founders are mostly organizations founded to stop sexual harassment and domestic abuse, as well as women's and minority rights, in comparison to the itsonus.org page, which lists notable "#partners", such as sports conferences and TV channels. I'm not sure that we need to fit this into further discussions but I thought it was interesting to compare the two, and it raises a few questions: How are these two related? Is it coincidental that they are two different organizations that have remarkably similar objectives and they use the exact same strategies? If it is not coincidental, then how is this a reflection of American culture?
 It is also notable to add that the NOMORE.org began its development in 2009.

Permanent Culture Now Website

Questioning the meaning of activism, I discovered Permanent Culture Now, a website that cultivates an environment for critical thinking and promoting societal change. While currently undergoing some minor changes, this website contains a great article on the definition and implications of activism.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned from reading this article is the fact that we should be careful about adhering to simply one mental framework. As activists, we simply cannot be blind to propaganda. Rather, we must think critically and challenge the social structures that surround us.

In particular, the article discusses activism for American capitalism. It’s preposterous to think that the top 1% of American earner’s income is exponentially increasing, while the rest of us are fail to enjoy any real increase of wages. We’ve become more productive, work longer hours, yet American wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. This is a great example of activism at work that impacts the majority of society.

Website Links:

http://www.permanentculturenow.com/what-is-activism/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8ZH1ejtIFo

definitions of “activism”

Here’s the opening words from the Wikipedia page on activism: “Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, or direct social, political, economic, or environmental change or stasis.”

Please edit this post to add your definitions (as you came to them in class last week) below:

INSPIRED BY SOCRATES

Research portal . . .http://www.socraticmethod.net

The Open Learning Initiative and the beauty of discourse. Includes the heroes of Ancient Greece and Blade Runner . . .http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/ancient-greek-civilization

Two Items of Interest

Discussing the different possibilities for websites reminded me of the CSS Zen Garden. With this site, the same content (HTML) is formatted with different designs (CSS). Kinda neat to look through the various options/designs.

Another site of interest, interestingly enough, Space Jame (the movie) has it's own website. It hasn't changed since 1996, and it's hilarious.

Differences in reading from a screen versus reading from paper

Here's the link to the article I brought up in class for helping us think some about the differences we experience (and that somehow affect us) as we read from screens instead from paper:
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/reading-on-screen-versus-paper/

BOOK

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg is a great resource for understanding communication across social barriers. His methodology is developed around understanding how to responding to a person's feelings and needs behind verbal expression and how to express your own feelings, how to ask for what you need. This method allows space for people to hear one another, to get past difficult social barriers like the effects of racism or sexism, in addition to social situations surrounding violent conflict. As a non-violent activist, applying these communication methods takes time but is fruitful when seeking to enact change within community.

The Moral Role of Digital Humanities in a Data Driven World

Hi All,
I found this transcript of Scott Weingart's closing keynote address at the 2013 Digital Humanities Forum. It echoes some of the conversations we've had in our own class so far, but it more focused on what it means that we are a digitally networked society and how ethics may play into that.
Cheers,
Kristin

"Prometheus Reclaimed" Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities

Maybe of interest?: 

 

2014 Dean’s Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, Ihab Hassan (Professor Emeritus, Comparative Literature, UWM)

 

 

 

Longaker & Walker Reflections

Longaker & Walker's definition of rhetoric is simply “the study and the practice of persuasion”, whereas the definition(s) we had in class were more nebulous. Additionally, none of us hit on the importance of persuasion as the basis of all civilization!

The rhetorical analysis of the VW “Why” ad and Dr. Martin Luther King's “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in Longaker & Walker's text were reassuringly similar to some of the professional and technical writing coursework I've done so far. Audience analysis is critical in creating effective business media, and has been a major part of many classes; it requires adopting a rhetorical perspective. Even within a single organization communicating to an identical audience, if the type of message (or, the exigence) changes, the switch in context affects the audiences reciprocity and has to be accommodated.

Thinking about rhetoric as being able to create the right kairos is interesting as an aspiring grant writer, since virtually all of an organization's success relies on it. What is your value, why are you relevant, justify your existence—dozens of times a year. You have to analyze the potential sponsor and approach them according to their history of giving or stated goals; selling the value of art education programs which take place in an independent art gallery to the Harley-Davidson Foundation requires a much different, more outcome-based approach than the empathetic style you'd apply when writing to a family foundation. Even though you'd probably use the exact same set of facts, statistics get less traction than heartfelt quotes from program participants when the grant allocation is being decided over a family dinner.

Rhetorical. Analysis: WWF

Rhetorical Analysis: World Wildlife Federation Poster

Environmental protection can be a difficult topic, especially when the focus is on animal rights and the preservation of soft assets. Not everyone cares about a polar bear, and, indeed, overemphasis on propping up spokes-species can even allow opponents to create strawman arguments ridiculing the value and necessity of the conservation efforts; the sadly common anti-environmentalist quip about how pandas would be extinct if not for human intervention is symptomatic of that type of mindset. Convincing many people that the value of nature and biodiversity outweighs the benefits of an easily accessible (if mostly unsustainable) economic engine instead requires a more rational appeal.

