viz.

Image Credit: The Guardian

Samuel Beckett's Play (dir. Anthony Minghella, 2000) 

This is my last Viz posting for the year, so I thought I’d be introspective, or perhaps, self-referential.  Specifically, I want to talk about podcasting pedagogy I’ve been experimenting with this semester and how it’s raised interesting questions in our classroom about the relationship between visual and auditory rhetoric.  The final assignment for our class was a podcast in which students delivered an argument on a contemporary controversy.  It was very strange for all of us to rely so heavily on voice without a piece of paper to mediate the exchange. Early twentieth-century theories of oral delivery such as those by T. Sturge Moore advocated that speakers of poetry should stand behind a curtain so that listeners could listen more attentively and W.B. Yeats suggested that his Abbey Theatre actors should be placed in barrels to train them against using distracting motions.  Not wanting quite so drastic an approach, I at least thought that a focus on the auditory would push my students to consider their words in action and more carefully focus on simplicity, organization and delivery.  

A few weeks ago I suggested that the seeming ineptness of many amateur videos indicates that most people are more skilled at textual production than at video production. William Saletan’s piece at Slate on video resumes got me thinking about this topic again. While the popularity of non-commercial videos on youtube argues that our culture is in many ways already video-literate, it is likely that the youtube community is self-selecting for video-savvy individuals. However, Heather Havrilesky’s recent review of Donald Trump’s Apprentice implies that there is a lack of awareness of a broader audience in that group, as well. Since we are near a point when video production will be as ubiquitous as text composition, it will soon become necessary for training everyone in video composition. If this is the case, I think it is likely that a huge part of the training in the rhetoric of video communication will be left to composition departments.