viz. - news

Mitt Romney and the (Mormon?) Rhetoric of Philanthropy

Laura Thain — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 09:16:26 +0000

At issue from the moment Romney stuck his neck out as a Presidential hopeful, his extraordinary personal wealth has become one of the primary issues covered by various news media as we march closer to the November election. Epitomized best, perhaps, by a cleverly Photoshopped image that initially made rounds as a campaign gaff, “RMoney” has anything but hip associations—rather, it has inspired vast discussion about the rhetoric of prosperity and philanthropy in the midst of economic recession, both real and imagined.

A less-addressed topic, I think, is how LDS-sponsored sources can inform this debate as it takes place in the mainstream media. Though Romney is not the first Mormon politician to garner national attention (most recently, Jon Huntsman achieved national recognition; former Michigan governor George Romney, Terrel “Ted” Bell, and Mormon prophet Ezra Taft Benson all held influential cabinet positions in the past), he is arguably the most successful. As such, there has been a resurgence of public interest in Mormonism. The constellation of this interest and the general discussion of the “cult of prosperity” as emblematized in the Occupy protests has resurrected the age-old stereotype of Mormons as wealthy white businessmen—and Mitt Romney, the unexpected champion with the potential of either salvaging or savaging the economy.

Serious discussions of Romney’s finances go as far back in the news archive as early this year, with no little attention paid to his philanthropic contributions, which are outlined to some extent here. Most critics of this breakdown cite the LDS Church as an artificial inflator and use this to deny Romney as a legitimate philanthropist. I’d like to suggest that we consider a different angle of this kind of rhetoric. Rather than addressing where philanthropic money goes, could we not equally question the rhetorical role of philanthropy in political discourse?

I’d like to cite here the search entry for “service” on mormon.org, a website designed for non-church members investigating Mormon belief. The rhetorical focus here is not necessarily on the benefit provided to those who receive charity, but those who give it—as the article asserts,

“Jesus Christ said, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This doesn't mean we have to die to show our love for our friends. We lay down our lives every time we put someone else's needs before our own. These actions, whether great or small, let us feel the happiness of connecting with our brothers and sisters and remind us that God often allows us to be the answer to someone else’s prayers.”

The emphasis on first person pronouns—we and us—and the lack of third person pronouns create a philanthropist-oriented rhetoric—not one in which the philanthropist is repaying a tangible debt to society, but in which he is repaying an intangible spiritual debt and thus further securing his own happiness. This necessarily reorients the rhetorical situation outside of the immediate--concrete social and political dynamics--into a supernatural realm, even as the superficial rhetoric addresses the need for humanitarian aid. The less obvious implication of this, however, is the way it defines the humanitarian/philanthropist as a catalytic wedge. He is empowered to create and control change, but encouraged to do so on an individual level; thus, he satisfies his obligation to his fellow man but is not encouraged to contemplate the situations by which the imbalance is created.

In this way, comparing the private philanthropic contributions of Obama and Romney is a fruitless exercise when it is really the rhetoric of philanthropy—and I’ve quoted from informal Mormon doctrine above, but the principles are, arguably, extant in nearly every Christian denomination—that is itself the flaw. Without the power to enact systemic change, I would argue, it runs a great risk of further increasing the power discrepancy between the giver and the recipient. For me, there is no amount of philanthropy that can fully mediate wealth on either side, regardless of how it is distributed, as long as this power dynamic remains in play.

The Power of Sympathy: Perspective Shifting, Visual Argumentation, and the Gay Marriage Debate

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:16:50 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

I was delighted to hear that the Washington State Senate passed a bill Wednesday legalizing same-sex marriage in the state. The Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger has been closely following the bill’s progress for several weeks, not only liveblogging the debate but also posting numerous excellent speeches on behalf of the bill. Eli Sanders highlighted Republican Senator Cheryl Pflug’s speech as the best of the night, which she ended with the following words:

“And so I commend this bill to you today because it is part of our struggle to recognize that everybody, whether they look like us or believe like us, has an opportunity—should have an opportunity to enjoy those personal freedoms we hold dear.”