Centering this poster advocating environmental sustainability around health issues helps it appeal to a wider audience, as the value of good health is obvious to anyone. Integrating a deforested area into a medical image common in any country where anti-smoking campaigns are active further helps the meaning cross language and cultural barriers. Notice as well that the image they chose wasn't of an area that was mostly ravaged, but one still largely intact. Not only does the overall emphasis on the beauty of the land inspire the romantic, but the subtext is that there is still plenty of hope for a positive change; this idea is further reinforced by the small message in the corner beside their panda logo “Before it's too late.”.

Simultaneously this poster is in your face, and subtle, obvious, and soft spoken. The sympathetic aspect of the audience is drawn in by the beauty and surreality of the image, as their logical aspect can appreciate its stark logic.

A quick rhetorical analysis of the Digital Activism Research Project webpage: A design with multiple purposes?

 Let’s begin at the beginning, with the organization name and how the name and the typeface used for it play against each other. “DigitalActivism Research Project” is the name, and it is presented in a clean, crisp, contemporary sans serif typeface in crisp black on a clean white background.

I don’t know about you, but when I hear “activism” I think of sly and scruffy ways of making social or political change; I think of everyday people committing to making change to institutions that would really rather not change, institutions like governments local and national, corporations, hospitals, and universities. Hearing “activism,” I call to mind scruffiness and resistance and long patience and then quick movements to try to change what is well established and deeply ingrained. (And one quick way to do an unscientific poll of the connotations people have with a word is a Google image search: search for “activist,” and you do not see calm, older people at telephones patiently calling their representatives; instead there is anger, action, blood, and police response.)

And when I think about “digital activism,” here in late 2014, how can I not think of the recent protests in the Ukraine, or of the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street; I also call to mind the World Trade Organization protests of 1999, so long ago and yet, like the other events I named, also organized in no small part through digital means, through the digital means that enable everyday, scruffy people to connect and plan sub rosa.

Given all that about “activism” and “activists,” why would someone choose an almost corporate typeface and presentation to offer information about digital activism?

In addition, as we noted in class, the photographs on the Digital Activism Research Project webpage show a smiling child to represent the protests in the Ukraine and show a man in a black jacket (who many of us on first glance took to be a policeman) calmly sharing a computer screen with a woman wearing a keffiyah. None of the photographs on the site match up with the first several hundred photographs that result from a Google image search for “Ukraine protests” or “Arab spring.”

In how it represents itself with its title and with its photographs, the website seems to be working hard to resist being associated with more popular notions of “activism” and “activist.” Its visual organization—the clean, wholesome, organized arrangement we noted in class—also seems to resist being associated with the popular connotations of activism I noted above.

Why might a website about activism be designed to be so apparently corporate and to resist the perhaps expected connotations of “activism” and “activist”?

The Digital Activism Research Project, in its own words down there at the very bottom of the page, is

based in Seattle within the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. We study the effect of digital media on activism in an international context and are motivated by a desire to make political and social change processes more effective and evidence-based. We seek to make our own work processes and products open, collaborative, and inclusive.

The Digital Activism Research Project thus seeks to support activist projects through its studies. Does that make it an activist project itself? Or perhaps the Digital Activism Research Project, being housed within a state institution, has to avoid looking like an activist project precisely to stay safely housed within that institution; perhaps the website needs to make activism look like a tamed, safe object of study in order that the Digital Activism Research Project can continue to receive state support. Or perhaps it is simply a matter of making activism look like a tamed, safe object of study so that it can be researched by folks in the academy who will apply social studies data analysis methods to activist events around the world.

Perhaps the website has been designed to address all of that. Perhaps the website has to look corporate, and has to present activism as a smiling, contained activity, in order that the site look like a location for serious academic research at the same time that the site has to look that way in order to stay safely ensconced within its corporation.

…………

What makes the above a rhetorical analysis?
If we consider the practicalities of rhetorical analysis to be about the purposes, contexts, and audiences for any text, than than the above analysis suggests how the website might have multiple purposes (shaping itself to look solid and reliable, shaping “activism” into a research object) in order to address its context (being in an institutional setting) for audiences that perhaps here “activism” in ways that work against the Digital Activism Research Project being able to do its work within the academy.

There are undoubtedly other purposes to the website (to attract other researchers to its project, to help activists gain new research tools, to change our understanding of what activism is to include researching the effectiveness of different digital tactics) as well as other audiences than the academic audience I’ve assumed in the analysis.

A rhetorical analysis does not have to (and probably couldn’t, anyway!) address every single observation one could make about its purposes, context, audiences, and related strategies. But such an analysis should seek to connect how a particular purpose and/or audience seems to guide strategic choices — or how the strategic choices used in shaping a text help one say something about the audience or purposes implied by those choices.