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

So here’s my project and it’s all y’all’s fault that it ain’t done.

While trying to bring together a semester’s worth of exploration, I came upon the difficulty that Morgan explores in her term project: this doesn’t work as a linear text. Not knowing where I wanted to start assuming prior knowledge on the part of my reader, I found myself writing in blurbs, each targeted at an 18 year-old audience (Thanks, Pepper). So then I decided that this whole InDesign thing wasn’t quite so bad after all (mad props to the ICaP Doc group) and started experimenting with a textbook style document design.

Try this one on for size. Pow! right in the kisser.

It's pretty! but is it real?

Here's my pages, have fun with that.

Does that title seem confusing? Well, it's my smoke and mirrors to make you think that this assignment was somehow turned-in on time. . . . sure.

What is the role of the screen phase in a personal experience of yours?
I decided to write this paper as a means of exploring why I’m so dern obsessed with self-presentation on the internet. Be it Myspace/Facebook, gaming, blogs, on-line dating, on-line resumes or even that new fangled tracking technology, it seems the internet, rather than merely an ocean of information, is an elaborate stage from which we can conceivably target any audience (the racial and class violence inherent in that claim will certainly be explored in my project) and utilize any form of knowledge as a prop in the performance of the self. My personal experience is that I’ve always loved on-line dating sites because I love attempting to manifest a page (hybrid textual/visual self-portrait) which expresses not only “me” but the version of me most likely to attract whatever sort of mate that version of me would want to attract. And yet I’ve never considered actually meeting anyone via these sites. The explicit purpose of the site is completely alien to me. On a similar front, despite nearly a decade of journaling, I found that attempting to post a personal blog was horribly awkward. I find that my audience awareness on the internet, and the ways that these new cyber communities overlap and conflict with my other communities make sincere-feeling self-expression near impossible. I can’t even post to discussion boards because of the complexity of creating an e-image of myself that will conflict with my self image. Recently, I’ve embraced this frustration. I’ve been creating digital personas. Avatars? Perhaps. But my process of learning to access my avatar potential needs to be theorized. I want to call this process of self-performance the screen phase, and be able to talk about internet-invested conceptions of self in terms of avatar literacy.

At the moment it's not complete (waiting on a promised e-mail to fill-in the "flow chart" which I'm imagining will be chaotic-chic).

http://wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html

Pick a color, pick the type of variation, pick the angle of variation, pick a color style.

Finally, you can also pick to see it according to various levels of color blindness (complete with percentage of the population who will see your color in that way)

Way cool.

And check out the root. As near as I can tell, it's a Czech compan

http://www.istockphoto.com/my_lightbox_contents.php?id=1924893

there's quite a few and I know the blonde is pretty smarmy (not mention embodying the radical whiteness of the internet, as I'm exploring in my research right now). But it's the concepts that I was lookin' for.

In response to the anxiety I think we've all been feeling which was articulated perfectly by Mark inhis post on "Real" Issues, I have a story to share.

When putting together my syllabus for this semester, I intentionally left the third major project open so that I could create a more organic assignment in response to what happened in the class up until that moment. For this set of students, I found that they're sense of themselves as political agents (almost half of my class considers themselves politically actiive) was undermined by thier sense of themselves as students and the roles they play. So for the third project, I decided to ask them to think critically about their simultaneous roles as students and citizens. The result, after conferencing and class discussion, we that they were to enter public discourse.

"Literacy means more than words, and visual literacy means more than play." (16)

Related to my post on "What is Visual Rhetoric," I want to challenge the base assumptions of which George is working. Literacy is more than words. But if our students are already visually literate, what are we teaching them. I'm not saying that we aren't teaching them anything, but I think that articulating more rigorous and specific answers to this question will help us to better adapt visual rhetoric to our purposes in the composition classroom.