The essential argument Pflug makes here—that gay citizens should enjoy rights equal to those of heterosexuals—relies on straight individuals being brought to recognize their commonality with gays. Harvey Milk long ago made this argument when he urged gays to come out, to represent themselves publicly as gay to “destroy the lies and distortions.” More recently, the Australian “independent, grass-roots community advocacy organization” GetUp! posted an ad on YouTube on behalf of same-sex marriage in that country. This beautiful, moving ad works because its visuals work in concert with old-school persuasive tools.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

The distinguished philosopher (and originally professor of logic at Glasgow) Adam Smith briefly explains persuasion in his treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments thus:

“To approve of another man’s opinions is to adopt those opinions, and to adopt them is to approve of them. If the same arguments which convince you convince me likewise, I necessarily approve of your conviction; and if they do not, I necessarily disapprove of it.”

In other words, effective argumentation exists when two individuals share common opinions and the arguments used by one speaker are found convincing by both of them. This doesn’t quite work as the 1759 version of How to Win Friends and Influence People because Smith doesn’t explain what arguments are equally efficacious for you and your audience, but he does present a non-agonistic tool for persuasion: sympathy.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Sympathy, as Smith defines it, “may now, however, without much impropriety, be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” (5). The purpose of sympathy is to bring individuals together in mutual understanding. While we cannot literally feel the emotions of others, Smith explains that we can use our imaginations to bridge the gap:

“As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. … By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body and become in some measure him, and thence form some idea of his sensation, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.” (2)

Smith may seem to be a bit-outdated by about 250 years, but recent studies in cognitive science and social psychology offer some evidence for his views. Studies in affect like Teresa Brennan’s suggest that emotions can travel between individuals within social environments; more relevant, however, is the formulation by cognitive scientists like Alvin Goldman of “perspective shifting,” which is a state in which we “imagin[e] being in that other person’s position, and thus us[e] our imagined thoughts and feelings and decisions to determine what the other will think and feel and decide” (Coplan and Goldie xxxiii). In short, what the GetUp! ad does is to use visuals to create a moment of perspective shifting; watching the ad here will give you a sense of how this works

The ad notably puts the viewer right in the middle of a romantic comedy—there’s a meet-cute on a boat where a handsome man named Paul gives the viewer his number, and then the progress of the relationship follows all the way through fun in the sun, domestic disputes, personal tragedies, all the way to a marriage proposal. The ad beautifully subverts the Hollywood script, however, when the camera turns and reveals that the viewer has not been looking from the perspective of a straight woman, but a gay man.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

However, the ad does not deal in the extraordinary. While there are breathtaking views of riding on boats and rollercoasters, most of what is shown is extremely banal: grocery shopping, moving furniture, meeting parents, and even fights about driving directions. Yet it uses poignant images like a hand on a shoulder to invite the viewer to think about the experience of sympathizing with a partner losing his mother. These gestures taken out of any context read as truly loving, and the viewer is brought to see that this relationship, no matter the parties involved, is like any other romantic partnership.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

In 2010 the New York Times reported on a study conducted by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation “that looked at the reasons behind society's evolving tolerance for gay people. It found that the reason cited most frequently by people who reported having more favorable views—by far—was knowing someone who is gay.” By using these images, GetUp! attempts to reach out to individuals who may not know a gay or lesbian person by inviting them to place themselves in the position of a gay or lesbian individual. The building violins at the ad’s end, in which the camera’s perspective performs the critical shift, create the kairotic moment that the only words in the ad echo: “It’s time. End marriage discrimination.” Hopefully, more ads like this one will bring that time closer.

Media Sensationalism and the Crisis in Japan

ladysquires — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

(Image Credit: Time Magazine)

Following on the heels of Megan, Cate, and Elizabeth, I've been monitoring media coverage of the disaster in Japan and coming across some interesting points for debate. I found this Time cover shortly after reading an anonymous letter to Talking Points Memo by a Japanese scholar critiquing Western media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant:

From my perspective as a scholar of Japan at a major American university―one who was also in Japan when the quake hit (I left one day later than scheduled on the 13th)―I must say that the coverage was, with some exceptions, largely substandard: full of factual errors, misconceptions, and bent towards sensationalism and alarmism. It is very unfortunate that this poor coverage will probably result in many Americans having false conceptions of Japan for years to come.

