E-rhetoric

Blogs: an epilogue

2005-02-23T00:57:00.001-08:00

Looking back over my short yet glorious blogging career, one thing comes to mind. Now, I'm not going to tell what that thing is straight off, because that would be no fun (and, at this point in the entry, I don't know yet). I started this blog highly skeptical of blog uses, especially any personal attachment that is conveyed through the noninteractive online journal that seems like a deparate cry for help and attention and a poor substitute for true social interaction. There are, however, non-personal uses of blogs as sites that chronicle events (journalist sites, political sites, PWR sites...) so that they provide (in my case) a very easy way of maintaining up to the week information. This is a legitimate use because it is acting as a news outlet instead of some surrogate communication. This means that it is merely another form of publishing that is infinitely updateable and allows comment sto it. As such, it can be used in an academic setting, and using it as a reflective space in this class has worked out quite well.

Now, back to that one, key point. This single, most important notion to keep track of in blogging is: coming soon.

The way that we used blogs in this class is about as intensively as we should blog. Some of the assignments even seemed a little too much, but I understand the desire to get us thinking about something before we came into class. That said, our blogs were useful because they were a supplement to the class and were useful as an added featrue that made us think more about the material. Just so, a political blog that acts as a conduit for information is not a source of that information, but instead a means of distributing it. Because blogs are inherently not the most trustworthy source, using them as a primary resource is not a good idea. Just so, using them as a primary mode of communication is not a great idea either, for reasons outlined just about everywhere I have written on blogs. This means that, at least in my opinion, the main reflection which I gained from writing blogs, is that the blog is a tool which can be used to either help present material and supplement the primary dialogue of articles and in class discussion or it can be used as an end in itself and expected to be a stand alone account (much like powerpoint). How one uses the blog determines its effectiveness and as long as one melds the blog to one's will as opposed to letting the blog dictate the form, blogs can be useful in almost any setting.

In case you missed it, or were just scrolling down because I told you that it was coming later, the key point was in that last paragraph.

farewell.

MIdterm presentations: the best and memorable

2005-02-18T09:32:00.000-08:00

It's hard to remember 15 presentations, each given at 9 AM over the course of 2 weeks. However, some things stand out from the big blur.
Among the memorable strategies are:

--The use of video, showing both the Matrix and the clip from everquest. These two clips have stuck with me better than any other aspect of any presentation. Obviously this workd to help me remember and made an impact on me.

--I thought that a lot of people really narrowed their topic from last time, which helps a lot in terms of focus. This made the presentations much more 'real' instead of forcing a presentation on a topic that is much to large to present in 5 minutes.

--I thought that the use of power point was good for some people, but not for others. again, those with less text on the screen make us look at the presentor more than at the screen, which is what you want

there were other issues, but these three were three main points that I saw improvement on and that were a major focus of these presentations.

Wikis

2005-02-16T02:34:00.000-08:00

I recently read an article debating the merits of Wikipedia. On one hand the creater and original founder was saying that there was going to be some darwinian process by which onyl the best revisions survived. On the other side, there was somebody who actually went through and read the entire history for a single post and dissected it. He chose the post because it was one on a famous greek whose birth year was ambiguous, andthe site did nothing to clear up this fact. The page originally had date A, with all other dates based off of that date. Later, the date was edited to date B, without any of the other dates being changed, and without noting that there is no definitive birthdate for this Greek.
He also examined another article and showed that the sentences were edited, but (in his opinion) became more confusing and disjoint. His final point was that instead of community editing, there was committee editing, where the last person to edit has executive power, which is not the best method.

That being said, I think that the idea of a wiki is amazing and that any application which allows any user to add to the body of data and correct other users is an great idea. Overall, even though the articles are not going to 'asymptotically approach the perfect article', the body of knowledge will keep growing and, as it grows, will become more coherent and more factualy correct.

I have great hope that the majority of members of the online community choose not to intentionally mislead the populace, and as such, am willing to be a sheep whenit comes to wikis and assume that their knowledge is at least basically factually correct.

