Research Project Update

Hey everyone! If you want to check out what I'm working on for my research project, go to http://multimodalrhetoric.blogspot.com/. Most of it is still under construction, so be sure to check back later.

Live on the Coke Side of Life

I should probably explain my reasons for posting a Coca Cola advertisement. Well, here’s the story: after I finished watching the four videos due for Tuesday, I realized they all heavily emphasized global networking and connectedness…or to sum up, “we’re all in this together.” In the back of my mind, I remembered there was a song titled “We’re All in this Together.” However, when I searched for it on YouTube, all these videos popped up for High School Musical. I’ve never even seen that film before! From what I’ve heard about it though, I was reluctant to post the height of teenage sappiness on my blog. I then searched for other songs with the same title, and I found the above video. It is still super-cheesy, but 1) it is one minute in length vs. five minutes 2) how could you not laugh at the absurdity of it all? 3) I figured I could “interpret” it in ways to match this week’s discussion.

 

First of all, notice that the people in the video are surrounded by translucent bubbles. If the film-makers had added a nice purple border to those bubbles, what we’d have then is a perfect reference to Anil Dash’s talk about networking. According to Dash, because we have new tools and better networks, we have the ability to transform institutions. These “tools” include the highway, twitter, and the internet, which have served to streamline our networking process with other people.

At fifteen seconds in the Coke ad, the viewers are given a bird’s eye-view of people in their bubbles navigating the network of roadways. In the center of all these roads and “networking” is a large building, symbolizing institutions. Dash proposed, “If you have the right network, things become transparent, and you could sort of peer through the wall into an institution and think about the ways it can be changed.” However, the institution in the Coke ad is obviously very solid and not at all transparent. Directly following the image of the institution is a scene where a police officer approaches some teens and gleefully accepts the coca cola they offer him. These two scenes in combination reflect another one of Dash’s critical questions: if networking is so powerful, why aren’t (nontransparent) government officials striving more to network with us?

Suppose you saw that same scene with the police officer in real life. In your mind, would his casualness undermine his credibility or authoritative power over you? Or would you trust him more because you could better relate to him? The coke symbolizes more “casual” networking mediums such as blogs or Facebook. How many of you knew that as a politician, Barack Obama is unprecedented in his use of social networking? (Check out the article here.) And yet, in light of the Snowden leaks from this summer show, does networking really make an institution more transparent? Or is it dangerous for a government institution to be more transparent, whereas for commercial institutions, transparency is more to their advantage (as proposed by Clive Thompson)?

Okay, moving on to another analysis: at thirty-three seconds in the Coke advertisement, a massive crowd forms, and people are laughing, dancing, chugging their colas, and having a good time. The scene is very bright and sunny—it’s summertime on the beach. This part of the ad reminded me of Chris Anderson’s speech titled “How web video powers global innovation.” Again, the coke represents a networking mode, but this time, the mode is specifically web video. The conglomeration of people on the beach represents Anderson’s idea of crowd accelerated innovation. Individual innovation can be accelerated by the crowd—or millions of people watching web videos—because the crowd itself “shines light [on the idea] and fuels the desire” of the innovator. For the most part, I whole-heartedly agree with this theory of crowd accelerated innovation; a group of people collaborating together present all sorts of differing perspectives and ideas that one person can’t necessarily come up with on his own. However, as Thompson also mentioned in last week’s reading: “Several [people] pointed out that secrecy can be necessary - CEOs are often required by law to keep mum, and many creative endeavors benefit from being closed: Steve Jobs came up with a terrific iPhone precisely because he acts like an artist and doesn't consult everyone.” I think I can safely say, though, that Steve Jobs is an outlier to the trend and that isolated innovation is rare indeed.

The Coca Cola advertisement ends with the world in a coke drop and the slogan, “Live on the Coke Side of Life.” This portion of the ad speaks both to Seth Priebatsch’s “The game layer on top of the world” and Jane McGonigal’s “Gaming can make a better world.” Just as the world in the ad is immersed in the coke drop, so is our world inundated by games. According to Priebatsch, the game layer is “all about influencing behavior.” When people play games, they are influenced by certain “gaming dynamics” such as appointment, influence and status, progression, and communal discovery. Because so many people play games, these gaming dynamics could actually be used to affect our physical world. For example, McGonigal revealed three different games—“World Without Oil,” “Superstruct,” and “Evoke”—that encouraged people to solve real-world problems in a virtual setting. Obviously if the game was designed to reflect the world as we know it, solving the problems in the game would theoretically present solutions to real-world problems we face today. (I didn’t buy the majority of McGonigal’s speech—gaming “brings out the best in people,” really?—but I found her proposal at the end quite fascinating.) The Coke slogan could be revised to read, “Live on the Gaming Side of Life.” Live in a virtual world, and perhaps by doing so, you could make the actual world a better place. Does this sound like a feasible idea? Or is it just another futile attempt at utopia?

Beautiful Transparency

After reading Anne Wysocki’s article, The Sticky Embrace of Beauty, and at first being thoroughly confused at what seemed to be her shifting stance on the topic of beauty, I believe I can now safely say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” To summarize twenty-seven pages of Wysocki’s discourse about what makes an image or design beautiful, I would readily point to the afore-mentioned cliché. Or, I could sum up the main idea in Wysocki’s own words: “If we see beauty as a quality we build, rather than one we expect to discover, then we can potentially see beauty—and other aesthetic qualities like coherence or unity or balance—as shared values we can both celebrate and question” (169). In other words, beauty is subjective and not an inherent property of an object.

As part of her attempt to define beauty, Wysocki sought to understand why the Peek ad should elicit feelings of “pleasure and anger” in her.  She therefore drew upon and analyzed the theories of Robin Williams, Rudolf Arnheim, Molly Bang, and Joel Kant (to name a few) to formulate her own thesis about the association between beauty and pleasure. I don’t want to re-write the entire article; I only mention this because it would be interesting to apply some of these theories to the topic of “pleasing, effeminate discourse” described in Kathleen Jamieson’s paper, Eloquence in an Electronic Age. Jamieson stated, “Where manly discourse persuades, effeminate discourse pleases” (803). She commented on several of the perceived differences between the written and spoken discourse of men and women, and one of those perceived differences is the “ornamental” or “flowery” style common to women. Well, I think even those adjectives of “ornamental” and “flowery” insinuate something of beauty. So, what makes a woman’s speech or prose beautiful? Could we apply the same principles of imagery proposed by Wysocki to this specific area as well?

On a new tangent, Jamieson expressed her idea that the “self-disclosive, narrative, personal, ‘womanly’ style” is to the benefit of modern-day politicians (811). This very idea is also espoused (although not in terms of feminism) by Clive Thomson, who wrote a blog post titled The See-Through CEO about the importance of companies building up their reputation and boosting their revenue by being completely transparent on blogs and other online sites. He predicted, “One can imagine how the twin engines of reputation and transparency will warp every corner of life in years to come, for good and ill.”

Speaking of transparency, I usually take forever writing up a blog post for this class. However, because of the mothering instincts of my roommate, I’ve made a pinky-promise to write this in an hour, so I can dedicate the rest of my night and early morning to writing an essay due in another class. Therefore, I realize my writing is a little disjointed this time around, but feel free to start a conversation about any of the ideas I briefly mentioned! (If I had more time, it would’ve been fun to pursue some of them more in depth). Or wait…maybe that’s a sigh of relief I hear coming from you: “Yes! Not another freakishly-long post!” Haha; well, the timer just went off. Until next time.