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

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.

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.

Attached please find a rough draft of my exploration project. I have attempted to answer 10 questions, and have included some additional notes that have yet to find a home.

Sorry to be posting this a little late. New Orleans was lovely, and I was struck by how visually compelling (at times demaning) the tourist area was. I thought about taking some pictures for you guys. It didn't happen... But I thought about it!  Attached are my 10 questions for this part of the project. Cheers, Morgan R.

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.

Exploration project is attached . . . cause it's long . . . and, uh, exploratory.

Reflection: I didn't think that I would get as much material as I did out of the questions, but as it was I had to shorten my inquiry to the first fifteen questions! I hope the generative process yields things that are really useful.