English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

7. Political consequences
I'm not sure if what I'm thinking of is political or economic, but those two are so close usually, I'll just shove them under one heading. Obviously, vidding is a type of piracy according to most copyright laws in the US. Fans of US texts such as StarGate and UK texts such as Harry Potter (which has mirror copyrights via Scholastic) openly acknowledge that their "poaching" is actually "stealing"--in fact, one could make an entire study of the disclaimers used. Fans place these disclaimers at the top of webpages an in their YouTube homepages, stating that no copyright infringement is intended. For fans, intention is what separates fantexts from plagiarism--they don't intend to make money, they don't intend to pass these texts off as wholly their own. They don't intend to take credit, or violate reproduction laws for the purposes of hurting the authors of the original text.

http://www.istockphoto.com/my_lightbox_contents.php?id=1924767

Notice the Amylea aesthetic: Cool blues, whites, and metalics throughout. I was imagining something that emphasized the visual nature of all text. I really like the white paper with a hole in it; what is missing in written text is the visual, often.
The shredded paper reminds us of the fragmented nature of the text. If it were used as a border, we could emphasize the framing. Or something.

The Weekly Dig, Boston's free counter culture newspaper, reported on the emergence of ANOTHER free counter culture newspaper that appears first next week.
http://www.weeklydig.com/news_opinions/articles/opening_up_the_floodgate...
To summarize: The newspaper will be made up entirely of reader-submitted blogs. Every week, the editors select the "best" ones they receive--but in a newsworthy move, they will do so live online. Readers can respond to the editorial board as they watch the feed; of course, the editors don't have to take the viewers' advice, but this is still a bold move. Lots of interesting things get decided in editorial board meetings, and this new paper wants to expose the decision making processes that happen at all papers.

Expansion Paragraphs
Keyword: Vidding
Definition: The act of making a fanvideo using clips of a favorite visual text and a favorite song.

1. Past uses of Vidding:
As per my PCA presentation, "vidding" is a new term for an old concept. Fanvideos began with the Kirk/Spock "slash" videos made by aiming a camera at a TV screen as an old VHS played the correct clip for the correct line of song. Vidding was used, according to Camille Bacon-Smith, as a way of soildifying a small community of women who wanted to see on screen an equal, mutal, loving relationship--a kind of equality they couldn't see in Real Life. These videos took hours to make and were a real labor of love (of the show). Today, vidding is used as propaganda for shippers (those promoting a romantic relationship) and as advertising for fanfics.

Despite the ...interesting...visual aspects of Vertigo even more interesting to me are the scenes into which we are denied visual entry. Madeline narrates her dream for us--we see clips of the dream, but never the "dream sequence" in entirety. When we see the Spanish mission, then, it has an uncany familiarity.
We are also denied seeing Scotty wake up in SF after the fall--instead the court official tells us about it. And in the final scene, Scotty narrates what "really" happened while we get the exciting visuals of the empty church bell tower.

There's a nice banner hanging between Stewart and the Union: Disability Awareness Month. This sign always makes me both giggle and snarl.
First, if you are disabled you are aware of it. If you are not visually disabled, it is unlikely anyone else will be aware of it, unless you decide to tattoo it across some body part (asuming you are abl to be tattooed). So I giggle.
Second, to cause a snarl: The idea of Awareness (which flits in and out of Jenkins' chapter on Photoshop for Democracy) assumes that once someone has been Enlightened, action will ensue. Grassroots organizations depend upon this assumption: "Raise awareness!" seems to me to be just as useless as "Empowering the Helpless." The power relationships don't change in either of these.

In Photoshop for Democracy, Jenkins emphasizes that new software has enabled amateur users to create professional results from the safety of their very own homes. We can, of course, substitute "iMovie" for "Photoshop" throughout this chapter.
What a rhetorician might notice is that with the poached screen caps and scenes (and in fanfics, poached plots and characters), "invention" becomes less about the act of creation and seems more and more like "arrangement"--to make an argument for Harry/Snape or Kirk/Spock, fans borrow already present media, already present stories and backstories (and dialogue, scenery, music, etc), and rearrange them to make their arguments. Additionally, these new arguments are already troped: There are only so many ways to write a Harry/Snape fic or to present a Kirk/Spock vid. These seem to be acting like Aristotle's topoi; fans are aware of a range of possible options, and they recombine them in new ways.

There are still a few annotations missing, since I didn't get the books until today. This will be updated as I read over break.

“Fanvid-Recs.” 8 March 2007. http://www.fanvid-rec.com.

This site hosts downloadable fanvids from about two dozen fandoms. All videos are recommended by other “vidders” who provide comments in blog form as to why the video is worthy of being posted. Because the videos must be recommended and available for download, they are likely to be of the highest quality—vids available only on YouTube are considered transient and not as “professional” by many fans.

Upon receiving a cryptic txt message, I flipped on CNN, only to see live, ongoing coverage of a "Tragic Bus Accident" in Georgia. The bus was carrying the baseball team of my college alma mater, and several were dead. Helpfully, several people emailed me the story from CNN.com.
As I watched the story "unfold" I couldn't help but note the visual constructions. First, there was the map of Ohio so that non-Blufftonians could figure out where the college is (most of them got it wrong for the first hour or so). Then, they decided to show the bus route from BU to Georgia (on I-75). Next, they cut to the outside of the hospital where the survivors were taken--all of this was given a voice over narration.

Jenkins is, of course, a man after my own fangirl heart (Squee!). As a fan himself, however, I think he sometimes forgets that the participatory culture he's cataloguing has not yet permeated the culture at large. To the world at large, fans are still "fanatics" in the perjorative sense of the word: People with no Real Life (In fan talk, RL).
Jenkins also says that he cannot yet talk about the significance of what he has found (13). I wonder at what point we will be able to make such claims. While Jenkins seems to imagine a coming convergence that will create sophisticated viewers across the spectrum of the US population, I'm not so sure. I disagree that in this new convergence, "No one group can set the terms. No one group can control access and participation" (23). Despite this egalitarian view, he reminds us that there is no Black Box, no single StarTrek computer system that will run everything for everybody. Convergence culture will take a long time, I think, to reach the general population. So when do we start studying it? Conquering it?