I’m very happy to be done with grad school. The professional environment, even when still centered on academe, is a much better fit for me. But every once in a while, strange to say, I miss it.

Usually, this strange nostalgia is centered around some sort of interesting research question. Tonight, it happens to be digital storytelling. One of my coworkers sent me a link to Bill Gates’ Facebook profile. Here’s the thing: this is getting to be a genre. There’s Austenbook, which retells Pride and Prejudice, or the Passion of the Christ, which came out right before Easter. And on Twitter, there’s the fictional adventures of Othar (a character from the ever-excellent Girl Genius), or @publicdomain, which just finished tweeting the entire text of Moby Dick, or @manyvoices, a collaborative storytelling effort from middle school students nationwide, started by Maryland teacher @mrmayo (his classes have since moved on to other digital writing and storytelling efforts).

At this point, of course, my inner lit major is bemoaning the sad state of literature in our day and age. The rhetor, however, is fascinated. What is the barest form a story can take? These forms, apparently. Plot, after all, is little more than a set of people and events. Austenbook may not be the most interesting read in the world, but it’s still the story.

Or is it? Does it stand alone without the reader already knowing the context? I mean, in reality, anyone’s facebook profile is functionally a story. Mine certainly tells a distilled version of my life over the last few weeks–a bridal shower for a friend, a baby shower for another, Star Trek, transitioning into roommatelessness. My twitter feed, interestingly, tells a slightly different story–a trip to the dentist, a phone interview (I really have no idea why they’re so different, which, of course, only adds to my personal fascination).

Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that nobody ever actually reads either a facebook profile or twitter feed as a story. Your status update is just one among many, and while one person’s may be more intriguing than another person’s updates, Facebook and Twitter are less like hearing the story of one’s life and more like reading a single sentence off each page in a book.

So: why do people force stories into tools that really can’t support them?

Perhaps more frightening: how much context do people create for the status updates they receive on their feeds?

rhetoric facebook, storytelling, twitter

It occurs to me that I should probably mention that I was interviewed for Beyond Words, a blog for professional writers, editors, and designers. The interview went up about a week ago. Featured in this interview: a really goofy picture of me eating sushi.

rhetoric me, work

SciFi's new logo

Apparently, SciFi has been trying to rebrand itself. Now, I admit, I don’t watch SciFi at all (or TV, really), so I have no idea if this has been necessary. But I will say this; the logo doesn’t look particularly usable across platforms. Maybe they don’t care about letterheads or business cards, or maybe they’ve got a flattened, monochromatic version for that. I am kind of intrigued by the lights and shadows–it reminds me of those pictures of dawn from outer space, but I have a hard time seeing what they’ve presented here as actually usable. An effective logo is a relatively small graphical representation of the business entity. The company is supposed to be able to splash it everywhere as a sort of placeholder for its corporate info; the consumer should be able to look at it and understand, if only subconsciously, who the company is and what it does. I think the only way this logo works as a logo is as the big block letters alone–but then you miss a lot of the symbolism with the lights and shadows–but with those in, this is too big to use as a logo. Sorry, Syfy, your old logo was better.

As for the name, I’m reminded of a few years ago when Beaner’s, the local coffee chain, wanted to expand and discovered that its name is actually a racist term in California for Mexicans. (I don’t think anyone I talked to had ever heard of this before.) This is a good reason to change the name of a franchise. Since the logo has always been a big “B,” Beaner’s decided to play off that, and renamed itself “Biggby’s.”

There was a public outcry, of course. People don’t like change. We in Michigan were especially frustrated, as most of us had never even heard the term “Beaners” outside the context of coffee. Personally, though, my biggest objection wasn’t that they changed the name–it was that they changed it to something without meaning. The coffee shop hadn’t been founded by a guy named Biggby or anything. Why didn’t they just change it to Big B’s? Was that name already taken? Why use the homonym?

That’s the heart of my problem with Syfy. I understand that they’re moving away from solely broadcasting science fiction shows, but Syfy as a word either says the exact same thing as “Sci Fi” (i.e. “We do science fiction!”), or it says nothing at all. And to a lot of actual fans of the old Sci Fi, I think what the new name conveys is this: “We are a horrible parody of what we used to be.”

rhetoric branding

Dear Churches of America,

Dear Body of the Living Christ,

My brothers and sisters,

Change has come to America, and we the church had very little to do with it.

Read more…

politics, rhetoric, society christianity, politics, religion, rhetoric

I just saw a Facebook ad for “custom term papers” (not linked, but you can find 212,000 results by googling that term). Basically, you hand them your research and they churn out an actual report. And they’ll even write your Master’s thesis for you!