The writer takes the Western media to task, citing several specific examples of inaccurate reporting over the past week, particularly the consistent portrayal of relief workers as desperate and overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation. Conversely, he or she argues that reporting within Japan, "has been largely calm, rational, informed, and critical. Some of this is naturally to avoid creating panic, but it has been able to do that because as a whole it has answered many of the questions people have and thus gained a certain level of trust. As a media scholar, I can pick this coverage apart for its problems, and of course point to information that is still not getting out there, but on the whole it is functioning as journalism should." Indeed, Japan Probe's screen caps of coverage of the same event from both the Huffington Post and the BBC reveal that U.S. coverage tends to be more sensationalist:

The letter writer acknowledges that sensationalism sells and notes that foreign journalists reporting from Japan "do not have the language capabilities to access Japanese media," but he or she also argues that

[T]he coverage is rooted in long-standing prejudices held by some Westerners against the non-West: for instance, a superiority complex that feels only the West and its media have real access to the truth, which led to a downplaying of Japanese media reports. In the worst cases, there has been simple racism, as some reporters when viewing how calm the Japanese are, seem to think the Japanese are mere robots who cannot grasp the immensity of the crisis or, as one colleague reports when a Spanish reporter interviewed her, think that the Japanese are genetically tuned to accept disaster.

...
But worst of all, the inordinate and sensationalist attention given to the reactors by American and other media has taken attention away from where it should be: on the likely nearly 20,000 people who died in the quake and tsunamis, on the nearly 400,000 homeless people, and on the immense suffering this has caused for Japan as a whole. I cannot but think that the low amounts of donations given by Americans to relief efforts is not at least partially the result of this warped coverage.

Indeed, the nuclear crisis, which at first was merely one of the many destructive consequences of the quake, now threatens to become the entire story. And while the nuclear crisis and its long-term implications for the Japanese are certainly worth attending to, the casualties that have resulted from that particular problem are so dwarfed by the death toll and economic damage caused by the initital quake that I begin to wonder why it has received such a disproportionate amount of coverage. Perhaps it is simply the fact that the quake and tsunami are over and done, while the events and the reactor are a developing story. Perhaps Westerners are simply more interested in the story because it has potential implications for us, as seen in the fact that some people in California have begun taking (entirely unneccessary) iodine tablets and the fact that this disaster has sparked huge debate about nuclear energy in the U.S. (the consequences of relying on coal and oil for energy have been pretty dire in terms of damage to the environment and cost in human lives, but nuclear energy is more mysterious and thus tends to spark more alarm).

Which brings me back to the Time cover (finally). It strikes me that the editors of the magazine are trying to thread a needle here. They are attempting to cover the nuclear crisis while treating it as part of a much larger story, but I'm not sure they are entirely successful. While the photograph of the crying woman does thankfully avoid the stereotypes described above and seems to commemorate the disaster as a whole, I cannot help but be distracted by the headline. "Japan's Meltdown" centers the nuclear power plant crisis in the mind of the viewer and thereby undermines the work done by the photograph and the line "Earthquake. Tsunami. Nuclear Disaster. Resilience."

Visual Budget

ebfrye — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:31:31 +0000

Image Credit: screenshot of Visual Budget, kickstarter.com

Visualizations are a necessary part of the way the media interprets government spending for the average viewer. Those of us who are not math whizzes, who may have trouble keeping our own accounts, find a simple graph or pie chart to be a useful aid. However, those representations often present an oversimplified view. Enter Visual Budget, a "cutting-edge data-visualization web site" that attempts to explain the nuances of government spending to the common citizen.

Apparently, even visualizing the budget can get pricey, hence the project's appearance on kickstarter.com. As much as I'm intrigued by the project's interactive features, I'm also interested in the rhetoric being used to promote the project. Here's the pitch:

One of the creators stresses the need to make the experience of the budget "cinematic." An animation director says, "It's all about storytelling." This is a striking contrast to the tendency of mainstream news media outlets to explain the budget in pared-down, "just the facts" terminology. But, I ask, does a shiny, suped-up visualization have the power to make us more informed and ultimately better citizens?

Google Earth Pedagogies: From Haiti to RHE 306

Laura T. Smith — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:41:30 +0000

Image Credit: Google Lat Long Blog

If were you watching the news in mid-January, you likely saw images like those above flashing repeatedly across your television or computer screen. Unlike the photojournalistic, street-level portraits that tend to document disasters, these aerial shots, produced through a collaboration between Google Earth and GeoEye (a satellite imaging company), have been prominent in the visual coverage of the earthquake that hit Haiti on January 12, 2010. The above images show pre- and post-quake views of the Presidential Palace (top left; top right) and downtown Port au Prince (bottom left; bottom right), and were created using the timeline tool in Google Earth.

