Selected Abstracts
Anti-Smoking Persuasion for the Digital Age: Cool Ethos and Implications for Teen Reasoning
Defining Difference Through Avril Lavigne: Subculture, Gender, and Identity Politics in Pop Culture Interpretation
Popular Hostility and the Rhetorics of Textual Identity
Virtual Guerillas and a World of Extras: Composing Machinima in Second Life
TheTruth is a North American anti-smoking advocacy group which traces it roots to the 1997 state of Florida’s Tobacco Pilot Program. TheTruth commercials– with their low-tech documentary style– portray the organization as an underground, grassroots and guerilla movement. Utilizing methods of street theater, the commercials have often focused on public performances to shock passer-bys with the “truth” of big tobacco. TheTruth commercials are fascinating studies in their own rights. Although the commercials may be the most public front of the campaign, TheTruth’s website reveals a more complex psychology. Within its flashy pages, the website strives hard to be cool with every new click. The primary persuasive goal is to be so cool that the act of smoking can only seem uncool in comparison. Using Alan Liu’s work on technological cool, this paper analyzes the ways this website attempts to persuade teenagers with an ethos of digital cool. If cool is a primarily “the aporia of information” (Liu 179, The Laws of Cool) then trying to persuade through cool ethos involves an often contradictory and radical redefining of all three Aristotlean persuasive pistis. These re-definitions ultimately have important implications for how some people feel postmodern and wired teens are best reasoned with.
Like any celebrity figure, Lavigne signifies a public performance which is partially calculated with intent; but at the same time, this performance invites personal interpretation from fan and critic alike. From the beginning of her career, the praise and criticism surrounding Lavigne has been clustered around the theme of authenticity. Is she a punk rock poseur who never heard of the Sex Pistols until she was seventeen? Is she a completely manufactured record company tool that appropriates subcultural style for an audience who does not know any better? An individuals’ answers to these questions are linked to complex practices rooted in personal appropriation and situated interpretation. The questions are also intimately wrapped up in issues of subcultural appropriation, mass consumerism, and female identity– three issues volatile enough on their own, and incredibly complicated when wrapped around the identity of one entertainer. The first section of this article examines both early praise and criticism of Lavigne. The examination is not in reference to an essentialist authenticity but located in terms of consumer use and their situated interpretive practices. Instead of choosing sides in the debate, this section aims to identify what is at stake for fans and critics and sets the stage for Lavigne’s subsequent image changes. The second section argues that Lavigne's subsequent image shifts coincided with more feminist-minded lyrics that demand looking at Lavigne through lenses of teen identity and third-wave feminism. Taken together, the evolving and shifting reactions of consumers offers insights into much larger cultural conversations about possibilities for teen identity, female consumption patterns, and feminism’s continually fluid tactics.
Since the fulfillment of aesthetic desires is never purely personal and entirely subjective, aesthetic fulfillment always involves a complicated navigation of socially constructed values and standards. These values have inevitably lead to aesthetic pluralism, a condition marked by different taste publics designated by their disagreements over the value of cultural forms. Of the many factors involved in navigating these disagreements, the sheer size and makeup of the taste public is perhaps one of the oldest concerns. Publics realized long ago that aesthetic taste can be a form of cultural capital offering exclusive membership, access, and rights to a certain pedigree of texts. Widespread popularity is the enemy of these goals, and the stakes, of course, have always gone beyond simple, aesthetic enjoyment. Claims to power and identity have always been part of the conversation. Thoughts about people’s supposed taste superiority are often passed off as snobbery or elitism, without an extended consideration of the actions that spring from them. Beyond thought, aesthetic pluralism leads to rhetorical action focused on positioning one’s self towards texts and publics. Aesthetics obviously contain a persuasive element, though often studied in the service of expressing how something evokes an appeal or pleasure. However, when aesthetics and rhetoric are linked in terms of analyzing popularity, rhetorical tactics have predominantly been utilized to convince others to not enjoy a text, not take pleasure, not think of it as for them. This paper focuses on rhetorical positioning toward aesthetic texts and the sizes of their audiences as they have changed throughout the eighteenth-century to present day. Hostility towards popularity has always been based in fears that textual enjoyment by large numbers of people is a threat to individual and group identity. At the core of this identity formation is the ability to draw status from a uniquely “special” understanding of a public text. This desire has not changed much, but developments in technology and the place of aesthetics in people’s lives have certainly altered the actions that today’s publics take to maintain privilege and status.
While making machinima with a video game, the filmmaker is obviously limited by the structures of the game; however, the “stage” can technically be restricted to the specific participants of “actors” necessary to pulling off predetermined shots. However, Second Life is a constantly living environment with avatars coming and going at their own leisure. Unless a filmmaker chooses to shoot on private land (not an option for a majority of SL residents), the experience is more akin to guerilla-style filmmaking on the streets of a busy city than the controlled environments of a Hollywood backlot. Based on my own experiences, the basic elements of machinima construction are further challenged by the constant barrage of avatars merely going about their own Second Life purposes. This article focuses on these challenges (and ultimate pleasures) of filming machinima in Second Life. Long before the raw footage of the machinima enters an editing program, the SL machinima director plays a social role not always inherent in filming the genre in other environments. I propose that instead of searching for empty areas of Second Life, directors embrace the potential chaos and base their rhetorical decisions on interactive play with the random residents they encounter throughout the process. The article will act partially as a primer on rhetorical strategies for navigating machinima production in SL. Additionally, the article will move beyond the instructional towards a theory of participatory rhetoric in virtual space. Shooting machinima in Second Life is ultimately another step away from rhetorics of mere persuasion and another step closer to rhetorics of public co-creation of knowledge and possibilities.