My goodness, people. This is why writing centers and editors exist. Let me give anyone who wants to use a site like that a hint: academic writing is about clarity and organization. If you can explain your research to these people, you can save yourself $20/page and write minimally your own first draft. I won’t deny the need for corporate professional writers… but it strikes me as unethical to pay someone for a paper that you’ll then get graded on. It’s called “credit where credit is due.” Seriously. Learn it before you enter the corporate world.

rhetoric, society editing, writing

Source: xkcd.com

fun, rhetoric grad school, literary criticism, web comics, xkcd

Sally pointed out this blog, which features strange maps and their function. I must admit I find it fascinating. This map, in particular, is a startling reminder that reality differs greatly from our perceptions thereof; this map, on the other hand, fills me with empathy for the designers. I’m actually working on a similar map for a conference program at the moment, so I can honestly say, given the design problem (too much text, too little room), the designers could have done worse.

fun, rhetoric design, maps, rhetoric

So… apparently they’re making a print volume of Wikipedia now?

I’m actually kind of torn on how I should feel about this. On the one hand, this almost completely contradicts everything that makes Wikipedia what it is: a triumph of collective intelligence–a living, very searchable document. You can’t put something like that into a book. You can’t put hypertext into print, nor can the general population collaboratively edit the printed word (unless they’re publishing it on Kindle). It is a useful document precisely because it isn’t printed.

On the other hand, a printed version would be great for archival purposes. I’ve wondered what a hypothetical alien archaeologist would say about our generation; we’re leaving increasingly fewer traces of individualism. Even my own hypothetical grandchildren may or may not get to see photographs from years of my life; it simply depends on the state of technology. Maybe .jpgs will no longer be valid file extensions in fifty years. Guess what: there went the last three years of my life, if I never got them printed. So an archive strikes me as an incredibly useful tool for future historians.

Regardless, though, who do they actually expect to *use* this?

rhetoric books, wikipedia

Larry Norman, Christian rock legend, passed away this morning.  For those who don’t know who he was, in many ways he did for Christian music what Elvis did for music in general. I can’t even find the words for a tribute appropriate to his level of impact.

Well done, you good and faithful servant. Can’t wait to meet you in Heaven.

rhetoric christianity, music

I refer you to this piece.

I actually *wouldn’t* take that bet–in short, the bet is that video games will never be a significant form of cultural discourse. In many ways, I agree with him that video games require too much of an investment. A game like MYST takes several hours to play, but its story can be summarized in about thirty seconds. Additionally, as long as libraries exist, books and a limited selection of movies will always be free, but video games will likely always come at a cost (unless you have a friend willing to loan you a system and games, as I do). So, yes, by virtue of investment of time involved, I agree: there’s a barrier to cultural relevancy.

After this point, the writer’s argument rapidly falls apart. To wit (emphasis mine):

The mode of expression in a video game is the interactive system. The simplest game would contain one system. Pong, for instance, is born out of the interplay of three systems: player input moves the paddles up and down; the ball bounces back and forth according to a simple physics simulation; a score increments based on the ball leaving one or the other side of the screen. So, you move your paddles to affect the ball, which affects the score. Fast forward to a popular contemporary game like Grand Theft Auto 3, Halo, or The Sims. The number of systems in constant interplay is countless. One must be systems-literate enough to process the outputs and required inputs of these webs of interactivity to gain any benefit from the experience. Compared to film, television and books, which all use plain talk and linear plot to express their meaning, video games speak to the audience in a completely different language.

Uhm, hello? As I have a degree in literature, I must disagree with that statement. Point: William Faulkner. Just as there is such thing as a reading level, so is there such a thing as a video game literacy level. Take DDR or Guitar Hero. Their interfaces are definitively NOT easy, but they operate on several modes–beginner, intermediate, advanced, etc. Just as you don’t read a baby Joyce, but rather Richard Scarry, so also you don’t start a new player on the hardest song of the game, but the easiest. Games are designed with a learning curve in mind. Even linear games, like RPGs, start the player off gently with easy battles or puzzles. Pong may be a great game for beginners just trying to grasp basic gaming concepts, but the player will want to move on from that eventually, just as most people move on from Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Moving on:

Film and novels never had to overcome the stigma of starting out as children’s distractions. They may not always have been respected artforms, but they were at least always seen as entertainment, if low-brow, aimed at adults.

What? Socrates, arguably the father of Western thought, hated the written word. Hated. Writing was considered destructive, especially to the rhetorical canon of Memory. (This is a valid point, but that’s a different blog post.) Perhaps it was never considered a children’s activity, but it most certainly was a subject of great debate. Guess which side won.

I speculate that games will grow up. My generation–the generation that grew up on Mario, Final Fantasy, heck, even the arguably educational Oregon Trail–is hitting the workforce. The game industry is going to grow up, and is already growing up, and we’re already proving that we’re taking the medium with us.

Will video games ever be considered culturally relevant by, say, the Baby Boomers? Doubtful. But even my late-adopter parents play the occasional computer game, and if you ask virtually anyone of age 30 or younger who Mario is, I can almost guarantee they’ll think of a short Italian plumber with a red cap. Moreso, probably at least 75% (that’s a conservative estimate) of those who can identify Mario have had at least one experience with a Mario game, whether a single round in Smash Brothers at a friend’s house or countless hours playing every game to exhaustive completion. Show me an American child who has never even touched a video game, and I’ll show you a child who is entirely too sheltered.

rhetoric video games