Okay so this is my best friend Megan. -------------------------------> She's a beautiful, talented, brilliant, powerful musk-ox... AND she's an amazing journalist! She now works at Channel 5, but until recently she worked at News 2 (WKRN) as their digital producer. This pretty much means she put together the stories to post on WKRN's website and social media accounts. I always enjoyed those moments when I was scrolling through my newsfeed and came upon a story that I KNEW she had written because I just know her. Below is the original post. I would show the story itself that came up when you click the link, but it has actually been updated since first posted so it's not the same. However, I will go ahead and tell you that the photos of the victims used in the body of the story were mug shots, since both victims had criminal records. This will give some context for what happened next. Let's first stop and look at what we know so far. Audience: anyone on Facebook, but particularly Nashville residents. Genre: Facebook post, obviously, but moreover it's acting as a teaser for the larger, longer story it links to. Author: WKRN, and the writer of the story on the website, but more specifically for this FB post, my friend Megan. Purpose: Because the main story is about the couple the police are searching for I would say the purpose of this post is to get their faces out there in case anyone spots them. The purpose of this post is not to talk about the victims. As you can see, many who saw this post were upset that the photo of those wanted for questioning was a happy, smiley photo and the photos of the victims were mug shots. They also totally ignored what WKRN said about only being able to use photos released by the police. A number of people were also confused by the photos used, thinking that the victims were those in the happy photo and the couple wanted by police was those in the mug shot photos. This brings us to... Context: We are in the American South, and unfortunately racial bias still runs pretty strong here. Since one of the victims was black and the suspects were white, some of those who expressed confusion were attacked by other Facebookers for assuming the black man (whose mug shot was used) was the suspect. So far, we have a situation where the police (and by extension WKRN) have perhaps made a mishap in communicating information to the public. It was unfortunate that the photos of the victims were mug shots, but I don't think people should have been berating WKRN for this. See more berating below: I'm honestly not sure if communication breakdowns like this can be avoided because people are always going to freak out on Facebook posts and people are always going to be a bit misinformed about the way things like professional journalism really work.
The breakdown could also be due to the fact that people seemed to be responding to visual information first and linguistic second. The post clearly states "police are searching for these two people..." I think this is more of a 'pay better attention to what you see/read on social media' and less of a 'those slimy journalists must be stopped' situation. But maybe I'm just biased. However I do think there's something to be said about the mug shots the police chose to release of the victims. I agree with the sentiment some of these people are expressing, but I just think there was a communication breakdown in that they were attacking the wrong person/entity and using the wrong reasoning in their arguments. WKRN did seem to realize that the mug shots weren't the best representation of the victims, so as I mentioned earlier they did update the story on their website to use different photos. I think this was the best possible thing they could have done in this situation. Books Of course, as a child growing up when it still wasn’t totally commonplace for middle class families to have boatloads of technology devices, my first encounter with literacy technology was in books. Sure, we had a clunky desktop computer, but only my parents used it for the most part. We also didn’t have cable TV until I was in middle school, I think. My point being: unlike the kids you see today that are five years old and can work an iPad better than I can, books were all I had in the beginning. In short, my voracious reading habits are probably the reason I am now an English major and love to write myself. You always hear that to be a good writer, you must be a good reader. I believe this is true, and I can easily trace influences in my own writing. This is just the traditional sense of using language, though. What are some others? Movies I’m glad you (I) asked! Another technology that was formational for me was movies. Though sort of similar to books, movies are oftentimes more present in pop culture so they had a bit of a different effect on my development as a human and communicator. One of the biggest things movies (and, to a lesser degree, books) helped me to do was better establish social connections. I was able to use the language of these texts to bond with other people. What I mean by this is I could find people with the same favorite things as me and use the language of a certain piece of media to converse with them in our own little dialect. This made it easier to make friends, especially for shy, nerdy me. For example, I cannot tell you how many friends I made my freshman year of high school by talking about the Twilight books/movies. (I was Team Jacob, btw.) Obviously this is embarrassing now (not the Team Jacob thing – I stand by that decision), but you get the point. And I also do this same sort of thing with my family. For example, my mom, my sister and I watched the 2005 Pride and Prejudice film probably twice a week when I was in high school. We all took to quoting it at each other in everyday conversation, with even my dad joining in with incorrect quotes sometimes. There’s this one part where Lady Catherine says to Col. Fitzwilliam, “Fitzwilliam, I need you!” in her super British, posh, commanding, Dame Judy Dench voice. To this day my mom still says this to call me over to her. The Internet So my best friend (who I have known since I was like two) has brothers that are 5+ years older than her. Therefore growing up with her, I knew a lot of things about the Internet before the other kids I knew. I’m pretty sure my friend was one of the first people who had a YouTube account. Okay maybe not one of the first, but we were hanging around there and watching the muffins video, the numa numa song, the llama song, etc. etc. as very young, impressionable little things. And weirdly, I think this exposure shaped the way I use humor as well as the way I use the Internet to this day…or maybe I was always doomed to have a ridiculously stupid and quirky sense of humor. We will never know. See below: my childhood. I still know every word to this song, sadly. The point is my use of this technology (in a variety of forms – text, video, photo, sound) has done two things. 