America, It’s Time: The Case for Reparations

In The Case for Reparations, Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses the controversial topic of slavery by arguing that descendants of slaves should receive the reparations needed to sustain everything that this country has done to their ancestors. He starts off the essay with a living person, Clyde Ross, who is suffering with his mortgage because of the racist system that has been created for him. By putting a living face to the issue of slavery, Coates personalizes the essay right off the bat, allowing readers to see the problem not just as a general old issue, for the issue affects living people like Clyde each and every day. The added sympathy, pathos, and attention gained by this opening story allows both Coates and the audience to be on the same playing field, and talk about a person who desperately needed help.

Coates then uses various research, historical content, pictures, and old documents to bring the ethos to the table and fully defend his argument, so that the people who are about to criticize him at least see the reasons and the articulations behind what he has to offer. There are various references to laws and acts that have discriminated African Americans, and by noting them, he adds more legitimacy than ever before.

His main argument through the essay is that reparations are a MUST in order for this country to pay its dues and open up to more inclusion and diversity. Like Coates says, it’s like not paying the debt on your credit card. It needs to be done or the money will continue to pile up until it is not worth it anymore. He asks white people to acknowledge the position that they are in, and know it is based on the participation of America benefitting from slavery. Theft has been committed, and by articulating it in a way that touches on all points, he allows his criticizers to gain a different perspective than they originally had.

 

 

Longform Essay: The “Cool Girl” Performance

Longform includes a Best list for essays online that are marked as superior in their content. One of those essays, Jennifer Lawrence And The History Of Cool Girls, really gets the reader thinking about big ideas based on a simple topic: how awesome Jennifer Lawrence is. Usually, buzzfeed articles do not produce adequate material, but Anne Helen Petersen surprises everyone with this essay questioning why this “Cool Girl” archetype exists.

Some highlights of the essay:

1. Starting the stage by bringing the modern age into a familiar person: Jennifer Lawrence. Talking about her being a “normal person” in society’s view by tripping, drinking straight out of the bottle, and being completely flustered and starstruck by other actors. It is an engaging opening that makes people think of someone they ultimately should know and why our society embraces this type of woman, the woman that acts like a man, but is beautiful on the outside. By familiarizing us right away, the essay connects a trivial idea like Jennifer Lawrence tripping to how a certain group of women are treated in a fantastical kind of way.
2. The essay also excels with adding the history of “cool women” from the past and why they were beloved so much just like the Jennifer Lawrences. They were the JLaws before JLaw. The tomboys with the beauty on the outside, that wear jeans but look amazing in a ponytail. By giving insight into Bow and Fonda, we understand how this archetype was created, instead of believing it just came up out of the blue. The insight, along with pictures and gifs, gives historical context while not being incredibly boring. It is a great balance that keeps the reader from stopping it immediately.
3. The overall critique on the “cool girl” archetype is extremely important, especially since the previous “cool girls” like Fonda tarnished their perception because of their beliefs in the long run. A “cool girl”, as said in the essay, is a performance and is mostly a facade because of how society ultimately treat “feminine” women or “masculine” women. The “cool girl” is the balance between, having masculine traits while also being feminine and beautiful. By emphasizing this in the article, you get the audience thinking more about how women are treated n the long run.

Users of Longform ultimately appreciated the humor, funny pictures, historical context, and familiarity with Jennifer Lawrence in this day and age. They loved bringing all of this together to produce an argument of how these “cool girls” are treated in the media and in the public. Because this was just a Buzzfeed article, it probably surpassed everyone’s expectations, believing it good enough to be held as one of the more thought-provoking essays of that year.

Learning from Lobsters

David Foster Wallace writes a captivating essay about a lobster festival is his piece, Consider the Lobster, completely changing a reader’s point of view on the special crustacean. Initially, you think it is just going to be a journalistic report about the festival, where it is located, what it represents, and all of the in between. A report like that would have instantly bored me, and I would have moved on to the next reading in my life. However, this was not just another report. While it is true that Wallace talked about the ins and outs of the festival, while also giving the etymology of the word “lobster”, he also made his essay personable and enjoyable for all to continue reading and wanting more and more.