I’ve been interested in the prominent role that mapping and satellite-produced imagery has played in the coverage and documentation of the Haiti earthquake, partly for its own sake, and partly because I’m planning a Google Earth-based collaborative writing activity for my Rhetoric and Writing class this spring.

In the earthquake coverage, the intimate, affect-laden portrait—framed by the human eye, scaled to the human story—has remained prominent, of course, but has been augmented by this second visual approach, which has, itself, received significant news coverage. These visuals do not function the same way photojournalistic visuals function; they do not focus on the human situation; they do not construct an explicitly emotional appeal.

These sophisticated, accurate maps of damage have clearly aided rescue and relief efforts. Yet I’ve been wondering about the analytical impulses behind mapping and its effects—especially given the debates during the past few weeks about Haiti’s leadership, its autonomy, about who’s in control of relief efforts.

The history of mapping is entangled with the history of imperial expansion, shot through with impulses toward geographical control. In what ways do these contemporary mapping technologies address or confront the imperial history of map-making? While much of the mapping of Haiti has been accomplished through satellite imaging, Haiti has also been mapped collaboratively, by countless individuals with diverse motivations. (Google’s Haiti Map Maker project encourages such collaborative, local mapping.) Similarly, Wikipedia’s “Haiti” page is currently ranked in 1885th place among the most-edited pages in the last 30 days, a number that, while seemingly high, in fact indicates an extraordinarily high volume of recent edits. So, what effect does crowd-sourcing have on the implications of mapping? Is crowd-sourced mapping anti-imperialist mapping?

As I noted earlier, I’ve been considering all these questions about mapping and its implications because I’m in the process of planning a Google Earth-based collaborative writing activity with Geo-Everything’s Caroline Wigginton. We’ll be using Google Earth technologies to explore issues raised by Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. The activity, which will involve both of our RHE 306 classes, will take place in early April. In preparation for this collaboration, I’ll be using this blog throughout the spring semester to discuss Google Earth, its applications for the literature, rhetoric, and composition classroom, and, in particular, the potential it creates for collaborative writing.

As I’ve begun to think through the possibilities, I’ve come up with a few initial questions, which I’ll address (and likely add to) in the coming weeks:

For the purpose of the writing classroom, what are differences between Google Earth and Google Maps?
What are their different critical capacities? How do they ask students to conceptualize information differently?
What are their different collaborative capabilities? Is Google Earth inherently more collaborative? How can this capacity be used in the writing classroom?
How might some of the conceptual and technological features of Google Earth (the “fly to” function, the moveable timeline, the placing of local sites in the context of a globe) enable writing and thinking exercises that are different than those possible in Google Maps?

Shakespeare Portrait Unveiled

timturner — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 17:48:06 +0000

There is a lot of noise in the press today about the unveiling of a portrait that is now believed to be of William Shakespeare (see here, here, here, here, or here). The painting is believed to be the original source for the only two surviving likenesses of Shakespeare from his era, both of which were produced in the decade after his death. This painting, inherited by the descendants of the playwright's patron, is believed to have been painted in Shakespeare's lifetime.
Image credit: AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis

There is no definitive proof to show that the painting is unquestionably of Shakespeare. The evidence includes its association with the family of Shakespeare's patron, its supposed resemblance to existing portraits, and the results of "scientific testing" and the nebulous testimony of "experts" who are quoted as being "90% certain" that this is a portrait of Shakespeare. The articles also rely heavily on the ethos of Stanley Wells, noted Shakespearean scholar and chair of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. (But as one of the commentators on the NYT blog entry notes, Wells is responsible for the inclusion of Edward III in the Oxford Shakespeare, a decision that has been met with considerable skepticism among Shakespeare scholars.)

I wouldn't exactly say that I'm skeptical of the claim that this is a portrait of Shakespeare. But I am interested in the extent to which the reception of the portrait is shaped by everyone's apparent desire for this to be a portrait of Shakespeare. In the absence of definitive proof either way, everyone seems to have decided that it's simply more exciting to assume that it is than to be circumspect about whether it could be. Further, it's interesting to consider how the particular details of this story brings to life many of the fantasies of Shakespeare biography and criticism. The longstanding desire to discover Shakespeare's "lost" works--an event that would establish the critic as a celebrity of some standing among Shakespeareans--is often imagined as peeling an old playtext off the back of an abandoned painting in a dusty antique shop. In this case, life imitates art (or fantasy).

