Link to the Google Drive folder with all my work: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xLMyF-BDU5XpYU11qmaAByGiydEvdHxN
1.Describe how audiences intended and/or unintended engaged with your digital-viral text.
No one engaged with my meme, not a single retweet, heart, nothing. I’m not quite sure how twitter works if you have no followers, like if it still shows on home pages and such but that could be a reason why no one did anything with it.
2.Account for how, if at all, your digital-viral text spread. You don’t have to list every individual or social media account that interacted with your work, but do note general trends and patterns with regard to how it circulated (was it remixed or changed at all, for instance?)
My digital-viral text did not spread at all…awkward.
3.If your digital-viral text didn’t spread, account for why you think this might be.
There are a couple reasons as to why I think that my meme did not spread. First, Kristine and I had made a completely new twitter account. Since it was new and had a name of ‘2DogMemes’, no one was following it and none of our friends knew it was ours. We tried mass adding people to follow when we created the account and gained 2 followers from it, but that still proved unhelpful. As mentioned in question 1, I’m also not even sure if anyone saw it if we have no followers as I don’t know if it would have shown on anyone’s home pages/news feeds.
4.What, if anything, would have made your text circulate more? Context, subject matter, platform, exigence, etc.?
If I had a chance to do this again, I definitely would have tried sharing it on more platforms and making people aware that it was me. I could also bring in my friends to make them help me share it too and expand the circle of people who see it. The more exposure a meme has, the more likely people will think it is funny and deem sharing. It you also get it to those people who LOVE to share everything they see, then that’s perfect. Another good place would be pages/groups in Facebook. With the picture being one of a dog and the caption being about finals, dog and school pages/groups would be best.
1)What genre of meme did you create and why? (A combination of image and text? A short video more akin to a Vine? Something else entirely?)
I used a combination of image and text for my meme as that is what comes to mind when I think of a typical ‘meme’. By using both an image and text, it gives it a more specific meaning. Normally, an image can have a meaning that is different for each viewer. However, with accompanying text, it allows the author to portray the specific topic and meaning they want to get across to their audience. For example in mine, I wanted viewers to focus on finals and their struggles and stress during this time of year. The dog is just for extra emphasis on this meaning.
2)What’s your subject matter be and why? Think of it this way – if you want your meme to circulate widely, you’ll likely need to craft a text that’s relevant and timely; think back to Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. Then again, there are popular, nonsensical memes that don’t seem to be particularly exigent either.
The subject in the image is my dog, named Aspen, and the focus of the meme is on finals time. With finals being just 2 weeks away, everyone is realizing how screwed they are with their grades. They’re calculating their grades and it is nowhere near as good as they thought they were doing…oops. This time of year is a huge time of stress and struggles for everyone as they are wrapping up projects, major assignments, and procrastinating as much as they can on studying without feeling too guilty. This image is the perfect portrayal for this saying as it is a photo of my dog who got himself stuck by being tied up around our coffee table with his ‘cone of shame’ on because he was just neutered. His eyes scream ‘help’. Of course I had to take a picture of it before helping, it’s a priceless moment.
3)How did you distribute your meme and through what platforms did you do so? For instance, do you want to explicitly encourage people to spread your text or not? Will you use a platform like Twitter, approach this project through Reddit, or use some combination of social media platforms?
I decided to use a shared fake Twitter account with Kristine to post our memes as both of our memes are about dogs. Neither of us have Twitter accounts to begin with, so we thought we would give it a shot. To my knowledge, twitter is very common among people our age all around the world. If the post is made public, it can be circulated a lot more as Twitter tends to be a place people post their feelings and rants, more so than Facebook. It will be interesting to see how this post does, however, as we will have a new account with no followers. No one to automatically ‘retweet’ (or like if that’s a thing?) our photos just because they are our friends.
Maps utilize space in a medium that is very different to others. Instead of space like in graffiti of photography where it is empty or the space around it, space for maps is the general area being represented in a map. Maps can show you more information that is specific to the space. It is usually more of an informational way of expressing rather than persuasive like the other mediums we have worked on in this class thus far. The map can be drawn to scale or not, but both represent the map especially with the use of a legend.
As for suggestions for this project in the future, I know something that we missed was the in-class critique of the proposals. I found this to be helpful for the past projects because it helps get you thinking about things you might not have realized when brainstorming. I also believe that since there are so many different applications you could use to make this, it would have been nice to practice using some of the in class and doing smaller map activities to be familiar with them. This way, we can be exposed to even more mediums. For example, if it wasn’t for my roommate telling me that I could use AfterEffects for our project, I wouldn’t have gone with the idea because it would have been difficult to map out.
1.) What subject matter are you planning to address in your map? Why?
After some deep thought, we decided to answer a question both of us have been contemplating for years now: How does Santa get around the World in one day to deliver all the presents? While we acknowledge how ridiculous this may seem, it’s a subject that has been argued between firm Santa believers and nonbelievers for decades. It’s also the holiday season, so the topic seems appropriate.
2.) What’s your map’s tentative argument or claim at this point? What’s it saying about space?
We argue that it is possible for Santa to make it around the world within one day. We even attempt to find the fastest route he can take. We will take into consideration the different time zones and the religious affiliations of certain countries since Santa won’t go to places where the people don’t believe in him. Santa Claus uses space because he needs to travel above the planes and clouds, so that nobody sees him and there isn’t air traffic. World maps are cool because they scale down the immense distance between countries. We will be using a global map to prove our claim.
3.) What medium do you plan on using to compose your map? What are its affordances?
