Some thoughts on Professor Henderson's visit...

I realize this happened a while ago, but I never posted about it. So here we go.

I like Professor Henderson. I have her for another class this semester, and she is one passionate woman. You can just tell by the way that she teaches about rhetoric and writing that she absolutely loves this stuff. While her short presentation didn't exactly help me solidify the definition of writing studies, it certainly helped me to realize the work and progress that is happening in the field.

One thing that has been on my mind since her visit is what she said about writing for social change. Like I said, I'm in another one of her classes, so I've been hearing a lot about the writing for social change course she is teaching next semester, as well as the conference of the same name. Also on my mind is the node I have been researching, the digital turn. I have been thinking about how digital communication has increased the amount of writing for social change. We have moved past the simple commercials that ask for you to help needy children and whatnot, and have moved to an age where anybody can type a letter or make a video that the whole world can see. Think about the Kony 2012 video. Whether or not you agree with the message of that video or campaign, you have to admit that it is pretty impressive how the video has spread throughout the world. It got millions upon millions of views in the first few days after it was posted... and now hundreds of millions of people have seen it.

Exploring the use of rhetoric used in this video, and the way that digital technologies were used is part of writing studies. A very small part of it. Seems like there's a lot more to learn in the writing studies field.

So I missed a couple months...

Thought I'd show my face again. The last time I posted on here was for the ethnography project. I thought I would post a few thoughts on that.

I mentioned this in class (but didn't include it in my presentation because it didn't fit), but I found it very interesting that the fact that my friend (a nobody) suddenly became somebody important just because we had a camera and a boom mic on him. I have some conflicted feelings about this. On one hand, I felt that it was great to get some of the reactions of people to what they thought was a movie star. That's what Sundance is to a lot of people... going somewhere cool and seeing movie stars. They were looking for cameras, microphones, and big groups. Those are the signs of a movie star.

On the other hand, I felt like it kind of made my impression of Sundance less accurate. Had I just gone to silently observe, I would have noticed many different things, and may not have even realized that people gravitate towards cameras and groups. It's almost as if I went into this place and made it what I wanted it to be. Of course, that wasn't my intention, but I can see how this could present the problem of a lack of authenticity. My report on "what Sundance is like" was more like a report on "what I made Sundance to be like..." You know what I'm saying here?

So in the end, I just kind of felt weird that I was trying to discover what made Sundance a "place", but in the process was altering it to become something that it may not exactly be.

Sundance

I decided to kill two birds with one stone when it came to my Sundance research. Me and some friends were participating in a 24 hour film festival, and I thought it would be a good idea to set the film in Park City during the festival. The plot of our short film involved an obsessed Robert Downey Jr. fan wandering the streets looking for him. What we captured on film was interesting, so I decided to use some of it for this class.

What we found was a mass of people who were equally obsessed with meeting a movie star as was our fictional character. The fact that our actor had a camera and boom mic following him created quite a bit of excitement for those that we passed. People stopped and stared. They asked if this guy was famous. They took pictures. They talked to us. 

It was just really interesting to see how people changed when they saw an ordinary guy being followed by a camera crew.

I may go up again and film more, but I feel like a lot of the footage we captured was very telling and could be used. Maybe I'll even share the short film that we created. It's kind of stupid, but it really fits in with this assignment.

OK...

I'm not going to lie and say that I understood either of the readings we were assigned. I attribute it to a few things:

1 - I know nothing about this field of study. Nothing. No background or anything.
2 - The semester just started and I'm still getting back into school mode.
3 - I don't like scholarly articles.

So, I don't really have anything to say about them. I did enjoy reading about the "Keep Austin Weird" campaign, but that was purely out of pleasure. Sensual, even.

Response to Auge

I'm not very familiar with the concept of place vs. non-place, but I will attempt to respond to it. We talked in class about airport being the ultimate non-place. I agree with this in some ways, but disagree in others. Again, my unfamiliarity with the concept may limit the relevancy of my response, but since it's the first week of class, I'm not too worried about it.

I used to work a job that made me travel all around the U.S. We would do audio/visual for different companies everywhere from San Francisco to New York City. I saw a lot of airports and hotels during this time in my life. One thing I noticed is that a lot of airports are trying to establish an identity that matches the city or state in which they belong to. Take SLC for example: In recent years I have noticed an increase in historical and artistic displays that in some way represent Utah. The same goes for other airports I have visited.

On the other hand, many of the hotels I stayed in didn't have much of an identity at all. Therefore, I would say that hotels are the ultimate non-place. Hotel after hotel was the same exact place to me. Bed, TV, bathroom, mini-bar. Nothing creating a unique identity. The one exception I can think of was the Gaylord Texan resort in Dallas. But what do you expect from a resort in Texas called the Texan?

Hopefully this gets at the point at least a little bit.