Week 7: Social Experiences/Photo Manipulation

The first thing Alexander and Rhodes bring up in Chapter 3 of On Multimodality:  New Media in Composition Studies is the popularity of media in the modern world that allows for audience participation.  Alexander and Rhodes write, "One of the key rhetorical affordances of new media in general is the capacity for active writerly participation in complex public spheres" (105).  Everything today seems to be a social activity.  It used to be that college students could take advantage of Facebook and keep up with their friends from high school, post updates about their college experience, and catch up with family members, but social media has exploded to include people of all ages (young children, students, adults, seniors, etc.) in a number of different formats. 

Facebook is still available and is widely used, but we now have other social media outlets available like Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and more.  Blogs and vlogs make it easy for writers and video makers to get their work out in the open for others to view, critique, enjoy, comment on, etc.  Writing and sharing multimodal projects is now such a social experience; we can see what other people are writing and creating and can make our own interpretations, perceptions, and feelings about the particular piece.  Through the use of these apps and the Internet, we can then let the original creator of the post or video or article know how we felt about the finished product.

An example of this social process:
I was going to go with some members of my cohort to see feminist writer and professor Roxane Gay speak at the University of Michigan last week in Ann Arbor.  We all made plans to meet up and plans for travel via technology.  It was also through technology that we found out the event was canceled (on the University of Michigan website).  We then used Twitter to see if Roxane Gay had written any posts about canceling her reading.  She had, and through this, we were able to find out she was sick and she even provided the nature of her ailment (a throat infection).  We were also able to tag her in a tweet that expressed sadness about the canceled event.  She then tweeted us back to let us know she would reschedule. 

Since we couldn't see Roxane Gay, we went to the Toledo Museum of Art.

New media allows for "active writerly participation."  We are able to communicate with people we never would have been able to without the use of technology.  We are able to read the posts of people in other countries.  We are able to communicate and talk with people across the world quickly and efficiently.

This concept is carried throughout the rest of the Alexander and Rhodes text, but I especially appreciated their discussion about photo manipulation.  As an amateur photographer, I have an interest in taking my own photos and viewing the work of other photographers and artists.  I found the section in Chapter 3 about the "situationist spectacle" and the photos that followed as examples to be very interesting.  The photos are wonderful tools to get students thinking and analyzing in new ways; the photos put faces of one gender on bodies of another gender.  The tensions that result are interesting, as the text suggests; some viewers find the photo manipulations funny and some find them disturbing.  Either way, the photos contribute to a different way of thinking about people, about gender, and about using media to create tensions and new meaning.  As Alexander and Rhodes mention about the photos of world leaders kissing each other mentioned previously in the chapter, "the pictures provide ample opportunity not only for shock but surely also for critique and analysis" (110).

Getting people to think about images in these new and exciting ways was the aim of the Dada and Surrealist movements, as I've discussed in previous posts.  I always find myself bringing up some of these works of art, images, and photographs in my classroom as ways to get students thinking critically about what they see, read, and experience.  Since we have a visual analysis unit coming up in the GSW course I teach, these images could be helpful to bring in as tools to get students to offer critique and analysis.

As Alexander and Rhodes write, "Photo manipulation becomes more than invention, a step toward the composed text, but a form of communication in its own right - one that allows us (and our students) to intervene in important and pressing public discussions" (109).

This popular painting, The Treachery of Images by Rene Magritte, is a favorite of mine to share with my classes.  The image is of a pipe, but the text says "this is not a pipe."  If it's not a pipe, then what is the meaning of the painting?  Photo source:  wikiart.org

 

This work of art, called Fountain by Marcel Duchamp, is a social commentary surrounding the world of art in 1917 when the piece was created.  I also enjoy showing this to my students and asking them to analyze the image.  Photo source:  tate.org.uk