Presentation Plans

2005-02-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

Next Wednesday I am expected to get up in front of the class and talk to the class about internet advertising and the rise of invasive advertising. As of right now, I haven't planned at all what I am going to say then, but chances are, I will talk about the economics involved and projections for the future. There have been a number of articles recently about advertising revenue and advertising in general that show exactly how profitable it can be and how we now have high profile compnies advertising on the interent instead of just internet businesses. I will also most likely talk about aggressive advetisements effect on the user and how it changes the way that we use the net.

In short, I have no idea.

Cripps and Co: that hypertext thing

2005-01-31T01:20:00.000-08:00

So I had to write on the Cripps paper and one other paper, where one of the possible other papers was the Cripps paper. This is no Longer Cripps and Co, and has become solely Cripps.

Michael Cripps makes someinteresting points in his web article, but I found that his layout in gneral was more noteworthy. Though his layout might have been absolutely amazing in terms of choosing exactly what sections linked to what other sections, the layout for each individual page hindered understanding.

First, the way that the lines were very long in a smallish font with black on gray coloring made it very hard to read the actual text that he was displaying, and merely glancing at his page didn't give me an idea of what the page said and whether or not I should continue to read everything on the page. This (along with other issues to be namd later) made me actually not realize what his entire site was about until somewhere between the 'theory' and 'praxis' sections.

Second, He didn't make his sentences brief and to the point. Instead, he tended to have rambling statements, such as his introduction which started out with the background of who said a quote, then the quote, then his interpretation instead of just starting by putting the quote seperated and above his interpretation, as the interpretation is the important part. These long sentences tended to build to a point instead of starting with their most pertinent information, making acanning even more difficult.

Third, The way that the links on the side and bottom of the page were so unobtrusive actually meant that I didn't see the links at all until I was very confused about the site and wondered if there was anything else that could give me an understanding. However, tese links were the entire point of his article, and so could have been slighly more noticable than the low key, small orange or yellow on gray off to the side of the page. Everything else on the page focused your attention towards the right hand leaving what appeared to be a large margin on the left to match the margin on top. Instead, it just meant that I missed the point of the article until I was halfway through it.

Fourth, I couldn't stand the unreadable logo in the very top left of his page in the blue top bar that seemed entirely divorced from his article, and the "#FFFFFF, #000000, and #808080" which I saw multiple places which I assume stands for black, white, and gray, which not only doesn't make any sense, but is entirely confusing.

In short, I don't want this man teaching web design for me.

Now, onto the other question, which was picking something which confused or enlightened me.

"With hypertext, the actual text gets constructed as the reader selects which relationship(s)
to explore as she chooses hyperlinks and reads the chunks of text in the nodes she selects. As
a result, the meaning the reader makes of the hypertext depends in part on which nodes she
visits, and in what order."
--Michael Cribbs

Given that my research topic is basically 'how multilinearity of online advertising makes it more intrusive than traditional advertising' this interpretation of multilinearity was pretty interesting. It basically describes the readers active part in reading hypertext as opposed to a passive reading of a book or even more passive listenening to radio or watching TV. Even in a book or magazine, you have the opportunity to flip through some sections faster than others which gives you some degree of activity. This means that there can be some invasive advertising, such as little slips that fall out of magazines that force you to pick them up and, in picking them up, read them. These are the lowtech versions of pop-up ads and stem entirely from the ability of the reader to flip past a full page ad that they don't necesarily want to see.

Anywhere, there are some thoughts.

PowerPoint and you

2005-01-24T01:53:00.000-08:00

I read the CNN article about the 'death of society at the hands of powerPoint' vs. 'PowerPoint isn't any good, but I can still have fun with it'. I would fall aquarely into neither camp. INstead, I think that PowerPoint is an excellent tool if used effectively. However, very few use it effectively. In general, the PowerPoint is inneffective if it detracts too much attention from the speaker to the point where he is the aid to the powerPoint itself. Instead, making a presentation work requires:

1) Never put up the details of what you are going to say (or, in fact, much text at all, probably 12 word max) This makes the listener turn into a reader and phase out the speaker as somebody who is just repeating what is written and everybody would rather read than listen turning their role in the audience into an acitve one. However, this makes the audience miss when you actually explain the points.