In the essay, Wallace makes sure at certain points to connect with the audience in a very significant way. By using the personal pronouns, “I”, “we”, “us”, we get a better insight into who Wallace is as a person, and we feel united in one community, as he includes us in everyday situations. That is probably the most important part of the essay that captivated me while reading it. In most essays, it feels very stand-offish, as the writer has been taught since they were very young to not use personal pronouns, and to keep the audience from getting involved. Sure, this is great for professional essays, but even then, it still feels strange. By including the audience with some “we” and “us”, you feel like an insider in this new community, completely included and safe. It is a subtle way to engage the reader, but it is very effective in the long run.

Going along with that, Wallace’s format of the essay is very clever towards the audience. For the first half, he talks about what is expected and puts you in a place where you want to eat the lobster and you feel entitled to because it is just food and there is nothing else to it. Then, in the second half of the essay, he surprises the whole audience by then shifting into the ethical questions in regards to cooking a lobster. He includes pathos in a way where you look at lobster eating in a whole new light, seeing a lobster as a living creature, and worrying about its environment. What starts as a lovely festival of the food turns into an endangered area where the lobsters do not feel included whatsoever in a healthy way. Reading the essay, it made me think of how we should not judge an event based on one point of view. The essay succeeds in what it does by including an alternative point of view that no one would originally think of, reading this at face value.

Incorporating various research and sources, Wallace sustains a significant ethos in his essay, backing it up with knowledge of the festival and lobsters in general. You really get the sense that he gained a substantial amount of information while attending this festival and wanted to share with the world. With a great deal of pathos, ethos, and personable language, Wallace is able to keep the readers wanting more from a traditionally dull topic. Lobsters have become a learning objective one essay at a time.

 

“The Remains of the Night”: A Whole New Medium

In Elizabeth Royte’s “The Remains of the Night”, the author discovers a problem with waste build up, like condoms, at a park and writes about her experience. She used the platform Medium.com to deliver her information, and is able to take advantage of all the website has in order to talk about this important issue.

Throughout the article, she used various pictures to help the reader into conceptualizing what she was describing and talking about in her writing. From pictures of the park, to flowers, to trash all lying around, she uses the Medium platform to give distinct visuals to the reader. One of the biggest visuals that Medium provides is the ability to have text sliding above a giant landscape picture. In a couple of instances, Royte has a large photo of the park and then has a little paragraph of text to talk about the picture. In order to continue the article, you must look at the photo and read the text that goes with it. By using words and pictures interchangeably, Royte allows for a more interactive experience. The photos are so visually stunning that it makes you feel like you are at the park with Royte. This helps her article because the reader is with her when the park is clean and fresh and also with her when it is being trashed. The reader fully gets to understand her argument through the use of this Medium function.

Another part of Medium that Royte uses in her article is the use of pictures on the side of a wall of text. Specifically, Royte uses pictures with statistics on them to show how drastic and important the issue in this article really is. For example, litter costing the US $11.5 billion every year is a staggering amount and gives an economic and financial perspective in what Royte is trying to accomplish. One could see this article as strictly focused on the pathos and emotions on the writer; however, with the use of statistics and facts, Royte legitimizes the logos of her essay and even enhances her ethos because of it. The use of the psychological study of gay men helps put faces to the sexual behaviors, as 25,000 men is a large quantity. The great part about Medium is you are able to click on the image with the statistic and enlarge it, if you wanted to get a full idea of what the image is reporting. This, once again, makes the article more interactive and allows the reader to still want to read the rest of the essay.

Medium also allows you to make a collage of various pictures in order to show depth to the topic you are discussing. Specifically, Royte puts nine pictures of trash together to show the actual proof that this is a consistent problem in parks and should be dealt with as soon as possible. Royte also includes a map of where the park is located, allowing more information and background for the reader to digest. At one point, Royte incorporates a link to a website that somebody made about the litter mob. This gives more context to the situation and gives the reader more material to look into if they wanted to investigate the topic further.

Overall, through the use of Medium as a platform, Elizabeth Royte strengthens her essay in many ways, allowing her issue to be taken in a very serious light.

