Reflection

Over the semester, I have learned a few important techniques on composing and avoiding clicktivism. First off, I think it is very important to avoid vagueness and abstract ideals while composing. I think everyone has been bombarded with fatcs and genericness from the media and while browsing the internet. To avoid this, I tried to be as specific as possible when composing. In my Assemblage Testimonial, instead of showing a generic beach in the Gulf of Mexico, I would show a beach and put the name of the town where the beach exists, add pictures of the locals of facts about the town itself. I think that people can relate to this by seeing a slice of American life, rather than just a beach that could be anywhere.

This project was a very different way of teaching and learning about an issue (public pedagogy, media engagement). This form of rhetoric, with small quotes and facts on specific places, all combined with pictures, certainly teaches the public about an issue in a way that I would have never conceived. The use of pictures and their punctum is a from of teaching in itself, and that is a sort of teaching about emotion inside of ourselves. When you see the video of the woman who became very ill after cleaning up her own beach because of the oil spill, you begin to feel something different than if you just saw CNN doing a story on her. The homemade aspect of this work (a video filmed at home, no fancy editing or equipment) is real down to earth, and causes a tremendous amount of emotion and understanding when viewed. I think people are skeptical of media now days, being partisan and interests based, trying to milk a story in order to get viewers. The projects we composed this year are quite the opposite because they don’t just want viewers (or clicktivism) but we want active engagement.

Engagement comes in many forms, and redistributing and remixing these projects are one of these forms. However (once again) I don’t really see how someone is going to take my Project 3 and do just that. I am not really into the whole “remix” culture of videos and songs that we covered so much this year, so I suppose I don’t fully understand the point of doing so.

However, by using tags and specific story lines and locations, people, about a topic (oil spill) I think that my work can at least spread because people from those places might see their town of their peers in this new form of media and then show it to other people (that’s the hope, anyways).

In conclusion, this project (project 3) was very effective as a consulting device. However, I’m not sure if the emblem really has anything to do with it. Based on the emblems that we discussed, and my emblem also, they seem very bizarre and metaphorical, almost like they belong in a modern art museum. There is an audience for this type of work, but much of the general public will either not understand it, or just plain take it literally (Why are there dead dolphins in Times Square? WTF???) To reach a broader audience, a meme or a GIF would be more appropriate, but I did not figure out a way to convert all three aspects of the disaster (which are the disaster itself, the sacrifice, and the value) all into one singe meme. The testimonial explains this much better, and the fact that it is a collage of short burst of information and pictures mean that it is engaging and not boring, people will hopefully skim it at the least. You can get a lot of information from skimming the pictures (which I have a ton of), making the connection between the brands that we know and love, the oil used to get them into our hands, and then the oil spill itself. That is why I think the testimonial was the most effective way to consult on this issue.