Blog #10

Now that I have completed the initial stages of my Final Project, I have realized that the two clips that I am remixing are perfect for what I am trying to accomplish. I began with a scene from the movie High School Musical 3 and mixed in a music video from the band Evermore. The video is for a song titled "Hey Boys and Girls (Truth of the World part 3)" and it depicts a group of adults dressed up as different professions (doctor, soldier, nurse) dancing on the set. This video helps illustrate the impact that mass media has on influencing young people to conform to societal standards in order to make money, thus allowing them to participate in a propaganda saturated culture in which they submit to the media giants to provide them with "Truth". Evermore created an imaginary drug called "Truthagen" to highlight the numbing effect that mass media culture has on children and adults alike.

Now all I need to do is further synthesize the two videos to fully reveal the similarities that entertainment has with mind control in our globalized world.

Final Project

For my final project, I would like to combine video and music media. I think its a great way to get a personal message across by combining these two popular forms of entertainment. I'm not quite sure yet what I want to do, but I think I'll have a much better idea after discussing it with my classmates. I think one of the biggest challenges will be finding two pieces that fit well together. Perhaps even using multiple movies clips with one song would work best for creating something interesting and new.

Another challenge will be to create something that makes sense to the viewer. With my remix project, I had to explain a lot of what I was doing, so in this next project I'll try to make the message more apparent without explanation.

Remix Project

For my remix project I chose to remix this video:


At first, I was convinced this guy was a real preacher, though after watching it a few times I noticed at the bottom of the screen that he is really just a performer. I feel that although he has a good point about consumerism, his method of using religious rhetoric is distasteful and absurd. He uses religion to get across his argument even though he is not religious himself. I took the clip of him talking about American consumers reconsidering listening to him and juxtaposed it next to him saying "They're tempted at this moment!' to highlight the fact that religious minded people might be attracted to him listening to him, but they're really being deceived by his appearance and the the context he is portrayed in.

One comment on youtube expressed:
"I agree, there is a growing population of people that instantly become distrustful or cynical when they hear an apparently unprovoked "Hallelujah" by a random religious person. Especially when he's preaching Anti-Consumerism and yet has VERY nice clothes. Hopefully they're made in North America, but buying locally doesn't address the OVER-spending and credit problems going on, just globalization and sweat shops."

I tried to highlight the absurdity of his persona and gimmick, such as the fact that he is protesting Victoria's Secret and comparing himself to Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple.

This project is supposed to have a degree of humor in it, but it still retains a degree of seriousness, considering the seriousness of the issues it revolves around; consumerism and the desperate state of our economy. Even though this interview was posted several years ago, now is the time for us to really examine our culture and how we approach important matters.

Podcasting in the School Library

I have listened to podcasts before but never created one. One interesting podcast I've listened to before was called Radiolab. It was more of radioshow because it was about 30 min long but it still involved a lot of sound effects and was very educational. After reading these two pieces, I believe it is something that I could enjoy creating because it helps engage the listener in the topic. Podcasts could be useful at Fort Lewis in order to educate students in a variety of ways. They could be used to aid in registration or to promote on campus events.

Podcasts are different from radioshows because they are much shorter, and are only meant to entice the listener to find out more about the topic. Podcasts can be inserted in between radio programs, like the Wheaties advertisements in "Mars is Heaven".

Wiki Lore and Politics in the Classroom

Before reading this piece, I was pretty familiar with wikis. Like many Fort Lewis students, wikipedia.org is often the first place I go when researching a topic. I'm glad that wikis in general are being recognized as a trustworthy source of information. The fact that they can be peer edited actually makes them more complete than some scholarly journals because they incorporate different points of view.

Not much surprised me about this article; it's pretty self explanatory. It did help me understand wikis better because it used real life examples of students using them in the classroom. It gave me a sense of how peer editing could be beneficial for collaborative projects, an area which I think may have been lacking on my part for our first assignment just because I am not too familiar with the process of creating wikis yet.

Some of the disadvantages of using wikis are that they can increase anxiety by adding a competitive side to assignments. Looking at some of the other wikis, I feel like the one I created is quite inferior. However, I feel like the topic I chose did not have a lot of material that could be covered, so in that sense, wikis are less of an intellectual creation and more of a collage of information.

The advantages are that they decentralize the classroom and provide students with a virtual workspace that can save time and energy. They provide an archive for students' work that can be reviewed as needed. Wikis also resemble a lot of the mainstream media that students use in their daily lives, so they are more familiar with the format and function. Wikis can help students become more involved with the world of social media and integrate their expertise into the work world.

Thinking About Multimodality

I see Takayoshi and Selfe's main argument in this piece to be that teaching multimodal composition is an effective way to get students more involved in what they are learning and can also help accelerate their comprehension of material. I agree with this argument, especially since students are surrounded with multimodal compositions outside of the classroom and are engaged in creating them as well.

The implications that this piece has for a class like ours is that we are going to have to incorporate many aspects of rhetoric and composition in our productions. We need to change the way we look at multimedia. We need to look at it not as a form of entertainment but as a valuable tool for education.

Their discussion of multimodality adds to what we learned in Daley's piece because it further highlights the importance that media has in helping people retain information. Major events in history have remained in the public's consciousness due to photographs taken, as well as news broadcasts, such as during the aftermath of 9/11.

I see this piece fitting in with our blogs because this is our chance to create our own media as well as critique media within our culture.

A Vision of Students Today

I find this lolcat picture to be quite true. I have been assigned so much reading in this past week that I am extremely hard pressed to find time to accomplish. But, at least I'm learning, which is why I'm here in the first place.



Need I say more?



Poor Pluto. I think we sometimes forget in this college environment that we are all still human. Too often we carry over the habits we learned in highschool into our "adult" lives. This picture made me think of the painful feelings of rejection I felt in highschool. Although I feel much more accepted at this school, I still notice other students who are still pushed to the fringes and left out in the cold.