UPDATE: Today there is a wonderful little item on the painting in the NYT, with the following question:

We somehow want the young Shakespeare to look like Joseph Fiennes, fiery and slashing. But what if he looked like Ricky Gervais? Would the plays mean less to us?

“And yet, every photograph cries out for an interpretation …”

John Jones — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 05:32:17 +0000

At his New York Times blog, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has posted interviews with the head photo editors of the AP, Reuters, and AFP on the photographic record of the Bush administration. Morris asked each interviewee “to pick the photographs of the president that they believe captured the character of the man and of his administration” and then discussed the photos with them along with the reasons each chose the photos they did.

With Standard Operating Procedure Morris has shown an acute interest in understanding the different ways in which the image is used to create reality, along with the ways in which that reality can be interrogated. In these interviews, Morris and each interviewee seem to share a different approach to how these images should be interpreted and what they mean. Although the discussions can sometimes be repetitive, they were a reminder to me of how much my judgments about our last president were based on these photo-ops.

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Why do you like the picture so much?

VINCENT AMALVY: We don’t understand what is going on. Why does the shadow appear? I suppose it’s a shadow of somebody else beyond the corner. But the picture is only of two guys walking. It’s a profile of George Bush and Barack Obama. And he’s near the Rose Garden of the White House. And so in the back is a shadow of somebody who says, “Bye-bye.” And it is looking like a joke, but it is amazing.

via Word Presser

Yes we can/no we can't

mkhaupt — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:57:22 +0000

By now, you've probably seen the moving and (I assume) influential video by the Black-Eyed Peas' Will.i.am "Yes We Can" video in support of Barack Obama, which sets Obama's New Hampshire primary speech to a stripped-down tune, the words voiced by a coterie of A- and B-list celebrities:

While some might argue that seeing/hearing Scarlett Johannson sing Obama's words might dilute their power, the video certainly helped determine where my vote, once belonging to John Edwards, would go. I had not previously heard Obama's speech, and hearing his indirect (yet rhetorically powerful) reference to Martin Luther King, Jr., sung by John Legend certainly caught my attention.

Equally interesting is the "spoof" video (one among many, I am sure), which adopts many of the same techniques, casting "real" people in the celebrities' roles and portraying their dismay at John McCain's pro-war rhetoric. The producers, "Election 08," claim that "earnest people reacting to a candidate is the future of music video":

House Bill 282: No Fat Chicks?

mkhaupt — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:17:24 +0000

Sandy Szwarc over at Junkfood Science reports on the controversial bill on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives. If it had been passed into law, HB 282 would have prohibited restaurants from serving obese customers. According to Szwarc, customers suspected of obesity would be required to weigh in at the door of their local dining establishment; those with a BMI over 30 will be turned away.

Szwarc, a RN with a staggering "introduction" page, doesn't really distinguish herself in her analysis of the bill; others have discussed it elsewhere. What is truly disturbing about this blog author's particular breakdown is her choice of images. Commenters on other blogs have likened this potential law as a 21st century reiteration of Jim Crow laws, but I'm not sure this is apt, nor am I convinced that this is responsible use of imagery to make a point.

Is it ethical or even good argumentation to invoke imagery from the era of segregation in this case, thereby forcing an equivalence between fat-hatred (via the rhetoric of an "obesity epidemic") and our nation's complicated and troubled history of slavery, segregation, and institutionalized racism that still lurks in our most hallowed halls?

Yes, it is wrong to discriminate against fat people, and it is wrong to automatically make the leap that fat people are fat because of gluttony and legislate against them as a result. But are fat people really in the same category as a race of people forcibly removed from their countries of origin, forced to work as slaves for generations, victims of rape and murder, and so on? I think not.

Elections and Visual Conventions

Brett Ommen — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 21:23:21 +0000

The Iowa Caucuses have come and gone, and as we prepare for New Hampshire and the remainder, we have some time to reflect on the visual dynamics of television news coverage of elections. Red and Blue states once had their debut to a national audience, and perhaps we’re on the threshold of a new visual convention.

