Here is my final research paper on Google Docs.
Wow, what a semester! I almost can’t believe it has come to an end, but at the same time I am pretty “done” 🙂 It has been definitely the most challenging semester so far in my doctoral studies for a few reasons. First of all, it was my first time taking classes on-line. At first I thought I would be super happy with that dynamic because it meant I would not have to be driving over an hour one-way to get to class, but I have realized that it did not save me time at all. I was constantly stressed in order to get all my work done on time, which has never really been an issue for me in the past. This may have been for a variety of different reasons: unfamiliarity with the field, unfamiliarity with technology, lack of in-class discussion to get my mind going, etc.
I am most definitely a people-person. And although, cooperative learning does bear fruit, in the graduate level classroom, where you need to cover some really heavy-duty literature (like the canons of rhetoric;), I felt like a partial lecture was necessary. Not necessarily to tell me what to think ( I can already hear Anne disagreeing with me :), but to get me to think in the right direction. I started my blog posts by connecting our readings to my background knowledge and my field, because that is what I know, and although I attempted more close-readings as the semester went on, I am not sure that I was ever able to understand the depth of some of the articles because it was really just me and my computer. Yes, the Ning discussions with my peers helped, of course. However, similarly to the readings, it was also difficult sometimes to wrap my head around what my classmates were saying exactly – in large part because I constantly had to READ! I love reading. I absolutely love, love ,love, love reading! I was one of those kids who hid underneath her covers with a flashlight instead of going to bed (which my mom still makes fun of to this day), but multi-modality is needed in higher education. No doubt about it. Maybe a blended course would make Digital Rhetoric a bit more manageable for the future generations? 🙂
What I am extremely grateful for is that this class has forced me to use digital technologies that I would perhaps not have discovered by myself otherwise. I was really proud of myself for having figured out how to make a YouTube video with sound out of what was originally a Powerpoint. Prezi is also pretty awesome! I will definitely make use of it in the classroom or at future presentations.Twitter – not so much . . . there is definitely something to be said for expressing yourself in only 140 characters, but I don’t see the point of it for me personally.
Most importantly, this class allowed me to look at my research from a different perspective. I foresaw many avenue down which to take it, but a analysis of digital media involved with carework was not one of them.Needless to say, I am very glad I did look into it. Obviously, without the internet sites I looked into, the au pair industry would not thrive as much as it does, similarly to other business.The power of digital technology is really pretty unbelievable!
That said, thank you all for your questions and comments. It was a very intellectually stimulating semester!
Cheers!
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Here is a Pecha Kucha of my project., which I needed to convert to movie format in order to upload with sound to YouTube. It’s been quite the experience. The voice recording alone took circa 10 hours total ! It was very difficult to sync what I wanted to say in such a way to speak for 20 seconds about a given slide. When I read about creating Pecha Kuchas on-line, it said that they might take 6 hours to make on average. Well, it takes much longer the first time around!
The most frustrating part was trying to figure out what format to use so I could publish it on-line and still have the sound. YouTube won’t let you publish a PPT and then add sound of your own, you need to choose from their audio files. So, I saved all my PPT slides as JPGs and put them into IMovie. Well, YouTube and Vimeo don’t accept I-Movie files… Finally, I-Life Suite came to the rescue!! It turned out, I could save my I-Movie as a QuickTime (had to take some I-Movie tutorials on-line to figure that out.)
Well, voula ! 🙂
I enjoyed making this Pecha Kucha, even though it took absolutely forever!!!! I have to admit that I am proud of myself, though . . . I mentioned some of the technology that we’ve been using in class and my husband has absolutely no clue what any of them are . . . I have definitely learned a lot this semester (despite the moments of frustration 😉 !
One more week to go and a seminar paper to edit one last time!!
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Here is a link to my paper on the legitimacy of au pair websites.
This paper is the first of this sort that I have written. I keep on telling myself that doing a rhetorical analysis of websites is like doing a close reading of a book, but it is different… I need story elements to build off of, whereas with websites we have none. What we do have, however, are audiences (or consumers in most cases), which I really have tried to put myself in the shoes of when viewing these sites. It helps that I am obviously researching a topic that I already have quite a bit of background knowledge on, of course.