 

Journalism: “Everything about Something”

Jay Rosen, author of the article “When Starting from Zero…”, gives advice to beginners of journalism who don’t know how to put their foot out the door, and need guidance in order to fulfill their future careers. His idea of knowing “everything about something” truly applies to our current group work because we like journalists, need to be experts in the areas that we are researching. When somebody wants to go into journalism, they need to look through a lot of research and figure out what is the most relevant and specific information about their topic. It is their job to deliver that to their audience in a way where they can consume the material, and trust the ethos of the author, who they believe knows a majority of what they are talking about.

With our group project, we need to know “everything about something” in order to achieve our mission statement. If we do not know everything about the various subcultures of Disney, our ethos is ruined, and we fail at communicating our goals. By knowing everything about Air Pirates, Disney cats, DisneyBounding, Dismaland, and Disney food, we are able to act as real journalists, producing material that is rich and substantial for a big audience.

Rosen also notes, “The audience knows more than you do on some subjects so be social, ask for help and correct quickly” (Rosen). Just because you know everything about something doesn’t mean you know everything about everything. You will miss something, in which your potential audience may know more about. Rosen states that that is okay. You can know the basics, but it is important to be interactive and talk to others to know the nit and gritty of what you are truly talking about. I feel like with our project, this is a very important point. While we may all be Disney lovers, we do not know the end all be all of the Disney corporation or Disney when our parents or grandparents were our age. By talking to people who lived through certain experiences or have written about events can make us better reporters and open our eyes to ideas and concepts that we had never heard of. Asking for help is perfectly okay, and as long as you correct the incorrect information in a timely manner, your journalistic career still holds in the balance.

For our project, I feel like we are already accomplishing Rosen’s first point to journalists with no big credentials: “Start a niche news service on a subject some people care a lot about” (Rosen). While we are still working on knowing everything about something, we indeed choose a subject that people care a lot about. Disney is such a controversial company, and it has its obsessive fans, who dress up in cosplay, and its cynical haters, who create works of art to criticize everything about it. By choosing a topic that will create discussion, we are already doing the right job; it is only now that we expand the knowledge that the people have, so they are better qualified in understanding what Disney is about.

 

Alibi Sound Clips

 

I listened to a very interesting podcast today which incorporated many different auditory ways to process information.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzsUJya67hQsVTQ0QXdWSFhLeUU

-In this sound clip, the narrator is interviewing teenagers a about if they remember where they were 6 weeks ago. This audible interview is formatted in a question/answer basis, and allows for further research on the topic. It is more personal than quoting about what they said through one voice only.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzsUJya67hQsdXBTS0c1SVV0eDg

-In this sound clip, the podcast uses suspenseful music to continue the mystery that is occurring. This audio feature gets the listener more interested in the topic and provides a different feeling than the narrator saying something without any music at all. It sets the tone of the piece.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzsUJya67hQsQVJibHZNcmhDTzA

-In this sound clip, the narrator is interacting with a person via phone call. This audible format is different than an interview, which is face to face. Phone calls are less personal and have a worse sound quality when listening to them. It provides an interesting perspective.

All three of these formats diversify the podcast and make it unique with its research.

Roundtable Discussion

I had a conversation with fellow students Jill, Chris, and Christine about Terms of Service, a comic about privacy, and The Oral History of March on Washington, an article about the people who participated during the event. Here is the conversation:

Jill: My initial thoughts on Terms of Service by Michael Keller and Josh Neufeld were it’s not the best way to go about explaining a topic. The comic format tries to implement other portions of media, like where the woman is seen talking on the ipad about the start of gmail, but it is not done well. It leaves me confused as to who I should be focusing on and I find myself trying to discern the surroundings of the characters more than focusing on the information itself. After further reading the comic I’ve found that the messages it’s conveying are very important. I think it’s more of a matter of getting use to the formatting of the article which at first makes it hard to understand. What I felt worked and was important was the everyday life illustrations which show people using the items mentioned and how much they could potentially affect someone’s life. Specifically on page 32 I felt the picture of the man in his room while all of his electronics were monitored helped show this.

 

Me: I agree that the Terms of Service comic about privacy can be an overwhelming way to display a topic of information, especially with the enormous amount of speech bubbles displayed on Page 39. However, I also would like to note that there are some positives to this piece. The comic is a very funny and intriguing way to inform the public on a complex issue. If this was an article, it would not hook the reader in as much. The comic’s embellished pictures, like the anti-Facebook man who says he will not “embrace [his] tech overlords” today, keep the reader entertained all the way until the end on a topic that would not immediately make them interested. The comic’s use of pictures, text, graphs, and references to technological items create a nice balance for the reader to navigate, if they can get used to the format over time.