We plan on making an animated video using Adobe After Effects to create a rotating globe and the path that Santa could take. We will label each country, as opposed to every city, to make it more general and clear. By using this medium, we hope to make it more visually appealing. If we used a paper map with every label of all the countries we are using, it might look confusing and messy. By animating all of it, we only have to show the label once Santa passes that country and then it will disappear. Another affordance is that we will be able to have a more realistic representation of the world compared to a flat map as it will be three dimensional.
4.) Who do you imagine your intended audience to be? How will they benefit from engaging with your map?
Our intended audience will mainly be for non-Santa believers to prove one logical fact. This is also for people who love the holidays because it’s for shits and giggles, since this project will be due just in time to ring in the holiday season.
5.) What problems do you anticipate in charting out, designing, and/or creating this project? How do you plan on getting around these issues?
Both of us haven’t used After Effects before, so we may struggle with creating the animation we want. In addition, finding out the fastest route may be difficult too. There will also be some time zone calculations that need to be done in the process of determining the fastest route as well as the time it takes to fly from place to place, even with Santa’s extra powerful engines. We plan on starting early to anticipate for any problems we may have along the way.
Overall, I liked the idea of being able to revise and redesign our works from the semester as we might learn more things in class and have that “Oh! I wish I added that” moment. I know that happened for me with a couple writing assignments and definitely the graffiti project I was glad I could redesign.
For me, the benefits were that I could self improve on my work. However, the drawback is that I was not completely sure how each of my assignments was actually doing. It would have been nice to not get a completion grade, but to get a brief grade on the assignment to know how it stands in comparison to everyone else’s. I also wish that we had more opportunities to peer review everyone’s work in class as sometimes it was hard to figure out what we needed to change in our work in order to improve, or what we might be missing. A lot of times, those who do the work fail to see what is wrong with it because they are did it and think that they hit everything because in their mind they did. It’s like how you catch more mistakes in a paper by reading out-loud rather than in your head.
The portfolio made me think about writing across media differently in that I was able to compare all the works through different mediums after having tackled them at some point. It was cool to go back and kind of see how everything tied together or how some mediums are better to portray the idea that we have than others. It’s not something most people might think about in general, but I like that we get to do it. I know most of my friends are always intrigued to see what our next assignment is, so it was nice to think back to how it all came together.
Sound is unique in that it makes you focus on a single sense when interacting with it. It makes it so that the listener can be manipulated into listening to a mashup without them even knowing it, whereas if they saw a video mashup, they would notice that the videos are choppy and don’t go together. Sound can also make a message come through as super powerful because of this. It forces the listener to indulge in what is being said in the clip without any distractions. However, one downside is that without a visual component, some listeners might zone out and stop paying attention as their attention span might not be great if they don’t care.
Something that I think could be to done to improve this unit for this class is to have some more in class activities that do with audio. The bigger project I think works well as it allows us to be creative and go whatever route we want, however, it’s easy to get careless with the project since Audacity can be frustrating to use and teams tend to get caught up in other work and do this last minute. In order to make sure that everyone still actually understands what we’re learning and reading for class, more in class activities should be done such as creating their own music through instruments and voice. If we do an in class work for the main project, I think it would be cool to do an audio, podcast-like reflective statement for the project instead of a video reflective. It could be like a “make your own background music for your podcast” for the smaller part, and have the reflective statement be the bulk of the project. Kind of like a two-in-one, a double whammy.
An example of something in this course that is multimodally inhospitable is the most recent WAM literacy project we had to do: the audio manipulation project. This project was done solely based on audio, or sound, making it an impossible task for someone who is deaf or even blind. If they are deaf, they are unable to hear the clips that they must edit and make sound well. Even with captions, this is a hard task to do especially when dealing with timing. If they are blind, it would take them much more time to clip the audio files as they cannot see what second they are in the file to clip. They would constantly have to replay the same parts over and over until they got it.
Instead of doing a project that is solely based on technology and audio, we could bring in a more physical component that deals with audio like instruments. That way, instead of creating a new file from already created audio files, everyone could make their own. Those who are blind don’t have to worry about clipping it perfectly, and those who are deaf can feel the vibrations of the instruments. With this, we are still able to play around with the different aspects of audio like music, silence, sound effects, voice, etc. to see how they all blend together.
This redesign of the project is not a retrofit because it isn’t targeted to only those who have a disability. It accommodates everyone, and in my opinion, is beneficial as it tests your creativity, teamwork, and sees if you actually understand the concept of what you are doing rather than just mashing random things up. I also believe that it could be more fun as everyone gets to act like a kid again, to some extent, and play some music or show off their vocals.
Disruption, formatting, and glitch can be used to describe many different types of medium, including audio, which is the medium we are currently focused on working with. Disruption and glitch are usually referred to when there is some form of sound or imagery associated with it, whether it be audio or video. These tend to add some effect and chaos to what is happening which can add meaning and gather the audience’s attention once again since it’s so subtle. Sometimes, it can also be very beneficial for the user even if unintended. Formatting on the other hand is even more broad and can be used for more additional medias including text. Examples of this are articles, essays, etc. If any of these characteristics are taken away from their media, it would create a different version of that media or composition.
Audio as a medium can be very powerful if used in the right way. It allows the listener to focus in on what is being heard rather than also getting distracted by imagery, placement, hierarchy of words, etc. It allows the author’s tone of voice to really shine through to give added effect to the point they are trying to get across. However, for the more visual learners, audio could be a medium detrimental to their full understanding. The listener’s vision of the idea could be different than what the author intended, which could be both good or bad for the author. On the other hand, audio could also be something just be in the background (like music) that goes alongside other tasks. It could or could not add extra meaning to the task, or could be used as a form of distraction.
Ada Hui 