Composer, Medium, and Message

I was in a car with a friend listening to some his favorite old school jazz. He discussed the irony of a happy lilt and melody blended with lyrics about some lovers' suicide pact. The dark side of popular music, he said. I thought about it for a moment and mentioned Death Cab for Cutie's song "I'll Follow You into the Dark." The line, "If heaven and hell decide that the both are satisfied / And illuminate the "no"s on their vacancy signs / If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks / I'll follow you into the dark." It was an interesting remediation of a very human pain - the longing for connection in a big, dark world.

Professor Wexler implied that even speech itself is a form of media, our speech is a method by which a Composer creates a Message to their audience. If we are to reflect Aristole's triangle of argumentation, this assumption is clearly relevant. The Composer is the Media is the Message. An example I suggested was one's use of a personal Twitter feed. Someone may be more honest or less honest, depending on their relationship to their audience. Another student suggested that this relationship forces larger news corporations like CNN to forge those relationships over social media to remain relevant to their audience. The news is no longer in print, it's in pixels.

Discussed also were to concepts of immediacy and hypermediacy. Immediacy purposes to make the viewer forget the medium or form of delivery of the message. A news station might use a high definition photograph of a "disaster area" for a pathos pull on their audience. They might also attach hotlinks to the Red Cross to express urgency and reality. Hypermediacy forces the audience to mark the media of their message. The professor used the example of a Jackson Polluck painting; the message is subliminal to the method and format of the work itself.

This is a news article that uses hypermedia links to emphasize it's point. The use of hypermedia in everyday texts changes the linear methods of communication that written language has been structured on for centuries. It's rocking the boat of academics as far as what to teach students in the classroom. There is emphasis on "back to basics" using books, grammar, and work books further students' learning.

I think its the millennial responsibility to construct the future curriculum that bonds technology and text.

But the questions remain: Perhaps in future classrooms where we are the teachers, how do we work with the ideas immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation so that each term is understood? How does writing on a blog affect the written text?

Apart from formatting, I don't see much departure from academic writing in blog writing. To effectively communicate one's point of view, it's still necessary to learn the skills of rhetoric and argumentation as well as ensure argumentative credibility with grammatical strength and thorough research. However, there is stronger emphasis on audience because the audience is no longer a single bored teacher reading essays, but the whole of those with access to the internet might take up parts of an argument.

Transmedia and Accessibility

Ask me three years ago, I would have told you that I disliked the jump into technology and that I mourned the almost certain demise of paper-books. (I worked at Borders, so I was more concerned about my job security, to be honest.) But I'm finally, slowly adapting. Despite my many frustrations with my touch-screen smart phone, I know in my heart that I cannot switch back to a "dumb phone" that cannot play music or run iHeartRadio or Pandora apps.

Still, even as I embrace technology and all its advantageous gadgets and applications, I have questioned what will happen to classic literature and learning. I am the kind of person who loves being in an actual classroom for formal education. I might even use a pen and paper to take notes. On the parallel, I'm the nerd who will Wiki all the answers to all the questions. If I can blend the traditional with technology, where's everyone else?

I found the answer to my question in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a webshow on Youtube.com based on Jane Austen's classic novel, Pride and Prejudice. The story was pulled into the modern era for a modern audience. Not only was Lizzie Bennet a Southern California grad student, but she interacted with her audience "off screen" on Twitter and Tumblr. It was a new kind of story-telling, but it was the same classic story made accessible to today's young women (and men, too).

Though people who watched The Lizzie Bennet Diaries understood that the story was fictional, the pattern of bi-weekly updates and live character interaction on social media pulled that screen away and immersed the audience into the story like no cinema film or television show can do. Transmedia storytelling is still finding its footing in the mainstream. The first prolific Youtube series that went transmedia was the story of LonelyGirl15 back in the days of Myspace.com. The creators of the show didn't tell anyone that the story was fictional, so many real-life viewers believed that Bree (aka LonelyGirl15) was in real danger. Months later, the audience uncovered their plot, and the rest was history.

Storytelling like this creates a new wave of research styles and a new style of critical thinking and discussions. In the case of LonelyGirl15, it was the fans of the show who spent the time to unravel their story, both the fictional plot and the production's deception. In The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, fans decided to enter the stage directly by hacking a webpage to avenge the defaming of a character. People got invested, and then they got involved. I'd like to think that this passion and creativity is a gift from technology, finding new ways to be clever and realize that sometimes the box is bigger on the inside.

Currently, the same production company that gave us The Lizzie Bennet Diaries are in the middle of a new show called Emma Approved, based on Austen's novel Emma. I'm looking forward to how this story will unfold.


I meant to post this shortly after the first week of school in relation to technology in the classroom, and then we got "real" assignments.