BEHOLD ANDERSON COOPER’S MAGICAL FLOATING PIE CHART!

Cooper was terribly excited about his 3-D pie chart prior to the coverage, as evidenced by his blog earlier that day . But his excitement was certainly tempered after he gave the chart a whirl. The technology relies on Cooper holding a board flat so that the pie chart can be inserted above it. When Cooper failed to keep the board flat or attempted to move around, the pie chart would dip and bob wildly on screen, obscuring talking heads and causing a general threat to CNN’s punditry. I never saw Cooper pick it up again, and had to chase down a screen grab from the fine folks at Inside Cable.

One could use this as a nice illustration of the problematic of new media. Does rendering a pie chart in 3-D so that Cooper can carry it around the set make it something more than a pie chart? And what does it do to CNN’s other pie charts? In the end, it was difficult to read and wholly deficient to its old media counterpart. Even if Cooper perfects his pie chart toting skills, it’s still just a pie chart. From what I saw, CNN was really pushing the visual information envelope Thursday night, much more than Fox or MSNBC. In addition to rogue pie charts, CNN added a little battery-charger like image below the number for percentage of precincts reporting. Fox and MSNBC, luddites that they are, relied merely on the number. CNN was also coming under fire in the blogosphere for leaving Ron Paul off their Republican pie chart. On both blue and red pie charts, CNN placed the top 4 candidates. CNN had room for Bill Richardson’s scant 2% on the Democratic chart, but no room for Ron Paul’s 10% or Giuliani’s 4%. I didn’t see how the other news networks excluded or included candidates, but that’s just because I was hoping to catch Anderson Cooper wield his pie chart once more.

Video of Cooper and the pie chart.

Making a public argument with the Trevi Fountain

erinhurt — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:26:29 +0000

In my rhetoric course, I ask students to find and bring in examples of protests. This week, one of my students brought in a news story about a man (Graziano Cecchini) who poured red dye into the Trevi fountain in Italy.
According to The Guardian , "Police found leaflets near the fountain signed by a rightwing group claiming responsibility for the act. The leaflets said the red paint was a protest at the cost of organising the Rome Film Festival and symbolically referred to the event's red carpet."

The image Cecchini creates is striking - pictures of it abound on the internet in spite of the fact that Italian authorities had the paint and fountain cleaned up in a matter of hours. I find Cecchini's protest to be effective in terms of garnered publicity and awareness, but find that it drops the ball in terms of connecting viewers with his actual issues about the Film Festival. But, as we discussed in class, protests whose aim is first and foremost publicity often aren't necessarily concerned with making specific points but rather raising awareness in a more general kind of way. I'm not sure if I find this to be true most of the time, but it does seem to be the case with Cecchini's particular protest - and it works.

Facebook response to the Virginia Tech tragedy

John Jones — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 23:09:04 +0000

Following up on my post from yesterday, where I pointed out that Facebook originated as a way to display and comment on photos, Facebook has been a nexus of information about victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. The descriptions of 7 of the 15 victims listed on this page on NPR’s website contain references to Facebook memorial pages or have pictures that were acquired from Facebook accounts.

Facebook users have also generated a number of online memorials. Consider these images that I grabbed from the “Longhorns Commemorating the Virginia Tech Shooting” (requires login) group’s page:

source: Facebook

Homepage for the Facebook group “Longhorns Commemorating
the Virginia Tech Shooting”

source: Facebook

All images for the Facebook group “Longhorns Commemorating
the Virginia Tech Shooting”

It is interesting that, along with commemorative images, group members included a photo of the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, and an image of the police storming one of the buildings on campus. While on the one hand the use of Facebook to post visual responses to the tragedy—in this case, a number of images associating the VT logo and the University of Texas logo—as well as comments associated with those visuals functions simply as remembrance, on the other, the images that users have chosen indicate a complicated response to the tragedy. Consider how out of place Seung-Hui’s image would be at a funeral for one of the victims, or a memorial service.

I think there are at least two possible reasons why these images were posted in this way. First, they are informative. The culture of Facebook is also the culture of the Internet, and one purpose of these memorial sites, like websites in general, is to provide information—about the victims, about memorial services, and about the shooter. Second, since commenting on images is a primary activity of Facebook users, I believe that once the shock of the event has worn off a bit, these images will be a place for people to post comments—reactions to the tragedy—just as the Facebook and MySpace pages of the victims will be ways for for friends and family to memorialize them.