 

Christine: I agree with Jill about the format of Terms of Service. I might not have minded reading on the subject of privacy in a regular article format. As it is, I don’t like reading comics. It’s hard for me to find them funny or retain too much information from them because I have to focus on which speech bubble belongs to which character, and try not to skip a square. The integration of other forms of technology such as the “facetime” scene and the letter to/from google was extremely confusing. The way that the artwork was done made it hard to make out what was a screen, piece of paper, or one on one conversation. The purpose of the style of the piece to, quite literally, “paint a picture of events but I feel like that could have been done in a more text or audio/video oriented format.This might have worked better for someone that is used to reading comic book format.

 

Chris: I think that Terms of Service by Michael Keller and Josh Neufeld is not a best idea. They have to change the way to explaining the topic. I usually like the comic. However, in this case, it should be change a lot. The comic was fun to read and they are talking about the social and public issue. If it is a long article, I don’t think I will read everything. This is because it is going to be really boring. G-mail carries a lot of informations. Therefore, not every informations would be true. Some of them need to be change. Nowadays, we have a social media like a facebook or twitter. These social media makes a problems. This because those social medias expose the privacy. That’s why something has to be change by some reason.

 

Christine:  The Oral History of the March on Washington piece broke up information in an interview style format. Each interviewee had one or more sections in which they provided their account of events of the march. Between every few paragraphs was a video clip of an interview with figures that were in attendance on that day. Usually, I find reading lengthy text tiresome. Even just a short break in a page with visual is enough to keep my attention, but using video really well with this piece. It also gave the story a sense of liveliness to it. It’s one thing to read about history, but to have the personal account of living history gave this piece an extra point of view.

 

Me: An Oral History of the March on Washington, which delivered intriguing insight into the time period and the people who participated, has a far more easier format than the comic. I especially liked that the article was split up into the different people who were talking about their experience, with their names being the headers followed by their quotes. By doing this, the article gives the reader many voices to the march, allowing for diversity towards the event. The article also succeeds with videos, both during the time as well as modern interviews. The article becomes more interactive through a visual/auditory perspective. We hear their voices and feel like we are with them in some way, shape, or form. I like when an article or form of media gives us a personal look through a person’s life or journey, and we saw their journey through these videos and interviews. There is always room for improvement, and the article could have been more interactive with its audience in order to grab their attention, but it’s simplicity and personal depth allow the article to shine in its own right.

 

Jill: I agree with both of you, not only was An Oral History of the March on Washington easier to read than the comic but the way in which they split the interviews and provided multiple voices really helped to provide a bigger picture on the March. Like Kyle said it could have used more to really grab the audience’s attention but the piece itself was very insightful. I enjoyed reading the thoughts of many during the event, rather than just the article be centered on one person’s view point, and then watching the video portions to get a bigger picture of what was going on. I think as a whole the article did succeed in conveying its message but there is always room for improvement.

 

Chris: The Oral History of the March on Washington, which brought the broken pieces of information to the style format for the interview. Since, I am the visual person, Terms of Service was more easier to read. They were providing the multiple people’s’ voices which was pretty helpful. They are helping out for variety of the events. By doing this, which makes the reader or listeners to easier to understand. There is going to be a lot of ways to shape a form. Media helps a lot for people to understand the article. It makes people to get an attention. This whole article is successfully conveying people to understand the message.

We all had a great time talking about the topics and the different media usage in each piece.

Wikipedia: A Conversation About Online Vandalism

Today, I had the pleasure of having an email conversation with Kayla Isley, a student in my Writing & Communications class. We talked about this article about a plastic surgeon named Otto Placik who vandalized Wikipedia to further his career. We also talked about this podcast by ReplyAll about social media mistakes. Here was the conversation we had:

Kayla: Ok, so the instance of the plastic surgeon editing the page is wrong, but he can’t be the only one to have pulled something like that, but I feel like as long as you allow people free reign over information then they’re going to skew 8t to fit their agenda.

