Hayles Reading Response

As a fourth-year college student, you are rarely asked to write about yourself. We know from early education that in grooming people to think alike for a centered, moral, and consistent workforce you must first produce a lot of like-minded people. As an education major, we're taught from our first day to dismiss any idea of what a classroom 'should' look like from our minds. We acknowledge the image below and reflect briefly that a predominantly (...exclusively) white, male, able-bodied classroom is no longer the reality - psych! Contemporary classroom may not look exclusively white but damn, they're so white. 

I really love thinking about this idea alongside Hayles' article and the ways we approach a changing field of study. Personally, I don't understand why educators, and/or the systems they occupy, are so reluctant to admit that the ways we educate now vs. then is simply different. I refuse to believe that kids are getting stupider - even though that's exactly what test results are concluding. I think the image above allows us, as readers, to do something more - to me, it allows us to evaluate the idea of productivity and why, to this day, individuality is something feared in these taught spaces. Hayles says, "After more than two decades of symptomatic reading, however, many literary scholars are not finding it a productive practice, perhaps because (like many deconstructive readings), its results have begun to seem formulaic, leading to predictable conclusions rather than compelling insights" (65). I think all these ideas overlap in some ways - teaching reading skills looks different than our ingrained image of education because our students and their needs are different. I recently did a report of education policy changes for a class last semester and through that process of actually reading laws and policy changes decade after decade, I realized that not much has changed. Language changes, quite regularly to apply to the relevant situation and classroom spaces, but the actual content of the policies do not change very much. "No Child Left Behind," the state standard testing incorporated by the Bush administration still exists, it just got a makeover and is now called the "Smarter Balance Tests." The rules are different and the funding is different but the tests themselves are still what they always were - standardized. Now they're online!  

Below, I've included a trailer to a fantastic documentary series named, America to Me. While this trailer focuses on the racial inequalities happening in diverse schools it does raise an interesting point, "We're preparing our black students less well to compete with their peers" (w.p.). I think this documentary is one way of looking at the current issue of teaching, in general, the same traditional literary cannon-esk ways to a large body of difference.  

Current education classes circulate around the ideas of teaching the skills rather than the content. To a point, this seems like the right way to go. Based on statics and test scores - students aren't reading as much or as well as they did 15 years ago. This is true, but it doesn't mean students got dumb. It means their needs, expectations, and pressures are different then they were 15 years ago and school needs to adjust themselves to fit the current students. We're taught in my own education classes that it's silly to prepare for a hypothetical class you might have - it doesn't matter because the content and the ways you teach that content will change from class to class. If teachers are taught to adjust based on the needs and realities of the studnets then I don't understand why educational systems can't follow the same fluidity. "The crucial questions are these: how to convert the increased digital reading into

increased reading ability and how to make effective bridges between digital reading
and the literacy traditionally associated with print" (62).

ePoster

I think I made a mistake. I made the decision to not to start my (e-)poster until I had a good amount of research completed for the Critical Photo Essay. At the time, I thought I shouldn’t limit myself to whatever research I had in order to make sure I was communicating the entirety of my project correctly. This was stupid—not only do I have too much of the wrong kind of research but the actual (e-)poster is not big enough or the space to communicate all the data I collected. It was too much and it made the process of starting the poster a lot harder. Getting the ‘right’ content is one thing but the other is trying to communicate that content visually. I love art and I consider myself fairly artistic so I went into this assignment feeling pretty good about my abilities in alignment and graphics. I had no idea that the process of transitioning textual information in visually accessible ways goes far beyond the techniques I learned in art class. This process asked me to extend my artistry further into the digital realm—combing all the elements in one single product—Whoa!  

