Author Archives: Kate

The Art of Civility (or, I heart PBS NewsHour)

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I don’t actually love the “I heart” expression, but it comes close to my warm, fuzzy feelings of affection for the NewsHour. After going years deliberately, steadfastly refusing to watch television news, I’m now hooked on my nightly PBS fix. (People are beginning to understand that I won’t talk to them between 6 and 7pm est. And the discovery that it’s replayed at 10 on PBS-2 has been a real relief for those days, like Fridays, when I can’t make it.)

Even when it’s depressing, and it often is, it’s reasonable, calm, thoughtful. There are no flashy graphics, tickers, or sound effects. There are no commercials. Gwen and Judy and Kwame and Jeffrey and Margaret and Hari and Ray are smart and sharp but never showy. They are reasonable. Coverage of national and global news–not just the big stories of the day, but actual journalistic inquiry into major issues–acknowledges disagreement without dogmatic bickering; it brings in actual experts in their field to discuss complexities rather than (usually) yell talking points (talk yelling points?) at each other. Even the most argumentative figures (like Newt Gingrich) know that when they come to PBS, the best rhetorical move is to remain calm and try to appear intelligent and nuanced…. reasonable.

It has restored my faith in “the news” in a way that I am daily, sincerely grateful for. It’s definitely made me smarter. I also think it’s made me a better teacher, citizen, and person. Seriously.

So it was a pleasure, today, to have Judy mention commentators Brooks and Shields’ recent award, the inaugural Allegheny College Prize for Civility in Public Life. (The award sounds nice and is also limited: it recognizes the importance of respecting different viewpoints and pursuing reasonable discussion, but it deems “Democrats” and “Republicans” the categories within which public discourse fits. Problematic on a few levels. But still, it’s a good sign. Or a sign that things are so bad…) I enjoy Brooks and Shields and their insights, and I often even forget that one is “right” and the other “left” because they tackle topics with such clear-sightedness. They seem reasonable, and they make differing viewpoints seem reasonable. So it was cool to have that recognized.

And their response was to credit PBS, and the Lehrer and MacNeil NewsHour legacy in particular, for raising the bar of discourse, for setting a standard that they just try to live up to:

But we are the beneficiaries of the standards laid down by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. I mean, we literally stand on the shoulders of giants. It was they who demanded and insisted upon a standard of civility in dialogue which permeates this whole show and has been the gold standard, in my judgment.

So I’m grateful, but I’m appreciative. We stand as proxies for them.

Some days the news is less depressing.

data, aesthetics, and rhetoric

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I ran across this very cool visualization of debt statistics (from David McCandless’s Information is Beautiful collection) yesterday:

Cool, right? It’s a smart way to present the info, well-executed, even charming for Gen Xers. It’s the Tetris narrative (enhanced by the accelerating tune) that seems ripe for rhetorical effect, I think. But when I showed it to my (logical) partner, he immediately called out the problem: It has no argument. The numbers, while striking in contrast, have unclear relationships and have been selected, or at least arranged, without seeming to have a point… which may not have been the goal of the creator, obviously.

But imagine the kinds of sweet rhetorical work could be done with such creative approaches to representing sharing data…

Seen any carnies around?

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Did anyone see any zombies at the mall this weekend? Smell any stink bombs? Was there a special Critical Mass in your neighborhood? Trickster performances? General harlotry?

I’m curious, because today concludes Carnivalesque Rebellion Week 2010:

Carnivalesque Rebellion Week

A few people start breaking their old patterns, embracing what they love (and in the process discovering what they hate), daydreaming, questioning, rebelling. What happens naturally then, according to the revolutionary past, is a groundswell of support for this new way of being, with more and more people empowered to perform new gestures unencumbered by history.

Think of it as an adventure, as therapy – a week of pieing and pranks, of talking back at your profs and speaking truth to power. Some of us will put up posters in our schools and neighborhoods and just break our daily routines for a week. Others will chant, spark mayhem in big box stores and provoke mass cognitive dissonance. Others still will engage in the most visceral kind of civil disobedience. And on November 26 from sunrise to sunset we will abstain en masse – not only from holiday shopping, but from all the temptations of our five-planet lifestyles.

“Buy Nothing Day” has been celebrated for over a decade now, a protest against the celebration of consumerism known as “Black Friday.” I’m a fan of the alternative, and not just because of how much this scares me:

Buy Nothing Day has a lot of appeal, and I know plenty of people who observe it for reasons more or less anti-consumerist but not necessarily proactive. This year, though, Adbusters seemed to be kicking it up a notch.  Then again, carnivalesque rebellion doesn’t come from a journal, but from local jammers…

So, my fellow local rhetoricians, what did you see?

Is failure really an option?