NASA in Second Life

John Jones — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:20:42 +0000

According to this story from Wired, NASA has developed a workgroup devoted to providing open source solutions to the organization’s programming needs. The project is called “CosmosCode,” and what I find most interesting about it is that the meetings that led to its creation were held in Second Life. Also interesting is the fact that the group meeting on NASA’s island were not all experts, but often featured anything from doctoral students and retirees.

Malcolm Gladwell: respected citizen

Malcolm Gladwell: scary criminal

Although there is no information in the article about the avatars the committee used, I don’t think it is trivial that the nexus of these ideas—open source, loosening of traditional disciplinary restrictions—is an online environment where people can depict themselves in any fashion that they choose.

I was rereading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink over the weekend, and I happened to glance at the acknowledgements. Somehow I missed them in my first read through—either because I typically skip acknowledgements, or because Gladwell placed them at the end of the book. In them he points out how a change in his hairstyle prompted a slew of changes in the way people reacted to him. After trading in his conservative haircut for a wild fro, he began to receive traffic tickets and on one occasion he was stopped by police officers in pursuit of a criminal who resembled him in no way except for the similarity of their pompadours. I’m not sure that this reaction has made its way to environments like Second Life. I’m sure that people in that environment respond to each other based on their chosen appearance, but the very acknowledgement of the fact that that appearance is chosen must affect those reactions. Knowing this, it seems utterly natural to me that NASA’s foray into openness and would be conducted in such an environment.

Baudrillard dies at 77

John Jones — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:27:45 +0000

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard died this week. As this obituary from the BBC notes, Baudrillard was well known for his post-modernist theory and controversial statements.

His work is important to visual studies for his theory of the spectacle, which, the article points out, he argued “is crucial in creating our view of events--things do not happen if they are not seen.” You can read his article “Simulacra and Simulations” by following this link, which is referenced through the site’s bibliography. Or, if you are just interested in how his work relates to The Matrix, you can read this Wikipedia article.

Ways of looking at a bird

John Jones — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:29:17 +0000

Although this story has been in the news a while, I thought it was worth comment because of the recent visual response that has been generated on the internet.

source: Chasing Cacti

source: flickr, by: kdenbley

source: Chasing Cacti

source: flickr, by: xjohnpaulx

source: flickr, by: MagicSafire.com

First, a reminder of what happened (thanks to Wikipedia for the information): on Jan. 31, 2007, some members of the the Boston police force interpreted some electronic, guerrilla marketing devices for the movie Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters as bombs. The city closed down bridges and shut down the river to boat traffic. In the ensuing fallout, video artists Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens were arrested and the president of Adult Swim resigned over the incident.

Most reporting has followed the lead of Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, who called the incident “outrageous” and attributed it to “corporate greed.” In the Wall Street Journal, Kelly O'Keefe, director of executive education at the Virginia Commonwealth University Adcenter, called the campaign “irrational,” “inexcusable,” and a “significant blunder.” But not many in the mainstream news have pointed out that the real problem was that officials in Boston couldn’t tell the difference between a bomb and a Lite Brite. I’m not saying we should disparage the good people of Boston—they had a strong motivation to cover their asses in this case—but attributing the problem to the makers of the devices seems a tad ridiculous.

Although there is much that could be said about Berdovsky and Stevens’s news conference where they failed to take the situation seriously, I would like to focus to online reactions to the way the incident was reported. An overwhelming number of flickr photos tagged aquateenhungerforce fall into three major categories: images of jokes associating the show or its characters with bombs (the eponymous example is the “ATHF is the bomb” t-shirt), images that show people posing with the devices, images that show the details of the devices’ design, and images that show the devices in public spaces.

While the first two types are examples of individuals snubbing their noses at the authorities who dubbed these devices “bombs,” the effect of the latter two types—those that show the design or depict them hanging in public—is to mock the notion that they could ever have been interpreted as bombs in the first place. Looking at the photos shows that they are clearly not dangerous, nor are they placed like bombs (they are not hidden). The emergence of this argument is even more striking when you realize that the purpose for posting most of the photos was often to either show that the individual who took the photo “found” a device (after the media uproar, they were selling on eBay in the low four-figures) or to merely illustrate how the devices work. The lesson: images make unintended arguments.