1. It has affected my writing style to where I am able to incorporate pop culture references into blog posts such as this while still using academic terminology like "literacy technologies." 2. On the whole social side of my argument, I can find interesting or funny things that I share with my friends, again establishing social connections. And that is still what I do when I send my sister an Instagram post by betches or share a Buzzfeed “Which Marauder are you?” quiz to a friend’s Facebook wall or quickly pull up a relevant Parks and Recreation gif to use when texting someone. Which brings me to…
Bonus: my phone! Confession: I often really miss my flip phone. The thing is, having a smart phone is just so much more convenient, and I hate that because flip phones are so fun and you can dramatically snap them closed after intense conversations. But really, my phone is honestly just the culmination of my use of all other types of literacy technology. This is interesting because I have related all the technologies I’ve mentioned to communication and social connection, and this is the very purpose of a cell phone. Funny how that works out, no?
In making my site, I took the most basic elements from the tutorial site we did and worked from those. It doesn’t really look similar to that site, but I honestly couldn’t find any information on the basics of an html page anywhere else online. For design, at first I looked around at examples of personal websites, but all of the ones I liked had Javascript elements and were terribly confusing (though very cool). I wanted mine to still look cool but remain simple and easy for me to work with. My method was pretty much just messing around with the code until things worked out more or less the way I wanted! I would drastically change one little element (such as increasing the padding by a huge amount) in order to see what it changed, and then I would go from there. Trial by success, I guess? The vision I had for this site was for it to just look decent. That’s a simple goal, but let me explain it a little more. Basically I didn’t want it to look like something from the early 2000s or something a child would make (as if children could code…though actually, these days I wouldn’t be surprised if they could). Design-wise I wanted something minimalistic but still effective and attractive—aka not boring. I wanted it to look dynamic if that makes sense. I think I did an okay job achieving this vision. I was even able to find a cool decorative element to put on my home page, as I had been inspired to do by the design of my planner where I drew my ideas. In fact, I am particularly fond of the home page but not as fond of the rest. However I can certainly live with this, since it’s a massive step up from the last html site I created from scratch! I think I primarily used the visual and spatial modes in creating this website. As you can see in the drawing I made of my design concept for the site, my emphasis was on the large text I wanted featured in the center, with the other boxes and paragraphs less emphasized. I changed the position of my menu/link boxes, but other than that I did alright sticking to my plan.
Also note where I wrote “symmetry” surrounded by asterisks. This was another important aspect of my site that I think I did manage to execute, especially on the home page with the pink heading text mirroring the pink (Fun fact: they are the exact same pink because I used a color-determiner-website-thing to find the color value. I am very proud of this.) decorative element under the menu, which itself is spaced equally between the two elements. Spatial symmetry is appealing to me on other websites, so I wanted to use it in my own. I didn’t really rely on the linguistic mode as much since I never know what to write about myself on these kinds of things. However the sparse presence of text just served to increase my site’s minimalistic vibe, in a way. I can tell myself that, at least. I have a tiny bit of aural mode in the sense that you can click on my "Listening to" link on the "Currently" page and be taken to a Youtube playlist of the Hamilton soundtrack (theatre kid forever!), but I don't think this counts since it's not directly on my site. I really enjoyed making this site. Using HTML gets easier every time I do it, which blows my mind because it's not something I ever thought I would be able to do. It's not going to win any of the design awards I discovered in my research, but I made it and it makes me happy. Update: I originally posted the wrong zip file, but I have corrected it! RhetoricThe audience of the informational campaign Just Label It is people who are already familiar with GMOs (notice it does not have a tab that says “What are GMOs?” but rather, “About GMO Foods”). It presupposes familiarity with the issue, because people who have never heard of GMOs would probably not know to visit this site. Another layer of the audience could also be people who are politically active and engaged citizens, since the first two photos you see on the site contain the words “Take Action” in large print that leads to a petition website when you click the photo. This leads me to conclude that the purpose of this website is not just to provide information, but to tell American people who care about the issue how they can help, as evidenced by the presence