I have never created an (e-)poster until now so I thought I should stick to technology I know, PowerPoint. After completing the project I wish I would have taken more time to explore other options like Adobe or something that offered more editing. Fiddling with multiple text boxes on top of each other got to be frustrating. This is an understatement—I started and deleted this poster three times before I was happy with the textures, colors, and alignment—that auto alignment was not my friend. Little things like this made this process much harder for reasons that went outside my own anxieties of writing well. I knew how I wanted my poster to look but I needed to Google every step to figure out how to actually make it happen within the program. My limited technological knowledge did, I think, hold me back because I needed to fall back on other decisions that I understood how to do in PowerPoint. I would have loved to display the bar graph in a little bit more interesting ways—but everything I tried in the program got really difficult to move around and edit so I decided to stick to a basic bar graph. If I were to do another (e-)poster I would definitely not take the technology for granted and allow myself more time to practice within it. The color wheel was my friend, I kept referencing back to it because after you start and restart a project three times you don’t really know what colors look good together—I felt a little like I was clothes shopping—unable to make decisions.  

(E-)posters are pretty cool, I have to admit. The process of making it was frustrating but I wish we could do more because they’re so good at forcing you to interpret information differently. Being concise is key, which I struggle with anyway, so this was great practice. I also think the idea of a single product demonstrating so many of the elements we’ve discussed this semester was so important. McCloud came in clutch as I drafted my sequencing of information in ways the viewer could follow instinctually. I am happy with the way my finished product turned out—would I do it this way if I could redo it? Probably not, but that’s ok. I was able to make cuts and include less in order to make the poster more readable, I came up with a color sequence that I actually like, and I didn’t fall into the trap of cheesy education graphics of kids looking just a little too happy. Overall, (e-)posters are cool and PowerPoint sucks. Onwards!  

  

McCloud 8 & 9 Reading Response

McCloud's reading this week had me like... YAS! The discussion of color is a fascinating one but what I hadn't considered was how much color is ingrained in our cultural awareness. Symbols are everywhere and that's largely in part to color. This makes sense after saying it - there are flags that represent nations, colors that hold significance in describing gender identity, and colors that symbolize a fast food joint, or your favorite superhero. Color is absolutely everywhere, McCloud though was able to step back and acknowledge the significance and meaning of color in one specific medium that's not discussed often. After reading McCloud in its entirety, I really enjoyed it. Did it make me want to start reading comics on my own for fun... no. However, I am stoked to have SOMETHING to offer in this context when I utilize it in my own classroom. McCloud described another mode of art and communication that deserves our consideration and respect - I will start doing that. 

In the discussion of color, it doesn't matter whether or not you stand under a spectrum of red, white, and blue or rainbow - it's safe to say there's a lot more to color then what meets the eye (see what I did there). Alright, I'm done.  

"The wall of ignorance that prevents so many human beings from seeing each other clearly can only be breached by communication. And communication is only effective when we understand the forms that communication can take" (198).

For example, the six-color rainbow pride flag we know well has served as a symbol to the queer community since its emergence in 1971 (w.p.), but the queer community has evolved over the past decades, leading many to question whether the pride flag still caters to those most marginalized in the community, including queer people of color and trans people.  

In an effort to accurately support all queer bodies of difference, the pride flag recently received a makeover. This is my opinion, is a pretty amazing design, thinking ahead and taking critiques of the idea into account. (The first draft added the new colors on top of the rainbow spectrum) Majority of people didn't like this because it acted as if it were replacing the significance of the gay body with people of color and tras people. This though couldn't be further from the truth - however the first draft of the new flag did prove that color, and its symbols mean a lot to people. Taking all this into account designer, Daniel Quaser, came up with the design on the left, signifying the new area of queer bodies 'added' to the spectrum.  

Moving on to film:  

I recently learned about the film Roma from a friend - she said it was one of the best films she's seen in years. I was curious to look it up and notice quickly that it was filmed in black-and-white. This shouldn't bother me, and it doesn't, but I still noticed it and took a mental note that this was somehow odd. McCloud even notes, "The differences between black-and-white and color comics are vast and profound, affecting every level of reading experience" (192). I thought this was interesting to think about in terms of contemporary art and film. We're lucky to have the technology that allows us to make these rhetorical choices - black-and-white is symbolized in film as old. To some, that means quality, because only great films were shot during this era. To others it's thought of as dull and boring -we have color now for a reason, so use it. We've seen random films make this choice for a number of different reasons. A modern film to pull off the 'symbolicness' of what black-and-white offers must be pretty good and trying to make a larger point. I just think there's something really interesting about a medium reinventing itself in a time where it's no longer necessary to exist. Films like Roma though, prove why "black and white will never be erased entirely" (192).   