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Another cool new digital project, coming out of the University of Cincinnati this time, is The Failure Project:

The Failure Project is a digital public archive of failure narratives that aims to generate and circulate healthy conversations about failure. Too often in our schools, our workplaces, and our community organizations, failure is stigmatized to such a degree that students, teachers, artists, musicians, scientists, and innovators are unwilling to take risks in their intellectual and creative endeavors. This is the wrong attitude.

What would our schools, workplaces, and communities look like if we weren’t afraid to fail? What would our world look like if we took bigger risks?

The Failure Project is about conversation. It’s about taking risks. It’s about you connecting with others over shared experiences of failure, making failure a speakable, de-stigmatized part of our lives. Our hope is that, through this archive, we can begin to see failure as something to celebrate rather than fear, as something to experience productively rather than as a final pronouncement of who we are and what we’re capable of.

I love the idea of this, and not just because it feels somehow akin to Harlot.  My research and teaching are all about how individuals and communities construct and share rhetorical narratives, stories with a persuasive bent. This project made me recognize how rarely I’ve encountered stories of failure, or rather, stories that conclude with failure. Indeed, even this call for failure narratives seems to imply that they are/should be angled in the direction of success.

The subtitle of the project page is that popular Samuel Beckett line — Try again. Fail again. Fail better. — which got me thinking about whether, or at least how often, we can let a story actually end without some compulsion towards any kind of happy ending. Even Beckett, not the most cheerily optimistic guy, seems to be suggesting progress, improvement through persistent effort.

But I’m not sure I buy it — Beckett was more likely, I’d guess, to be advocating failure on a more massive scale (epic fail?) than to be suggesting baby steps towards success. But then, again, does his line becomes a narrative of progress, of success at failing? Before I get any more tangled, my question is kinda simple:

How often do you come across or tell a story of failure
that doesn’t get a positive spin, even just “lesson learned”?

Are there some communities or cultures
in which failure narratives are more/less allowed?

And, well, why?

All this and poetry too

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A proud shout-out to beloved Harlot editor, contributor, and all-around tech wizard Kaitlin, for the recent publication of 3 of her poems in PANK Magazine. Read and/or listen here to get a taste of why Kaitlin’s recently been accepted to San Diego State University’s MFA program. Please join us in wishing her good luck as she departs Columbus for sunny California!

But don’t worry, she’s a Harlot for life.

Google’s buzz-kill

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Those of you who use gmail no doubt noticed this week’s launch of “Google Buzz,” another social networking project. I clicked in briefly, figured it was just another variation on Facebook, and went back to my emailing.

But it turns out plenty of people reacted much more strongly — and for good reasons. What I didn’t look too closely at was an immense consolidation and public-ization of Google-related activities: “Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages will automatically appear as posts in Buzz.” And I was automatically linked in — “14 people are already following you.” Creeeeepy.

Google’s ready-made network revealed common email/chat contacts, leading to all kinds of privacy breaches. And in this case, the stakes are far higher than the romantic escapades common to Facebookers. In today’s NYT coverage, Miguel Helft points to the difference:

E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists. And Google, so recently a hero to many people for threatening to leave China after hacking attempts against the Gmail accounts of human rights activists, now finds itself being pilloried as a clumsy violator of privacy.

As Evgeny Morozov wrote in a blog post for Foreign Policy, “If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government.”

The key point here, of course, is that despite the publicity trends online, people still think of email as a private realm — and Google ripped down that curtain, leaving people feeling exposed and vulnerable. And they’re pissed.

Google is known for releasing new products before they are fully ready and then improving them over time. But its decision to do so with Buzz, coupled with its introduction to all 176 million Gmail users by default, appears to have backfired.

“It was a terrible mistake,” said Danny Sullivan, a specialist on Google and editor of SearchEngineLand, an industry blog. “I don’t think people expected that Google would show the world who you are connected with. And if there was a way to opt out, it was really easy to miss.”

It seems that Google was just so darn excited — and expecting its users to be same — about the idea of enabling more seamless access and interaction to think much about the consequences… which is just funny, consider how astutely my undergrads note the risks. You’d think the Google team could keep up with our “intro to digital media” conversations.

Super bowl backlash

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We all know this year’s Superbowl commercials displayed a less-than-shocking theme of masculinity under attack by women/harpies–and men’s resulting desperate need to bolster it through muscle cars and micro-televisions:

Does anyone else find it kind of heartening that even the ad-men think that such versions of gender roles are making their “last stand” — and acknowledging implicitly that they’ll fall like General Custer? (Of course, they’re probably relying on another problematic subtext: it’s just a battle lost, not the war. Though that might be giving them too much credit for self-consciousness.)