of the “Take Action” photos as well as the blue and yellow boxes found in the upper right corner of the page that say “Donate” and again, “Take Action.” This site fits in the genre of other informational campaigns since it includes features such as informational blog posts and a link for donations. However since this is an issue that can be affected through actions such as writing letters or signing petitions (you can’t exactly write a letter to Congress asking them to stop breast cancer), the site goes beyond what some other sites in its genre does. It includes clear and direct routes for taking action by providing links to petitions or instructions on how to email congressmen, etc. DesignEmphasis is certainly on the phrase “Take Action” which can be seen in three different spots when you first open the website. Color is also used to emphasize important details on the page such as the logo and the donate/take action boxes in the corner and, again, the words “Take Action” on the Gwyneth Paltrow photo. Emphasis is also placed on the blue bar (again, color is used to emphasize) containing common questions about GMOs. The eye is drawn to the brightly colored bar because those questions are probably the first thing someone will want to know—especially those who aren’t ready to “take action” right away and feel the need to scroll down the page a little more. As with the emphasis, color is used to create contrast on the webpage and draw the eye to the most important aspects of the page. These include, as I have mentioned before, the text “Take Action,” the colored boxes in the corner and the blue question bar. If you continue to scroll down the webpage after the blue bar, you come to a section of blog posts. These posts are not emphasized by any color or special boxes. They are a collection of photos and white boxes set against a light grey background—not much contrast there. They blend in and are de-emphasized because they are not as important as the rest of the home page. The blog posts provide the most specific information, but the purpose of the home page is not to give deep information, but to present ways for the consumer of the text to take action about GMOs. The blog posts are there if you want them, but they won’t distract you if you just want to know where to click to send a letter to the FDA. This site is set up so that the most important elements are at the very top and very bottom of the home page. At the top, there is the menu bar which provides easy access to the most vital information the reader needs about the issue as well as the two ways he or she can get involved (the much mentioned donate/take action box). This is pretty standard organization for a website. The bottom is a bit different. Usually the very bottom of a website contains information on how to contact the organization that the website is about. While this site does have a contact tab for itself at the bottom, more importantly, the information for contacting the FDA, Congress, and large food corporations are found just above the standard bottom-of-a-website tabs. This is great organization because it takes a standard trope of web design and turns it into another way for the website to reach and persuade its audience.
Recently a friend called me “old school” because I go to the public library to rent movies rather than finding them on some random streaming website; I also go there to rent books for non-scholastic reading. However I’m not sure if I really deserve the term old school. Yes, I go to libraries often. Unlike Leslie Knope, I think libraries are excellent and I hope they never go away. But I don’t do this because I’m averse to technologies such as online video streaming or e-readers. I often catch up on TV shows by using sketchy, probably illegal streaming sites. I own and frequently use a Kindle. It’s just easier and cheaper for me to do things the old school way. So for me, the question of where digital texts fit into my life doesn’t have a black and white answer. I’m no defender of technology by any means. I have especially strong views about the damaging effects of social media, but otherwise I find many uses for digital texts and think I have benefited from the knowledge I’ve gained from them—even if they do occasionally suck away my time. But is it a bad thing that engaging in digital texts sometimes sucks away my time? Carr suggests that people today probably read more than they did in the 1980s when everyone just watched television all the time, yet he still has a problem with the kind of reading we do online. In response to the idea that people no longer engage in deep reading because of how reading has changed in the digital age, I would like to suggest that many people still read deeply, but it has to really interest them. I will read a long article on a topic I enjoy, but I will skim something that interests me less. I don’t see a problem with this. So no, I don’t think Google is making me stupid. However I wonder at Carr’s idea that the inability to engage in deep reading suggests a person is stupid. There are many kinds of intelligences—linguistic being only one of nine if you subscribe to the theory of multiple intelligences—and perhaps some are strengthened and encouraged by use of digital texts. Others may not even be affected by technology. In any case, I have been able to utilize digital texts to do things such as catch up on presidential primary debates I missed on TV or research a new idea for a short story right when the thought comes to me. Just the other night I purchased a book on my Kindle at 11:00 pm and stayed awake until 4:00 am reading it. I am better able to explore my real interests because of the technology I have at my fingertips. In his response to Carr, Steven Johnson suggests something similar when he says, “And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected.”
In conclusion, here is my advice to anyone wrestling with this issue:
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Anna SharpBelmont writing major who is about to become a Real Adult™ and still owns like 12 coloring books. Archives
May 2016
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