2) In a related vein, never look to format your presentation to the powerPoint. If you have three main points, put them up in a bulleted list, but don't feel the need to say 'my first bullet point is...' or any othe reference. The only use for the presentation is to be a guide for your audience as to what you're talking about and to make the presentation easier to follow.

Things to put in a powerPoint
1) Pictures (actual diagrams and pictures, not clipart) Self explanitory, PP is the best way of displaying pictures.

2) Numbers. PP is excellent to show graphs and numbers. Rule of thumb, no more than 12 words on that page, make sure that you can read the entire page in under 10 seconds and then not want to go an squint to make out more.

I think that too often, people take second stage to the PP itself and are there just to fascilitate their presentation. I much prefer a presentation that would make absolutely no sense if you were just to look at the slides. Whenever I make presentations, the slides are almost exclusively title and a picture. If others were to do the same, there wouldn't be this big backlash against the so called devil machine that makes us dumb as bricks.

Use the technology, but don't get used by it.

berger

Oral presentations: what works.

2005-01-18T23:07:00.000-08:00

I recently attended a talk by Howard Dean at memorial auditorium. Because he was talking in a comparably pressure free environment to a mainly left leaning audience he was able to be much freer than many of his campaign speeches which were scrutinized for any angle to be attacked by the media. Instead, he was able to make fun of himself, the democratic party, and the state of the country freely and thus connect with the audience very effectively. In particular, he was able to contrast the different audiences he has talked to and integrate the people (even though there were 1700+) making them feel in some way special.

In other news, I was on a tour in Ecuador at the equator monument. While I was there, there was a presentation about the knowledge that the native people had before the Spanish came. In particular, theer was a lot of passionate drawing on maps to create lines connecting sites and then claiming that it drew something meaningful. He had an incredibly slick powerpoint, and an entire room of maps and pictures hung at weird angles to represent the 'west is up' and Equador-centric view of the universe he was propounding in his best 'join our cult' voice. However, when I left that presentation, the majority of the people who had seen it seemed to be agreeing with him. The reasons (i believe) were that
1) He spoke passionately and with authority.
2) He had hundreds of specific examples (each of which when looked at carefuly seemed entirely bogus)
3) He inspired audience participation as in: draw a sunset. You see, that is the west. therefore, West is up and North and South are just artificial constructions.
4) He had a number of ways of establishing authority including the sheer amount of effort that must have gone into the presentation.
5) he made great use of visual aides, even blocking our way out by drawing out first a huge map, and then finally a whiteboard for us to draw on to illustrate his points and thus prolong the time we were near him and near the donation jar.

The reason I didn't trust him (beside the obvious hoaxlike appearance of his data) was the fervent manner that he presented his ideas with, including working himself into a frenzy about the angle 23.5 (the tilt of the earths axis) on a large number of geometric designs that I'm almost positive have an angle of 22.5 degrees (or 45 degrees divided by two) which is a very usual angle to occur in any quantized material, such as a weaving.

In general, the presentation was a great presentation of the material he had, which did its best to hide the fact that the infomation was lacking.

Main points: Make sure that you are talking about something that is true, that you use specifics, and connect with your audience.

that is all

Potential Research Topics

2005-01-09T23:41:00.000-08:00

So, having already spent two days in class, I obviously have an excellent view as to what sort of research project I am heading towards: one on digital culture. maybe.

Looking at digital rhetoric, possibly one of the most interesting examples is online advertising because it relies solely on how its 'rhetoric' attracts clicks. I think that looking at banners, popups, textads, applets, and other forms of advertising that financially run the web by forcing us to look at them with flashing lights and bright colors is probably the most important erhetoric out there. Also, because they rely on persuading the viewer with only a glance, a brief movie, a number of facts, or an enticing offer, they are the most compact rhetoric available.