The Female Body: Wysocki Reading Response

Wysocki offers a unique take on the body suggesting that its use is foundational in the history of visual text. Our attachment to our bodies and our innate fascination with others has been a source of capitalism for well..., ever. The female body, especially, has often been symbolized as a commodity of use and exchange. Wysocki's reading center's this argument to understand a couple ways the symbol of the female body is created and perpetuated through our cultural understanding of how to view and interpret bodies.

"...contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity--for visual arrangement"   (Wysocki et al., 150)

The result for women seems to be twofold. On the one hand, women are reduced to their biology and utilized as a literal prop that connects to culturally sexual acts, positionings, or disassembled 'parts' of the body. On the other hand, when women are defined it's only in terms of their reproductive capabilities.    

Wysocki does something really interesting in this conversation by acknowledging that this use of the female body, "requires acknowledging--among other cultural categories and structures with which the figure of the generalized [female] articulates--gender, gender relations, sexual orientations, the particularities of cultural practice, relations and movements of capital and property, and so on" (156).  The female body constantly belongs to someone other than herself. She goes from being someone's daughter to someone's wife, then to someone's mother. The female body is further utilized to be of use to others and the culture of the visual text does demonstrate this. We are all either potential mothers, current mothers, or failed mothers. If we cannot uphold this biological standard, we are not wholly woman. Mothers who, for whatever reason, are unable to live up to these ideals are deemed not just as ‘bad’ mothers but, more importantly, failed women. These standards of whole 'womanness' suggest that women need to be both the prostitute and the angel of the house--standards that follow the female experience throughout each phase of her life. 

Below I've inserted a video demonstrating the ways the idealized female body is viewed in contemporary culture.

"I want to argue that the body in the Peek layout has been made into form, has been departicularized: when we see this body, we are seeing a body only through a distant, universalized, formality that I have argued is well-seated in Kant's notion of aesthetic judgment and that we have inherited in much of our uncritical and uncriticized practices with and around the visual." (Wysocki et al., 167). It's true too, that there's a lot of evidence of a cultural change. I think it will continue to be interesting to see the ways mainstream culture change with movements like HeForShe, #METOO, and global outreach from the United Nations of Women, and many many more. Now, as the culture begins to change the visual text the use of bodies changes too. It's useless to ignore the ways the female body has been used and is still used today. Many people utilize this as a new platform to speak from to encourage change showing the female body as natural and strong. This isn't new of course, this has been in the motion of popular culture for decades--now it's becoming a norm to include more and more bodies of difference. Not just opening up the conversation to real women, but different types of women, color, size, age, ability, gender, etc. Unfortunately, this changing discourse of difference IS STILL between the culture of the idealized body, and it will most likely continue to be. Wysocki states, "We come to see visual composition as rhetorical, as a series of choices that have much broader consequences and articulations than visual principals [...] suggest" (173). This does suggest that the culture will influence the art of visual text and it will continue to change and disassemble as our interpretation of the body and its uses do in fact change. 

Below are more contemporary examples that use the body in more productive forward-thinking ways!

FEMEN

The image above shows the topless feminist group FEMEN. They're what journalis have flagged as "sextremists" (w.p.) whose aims are straightforward and radical for Eastern European culture. Body rhetoric is facinating here, not only does the image shoe six topless women protesting rape culture, but they purposfully use their naked bodies in public spaces like the Louvre to attract the attention they want. Their bodies are painted with words, "justice against rape" while their body stance is in unison--feet apart, firming rooted, aggressive like warriors. 

Mothercare UK

"At Mothercare, we believe all mums are beautiful and should feel proud and confident about their bodies" (w.p.). 

Self Evident Truths

"...the body outside the layout, the viewing body on which these principals are based, must also be acknowledged in its complexity" (Wysocki et al., 156).