What "moves" us
One of Lessig's more important points seems to be his insistence that media literacy is more than passive consumerism. Rather than just watch tv shows, movies, digital video, and the like, kids (and adults) need to know how to actually create with those types of media. Lessig writes:
For though anyone who has written understands how difficult writing is--how difficult it is to sequence a story, to keep a reader's attention, to craft language to be understandable--few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is. Or more fundamentally, few of us have a sense of how media works, how it holds an audience or leads it through a story, how it triggers emotion or builds suspense. (36)
He goes on to talk a bit more about the actual techniques that film uses, but I guess I'm wondering about the rhetorical techniques that we're teaching students. How are we teaching students to build suspense or maintain attention in their new media compositions? What are these techniques anyway and can they even be taught?
For instance, what are the various rhetorical techniques deployed in this piece of media and how might we teach them?
3 Comments:
Teaching rhetorical techniques...
Can new media be made into a kind of rhetoric? Can it be taught?
Some folks think so. There are any number of introductory works to using new media and making film.
How to maintain attention?
There are any number of films that hold our attention.
So, too, with writing. I am sure there are lots of examples we can think of that could be said to hold our attention.
Many of these examples build suspense.
You want to know what will come next.
And, quite often, there is a pay-off that is to be had.
Turning such pay-offs into a formula is, one supposes, the techniques that one is to teach.
If the students recognize where the pay-offs are, they will be able to do the same.
There is, in saying as much, the sense of stretching "pay-off" ... to engage its sense, perhaps even in wordplay... but there is another sense of "pay off" in terms of disengagement.
A pay off that is a disengagement.
A pay off that never comes, but rather withdraws.
This is the pay off of another sort, though it is one that one hardly has patience for.
Like waiting for water to boil, like watching a sugar cube dissolve.
This is less a technique than a span.
A span rather than suspense.
Some films build suspense, while others span...
The notion of building... the notion of making a point... the notion of anything at all...
Slowly crumbles...
Slowly dissolves...
And it is in this sense that is attentive in a sense less of craft, less of triggering emotions, less a building of suspense that is also what filmmakers undo...
Such direction.less directors are, of course, considered boring.
What is maintained is a sense that something might happen, but nothing does...
This is a stretch...
A stretch of meanwhile....
un entre-temps
6:34 PM
In order for my students to learn the rhetorical techniques of writing and new media, I encourage them to discuss their projects with each other. After analyzing examples, such as the link Jenny offers, students analyze what works and what doesn't. Then hopefully in the drafting process, they can receive feedback from their peers on whether or not they are creating suspense or maintaining attention. Basically I've just summed up the theory behind "Peer Review." Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn't. How well peer review works is a whole other debate. Basically, we have to get students interested in the purpose of their project. How to do that though? I'm still trying to figure that one out. lol
7:29 PM
That animation reminds me of this site, published by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which records the last statements of executed inmates:
Executed Texas InmatesMost are "conventional": apologies, religious statements, and gestures toward loved ones. Some, however, are fairly odd:
William Prince DavisOnly in Texas would a person use his last words to pronounce a cliché about football.
Anyway, narrative creation in New Media, I think, directly involves the tools of production. The link in the parent is a Flash Animation. All files made by Flash are stamped by Macromedia (the company that produces Flash). Macromedia has no explicit rights over the content you produce, but it is marked as a product of Macromedia. Indeed, an older version of the Flash license agreement stipulated that all Flash projectors (stand-alone programs that display Flash animations) were contractually obliged to include the Macromedia Flash logo. If you were familiar with a hex editor, you could hack the logos out, but doing so was technically illegal.
Now think about this in the context of software you use all the time. What if everything you produced with Microsoft Word had "Microsoft " stamped on it? What if when you printed something out it had advertisements on it? We talk about content as though it is "ours," but it is increasingly becoming linked to the tools that produce the content.
To make this more clear, what if every time you produced content with Word, Microsoft owned it. Think how odd this is. It is as if every time you wrote content with a pen, Bic owned whatever you produced. These are not crazy speculations; they are already at play. Here's one example:
The Big Book of JerkcityThis is a book of comics. However, the art used in the book comes from a no-longer existent instant message program called "Comic Chat," produced by Microsoft. This was a chat program that used little cartoon characters as avatars instead of just lines of dialog.
Now, a real artist made the cartoon characters you see in the above link. This artist sold his rights to that art to Microsoft for use in Comic Chat. But, when Jerkcity wanted to use that art in their book, there were problems. This was because Microsoft now technically owned those images.
In the end, the use in The Big Book of Jerkcity was OK because of an interesting technicality. It seems that in the Comic Chat user agreement, Microsoft waved any rights to the art to avoid any culpability. What do I mean? Think about this: what if a kidnapper used Microsoft Word to write a ransom note. If Microsoft staked some sort of claim over the content of that work, they would be culpable and ripe for legal action by the victim's family. The same just happened to be true for Comic Chat. Microsoft didn't want to be responsible if someone used Comic Chat to do something illegal (it was a chat program--what if someone made threats of bodily harm or lured a child into lewd acts using that program? Would Microsoft be to blame?), so they waved all rights and responsibilities.
This convoluted case gives you an example of the world in which we live. This is a world where the only thing that prevents corporate ownership of anything we produce is the fear of lawsuits.
As Lessig claims, one of the big problems is that our culture is so litigious. Apparently, ancient Greek culture was even more litigious than ours, and we can all see how well that worked out. How long will it be until everything we produce is already owned, not even because of copyright, but because the very tools we use to produce content are granted legal right of that content?
8:24 PM
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