Another interesting view is looking at satire and online humor sites. Online satire has the ability to be entirely free and anonymous and often is. This frees whoever is writing to speak their mind and parody whatever they want. I'm not sure exactly how this would become a research topic, but would be fun to research, especially looking at 'the best site in the universe' and 'the onion' as well as other funny sites. Basically, it would be an excellent excuse to 1) look at funny sites 2) find out why they are funny and 3) look at more hilarious sites.

Right now, I am thinking about advertisements and finding out what makes them efective because that is really what fuels the vast majority of the internet economy, and there is an incredibly strong evolutionary force making only the 'best' ads survive. This should lead to amazing changes, and looking at those changes through the evolution of the internet would be interesting.

1: The blog and me

2005-01-07T00:04:00.000-08:00

I have never had a diary, a stuffed animal I told my thoughts too, or even a journal of any sort. Nor do I use IM, I'm not on Thefacebook.com, and I don't use email except to communicate cold, hard facts. In short, you should not be surprised that I have never blogged before. That being said, I was assigned to keep a blog last year in a certain PWR1 class, yet instead insisted on just turning in word documents instead of posting my thoughts and reflections.
There is something inherently unsatisfying for me to write something for the whole world to see and proclaim that this is a shared part of me such that if you were to read enough of my posts, IM conversations, et al, you would eventually get any sort of unserstanding as to who I am. There is a different face that everybody has when they are sitting in front aof a computer as opposed to taking in person that makes a true interaction impossible, even considering a 'perfect' writer and reader because there is no natural interplay and monologues to compters seem to go about as this one is going: boring and nowhere because I have no gauge as to whether my reader is ready to move on or wishes to dwell in what I think is a fascinating field, though they would rather rip their own eyeballs out than continue to read what I say. I could make this point more clearly, but I don't think that that will help anything.
One might respond that blogging and such is not to replace an existing interpersonal relation but merely to strengthen it, but there are online societies of bloggers who have never met in person, but still claim that they have some sort of contact with their society. Likewise, every minute that you spend writing about what you have been doing/thinking, is one minute less to do/think about the things you were writing about, and this tradeoff becomes even more heinous when the writing is only at best a cheap imitation of whatever you were doing preblog. Perhaps you can tell that I've never been one for prolonged introspection.

There were a series of question prompts that I have promptly ignoreed. Allow me to answer them in full or in short depending.

What are your preconceptions about blogs or people who keep blogs? See above for notions on personal blogs. People who blog are (to stereotype with a broad brush, as this question requires) trying to 'share their experience' with friends and strangers, though the experience they are sharing necisarily loses so much in the translation there is little point (at least for me) to do that.
What sort of blogs, if any, have you kept in the past? none
How do you feel blogs fit into your understanding of e-rhetoric? personal blogs are a very interesting way of sharing experiences that, in my understanding, fails miserably to convey a true interaction even though there is the obvious ability for an excellent blog to reach more people than are reachable by means of direct communication. There is a method of writing blogs which has to be called erhetoric by definition, and obviously, though I have been overtly negative on the whole issue, some blogs can be written 'better' than others, thus making it an art, science, or however, you wish to classify it. Thus, it can be studied, and, no matter what perspective you take into a study, there are interesting things that can b done and there are boring things that can be done on a blog. Hopefully mine will have some modicum of interest, if not, I fear my pessimism will have gotten the upper hand and spread like wildfire consuming all in its path (or at least boring everybody who has to read it).
What blogs (if any) do you read on a regular basis? none

Above I make a note about personal blogs. I think that there is a profound difference between blogs meant as a way of keeping 'in touch' with other people and to share one's life with them through the open medium of splattered words on a proverbial page and blogs that are merely a running account of some other action. For example, a political blog describing different fundraising techniques and different conventions is a great medium as an updateable verbal database. When the blog tries to be something bigger than merely a conduit for information and becomes a society or web through which we 'know' other people, it starts to scare me.
Call me a luddite.