Me: I agree that he’s most likely not the only person to have a conflict of interest on Wikipedia, as well as many other online sources. If it’s not him, it could be someone else the next day, and then as time goes on, as he lays low again, more vandalism could occur. I feel like Wikipedia handled it the best way they could, but hopefully in the future, they will be more hyperaware of anything out of the ordinary.

Kayla: I feel if Wikipedia had a program or someone like the guy from the podcast, who goes on Wikipedia every Sunday night and corrects all the “is composed of” phrases who was that hypervigilant about what’s being posted and by who then problems like vandalism would still occur but noticed less frequently.

Me: That’s a great idea. I feel like Wikipedia, while a great source of information, is sadly plagued by this big assumption that everyone is vandalizing the site every minute of every day, and that is definitely not the case. There are people, like this plastic surgeon, that corrupt Wikipedia, but there are moderators/editors working diligently trying to make sure all the information is verified and cited. Sometimes they go to high measures to lock the page for a while to control the issue. With more programs or more vigilant people, like the guy from the podcast, maybe the stereotype of Wikipedia being spammed 24/7 would dissipate a little bit.

Kayla: So overall I think we both can agree that while Wikipedia is a good source but it’s vulnerability to vandalism and corruption has stigmatized it.

Me: Agreed, which is why Wikipedia is such a controversial topic. It has its advantages and disadvantages. Maybe with more precautions, people will see how useful it truly is.

This conversation was a very insightful one, and it got us both thinking about how online users can be better prepared to deal with online errors in the future to come.

Wikipedia: It’s Debatable

Wikipedia creates a different kind of atmosphere online than a traditional encyclopedia for our generation. It is an online community for any source of information that a person could possibly want to know more about. From TV shows, to movies, to companies, to historical figures, Wikipedia is an easy access tool if one needs to look up something really quickly. Have a question about who voices this character? Wikipedia has the answer. Have a question about what year this event took place? Wikipedia is on it. It represents a collection of online entries that many people from all over have submitted and edited to be professional and as informative as possible.

There is a controversial debate going on between the uses of Wikipedia as a source as compared to an encyclopedia, and how the different displays of knowledge differ. With an encyclopedia, one gets a very formal source of information, with two or three editors who have checked all the content. However, encyclopedias are not as easily accessible as Wikipedia in this day in age. Wikipedia is an easy available source where people can have conversations and impact the Internet with different articles. However, it is so free and welcoming that anyone can edit it, which can cause misinformation all over. Yet, Wikipedia does have moderators and people in charge who make sure that a spammer’s edit is deleted.

This difference between formal and informal sources provides a confusing sense of what is real and not real in today’s social world. Wikipedia says certain facts, but other websites say other ones; it is a problem when doing relevant research for a specific topic. For my peers and I, it is best to take everything with a grain of salt, while also realizing the potential that Wikipedia has a primary source before investigating more formal ones. Wikipedia is not completely flawed, for it has a million of articles with necessary material. It is just important to realize the advantages and disadvantages and use other sources, like encyclopedias, to back up what you find.

Confident Research in Confident Idiots

David Dunning, author of “We Are All Confident Idiots”, uses his research and sources to further prove his point, allowing other perspectives to rise to the occasion as well. He talks about the Jimmy Kimmel Live! Show’s prank to those interviewed, who pride themselves on knowing everything. The ignorance of the people relates to the psychology of how people think in various situations. Throughout the article, links of sources such as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the National Financial Capability Study, and Deborah Keleman are used for easy access if the reader wants to know more information about the research Dunning made to write this article.

He includes pictures and videos in his article to have media-based articles to draw the reader in and know exactly what he is talking about. He references the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where he and his graduate student published a paper in this expertise. The fact that he published a paper on this specific topic shows that he is well informed and trustworthy to give his opinion on the topic. He uses humor and emphasis to make valid points, at one point he italicized “something” to emphasize and create a voice within the article. He also bolds certain terms and phrases to make them stand out and become more important than other words. In terms of other voices, he quotes various people in the Jimmy Kimmel segment, and he comments on their reactions and how it relates to psychology as a whole. The audience is well informed of all the sources used, as well as what to look up if they want to be interactive and learn more about the topic. Dunning encompasses a wide range of methods throughout the article, and he creates a great atmosphere for readers everywhere to embark on a research-filled literary journey.