It’s been great fun to have the rampant sexism in advertising called out in the mainstream media (Slate, the Times, even USA Today– especially in light of studies suggesting how unsuccessful these ads were. And I’m ready to enjoy the potential for wittier and far cheaper responses:

I dig certain parts of this: “I will make $.75 for every dollar you make doing the same job…I will catch you staring at my breasts but pretend not to notice…” In some ways, I can see that it’s pointing out how the assumptions behind these duties are equally ridiculous. Those accepted by the men in the Dodge commercial are, for the most part, basic measures of maturity (“I will shave… I will be at work… I will sit through meetings”) undertaken not as a man but as reluctant partner (“I will take your calls”?!). But the spoof’s duties suggest that what women do for the sake of their men is not about basic hygiene, but self-subjugation: “I will diet, Botox, and wax–everything… I will allow you to cheat on me with younger women”?! Hmmm. If this spoof is looking to encourage identification among women, then depending on such assumed “duties” is disconcerting. And if it’s trying to challenge the sexism of the original, isn’t falling back on superficial standards counterproductive?

I’m not sure. I’m happy to see some talk-back to those ads, and can only hope we see more discussion as a result.

In the meantime, I leave you with SNL’s hilarious take on the powers of a Dodge to recuperate the male ego:

Buffy the Twilight Slayer

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I’m still working on that digital media syllabus, so… playing around on YouTube. (Work is hard.) And there I stumbled upon this little gem from artist-activist Jonathan McIntosh:

It made me so happy, for a couple of reasons:

As a longtime Buffy fan (not to mention feminist), I can’t get on board with the Twilight phenomenon. Last year a student of mine wrote a rhetorical analysis of the first novel. She choose the text because although she really enjoyed the books, she felt kind of uncomfortable about the idealized relationship between Edward and Bella. And rightfully so: Her astute analysis finally led her to the conclusion that Edward fits the Harvard psychological profile of an abusiver stalker, and that Meyer’s version of love and abstinence disempowers her predominantly young, female fan base. (For more, see Christine Seifert’s “Bite Me (or Don’t)” or Anita Sarkeesian’s “The Real Reason Guys Should Hate Twilight,” among innumerable others.) This remix does a great job, I think, of humorously highlighting just those problems–and the comparative awesomeness of Buffy.

From another angle, I can’t wait to use more of McIntosh’s work in the classroom. The digital media course, which I’m centering around narrative genre(s), has me thinking a lot about fair use, remix, and how everyday composers can engage in public conversations about the texts that affect them and their culture. And this sleek, smart, and legal film works to demonstrate how effective and fun such rhetorical narratives can be.

For more from McIntosh about this remix, see his guest blog post on WIMN’s Voices. And definitely check out his other works at Rebellious Pixels.

Visual calm

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I’m guessing all of your eyes and minds are as exhausted as mine after a day of work, which, for many of us, contains a fair amount of web wanderings. (I’m prepping a course in digital media composition, so I get/have to spend a lot of time looking for and at teachable texts and sites. Any recommendations are always welcome!) It’s not just the wretched pop-ups or those expanding ads, but all the colors, links, sidebars, and navigation tools that distract the reader from the actual text under examination. My burning eyes and burnt brain have seemed like an inevitable side-effect, a necessary evil. Until now!

David Pogue’s “Pogie Awards for the Year’s Best Tech Ideas” in today’s New York Times introduced me to a groovy new (and, like all the best tools, free!) button for your web browser that promises, as Pogue says, to be a “real life-changer.” Readability clears all of the pesky distractions away from the central text under consideration, leaving only a simple, clean, and customizable view. Check out the difference between Pogue’s original article and the Readability version:

Pogue's original NYT article view

Pogue's article viewed through Readability

How cool is that?!?! My new year’s gift to you: some breathing room for your eyes.

Transparency in photography

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There’s a fascinating piece in the NY Times today — “Point, Shoot, Retouch and Label?” by Steven Erlanger –about French politician Valerie Boyer’s draft of a law requiring advertisements to carry a label if they contain images that have been digitally retouched. This is not a new discussion; publishing associations in the UK and elsewhere have talked about voluntary reform. Check out the consistently smart coverage in Jezebel. But it may be the first to push a law.

The article focuses on the issue of women’s body images and the dangers of falsified ideals, documenting various approaches to this debate, from hopes that “such a label might sensitize people to the fakery involved in most of the advertising images with which they’re bludgeoned” to the threat that “such a law would destroy photographic art.”

In this vein, a fashion photographer is quoted pointing out that all photography is a representation of reality through a lens that excludes as well as captures. Very smart and valid… but is this the generally accepted view that fashion magazine readers share? Based on a sample of my self, friends, students, sister, cousins…. No. However naively, most women still “buy” these false images.

An editor at Marie Claire declares the labels unnecessary because “Our readers are not idiots … Of course they’re all retouched.” You’ve got to almost admire her bravado, and the move to convince her readers with a magazine that so clearly respects their intelligence… I guess I’m an idiot, then, since despite my rhetorical training, I’d still love to be informed.

Check out Marie Claire’s edited editors:

Photoshop Disasters: Marie Claire

Photoshop Disasters: Marie Claire

At least, in the meantime, we have such wonderful sources as Jezebel and Photoshop Disasters and Photoshop of Horrors, and of course fun on YouTube: