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

Interesting little site here at http://atten.tv AttenTV claims to be "the Truman Show for attention economy." I haven't checked it out too much, but appearently it tracks your clickstream on the web and then broadcasts that for others to watch.

Everything is something-tube now, and added to this growing list is teachertube.com.

Is this an attempt to make the lives and workings of teachers more visible to the public? Is it a visual resource for teachers to share community with one another? Is it potentially frightening, horrifying, yet oddly fascinating at the same time?

Check out Mrs. Burk's raps and rhymes on math . . . you'll b

I stumbled upon a site that might be a useful resource. It's similar to YouTube, although it's focus seems to be more on user content that documents events in ways different from the mass media. It's subtitle is "Redefining the Media." It doesn't seem to have as many random videos as YouTube. In other words, I haven't seen any videos of cats flushing toilets or chasing balls of string. I have seen a few of the "confessional" videos so prevalent on YouTube but these all seem to be vlogs that record commentary on current events. I haven't seen any personal diary kinds of vlogging. Also, according to their FAQ page, after users upload content, the video is approved by staff before becoming accessible on the site's public areas but is still available under the user's tag, which as far as I know is not YouTube's policy. LiveLeak also has some kind of point system to reward users for uploading videos and posting comments and punish them for posting unacceptable content. I'm not sure what these points confer on the user. I've looked through the YouTube site and haven't found anything similar, other than the ranking of videos using the star system, which are user-submitted and different from the point system on LiveLeak. Maybe someone with more YouTube knowledge can provide more insight on this.

Great video here about the history of media starting open and democratic (the printing press, radio, etc.) and eventually being co-opted by corporate interests and turned into one-way communication. The video discusses forces at work to turn the internet into a similar nightmare.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rNg_FVaPek&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fkairosnews%...

2 very interesting and class-related links for ya'll. The first is Jenkins' blog site, which I already knew from his writings about Second Life.

The second I'm still waiting to explore more. In the vein of the economics of attention, it seems to be an organization dedicated to championing the individual's right to mastering their own "attention data." My quick look found it quite interesting.

I found several books that provide interesting explorations of the visual and the mind. I am listing them below along with the links to their book reviews.

• Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-year Collaboration
• Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing
• The Psychology of Attention
• Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning

Last night's Daily Show (http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/index.jhtml?ml_video=82077) provides an example of the oscillation Lanham describes. Not only are we looking at Anna Nicole Smith's death on CNN, but we are also, with Jon's TiVo skills, watching ourselves watching it. By compiling examples from the 24 hour cable news channels, The Daily Show provides meta-news, drawing our attention to the way news channels draw our attention.

Wikibooks has an excellent set of articles on visual rhetoric, starting here:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Visual_Rhetoric

If you want to contribute, go for it!

D.

Stop whatever it is that you're doing and read Borges' Labyrinths. The short stories and essays of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, along with Italian author Italo Calvino, are fabulous thought experiments. Similar to Deleuze, only without the inferference of the whole academic industry and its conventions (pretensions). Borges likes to think about corruptions of abstraction/language and the ways in which time (cause and effect) can be disrupted or otherwise experienced.

I mentioned this article in class on Tuesday in reference to avatar design. It's written by Beth Kolko, who of course, was one of our IDID speakers last semester. It's a pretty fascinating look at the rhetoric of avatar design from a gendered perspective. It's a tad old now, in that, it's pre-Second Life, which is probably where the most interesting potential for avatar exploration is happening right now.