Perhaps, the most challenging part, though, was that I have not been able to find a lot of sources pertaining to my research. In many ways this is great, because it is innovative, but I have found that I am have not been able to integrate the articles I have read into my paper as much as I would like to, which puts me in a difficult spot as a novice to the world of rhetoric…
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Here is my Prezi: Rhetoric of Au Pair Web Sites
I have to say that my experience with the Prezi was pretty good, although time consuming, which is probably because it was my first time using it. Like any other piece of technology it seemed to have a mind of its own at times, and it was most frustrating when it took me two hours to figure how to place the words in order for them to be centered on the screen.
The beginning of the process was not only challenging because of new technology, but also because I initially didn’t know exactly what I should say in order for the viewer to know what I am talking about without using sentences. That in itself is really quite a skill – to not be wordy!
I love how the Prezi is more interactive than Powerpoint and allows you to jump around on the screen. I really think that it grabs the audience’s attention and I plan on using it for future conference presentations. Thanks ENG 753 for teaching me how to use it!
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Week 11: Reflection
This week has challenged my opinion of gaming as strictly “pressing a brightly colored plastic button on an infantile toy” as Kirkpatrick puts in on page 136. As any social phenomenon it needs to be studied from a critical perspective. Castranova’s book certainly does this well from an economists’ standpoint. As a business, gaming has become an insurmountable success. Movies like Tomb Raider showed us that virtual lives can actually come alive.
The issue that I have with gaming is twofold:
– it blurs the line between real life and virtual reality
– it takes time away from other productive activities (studying, reading books, playing outside, etc).
Yes, I understand that the latter hyphen is my very subjective opinion, but as anyone who has grown up with a brother or a husband who cannot take his hands off the Guitar Hero controller for 7 straight hours while Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” song plays over and over and over again (“What? I need to get a perfect score!”) knows – video games can get extremely annoying!!!
Certainly each generation has had their own version of gaming: board games, card games, arcade games, etc., but multi-player games have transported gamers into new galaxies that take them away from the real world. This is where a lot of problems begin – many people do not have the strength of character to know when enough is enough and get addicted to their virtual lives and avatars. For some, it is difficult to differentiate between what one can and cannot do in the real world anymore, e.g. the Columbine massacre. Miguel Sicart talks about the need for ethics in gaming, but that is not what sells. What sells is the blood and gore of Resident Evil.
I am much more excited about the notion of play as a means of child socialization and development. Within this context, we can use playing with cars, dolls or other children to discuss the impact of games. The only problem with this idea, however, is that it has become much easier for parents to allow their child to play video games because it does not require any effort on their part. Unfortunately, it seems like we are heading in this direction more and more…
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The articles for this week on gaming were obviously not very clearly linked to my research on domestic work. Flanagan’s chapter on “Playing House” intrigued me, however, with its analysis of domestic games as mechanisms for identifying themes in culture (20). She starts off the chapter by mentioning many forms of public spectacles that have been popular throughout the years: from medieval jousts to cockfights, boxing, horse racing, and other spectator sports. Thinking about collective means of leisure made me go back to my sophomore year in college when I took a Leisure and Sports in Britain class and ended up writing about the Superclub phenomenon that was popular back then in England, but has since died. The choices for play can be quite unique amongst generations, but the dollhouse is different in this respect in that it has survived the test of time.
Flanagan states that play has been “justified as educational and moral helping to build intelligence and good behavior, and preparing children to take part as good citizens of the adult world” (25). During the Victorian era playing house served as a way of institutionalizing social and cultural norms; little girls played house and this play mirrored their every day: “the girl of the household would get her dolls out of bed in the morning, dress them, and give them breakfast before their ‘school lessons’. . .the dolls studied at the same time the girl did, and, like her, had dinner, did more homework, bathed, and went to bed” (30). This was, therefore, an ideal way to socialize little girls into their future roles as wives and mothers.
I would have liked to see Flanagan expand on her statement that during the Civil War “dolls, dollhouses, and toy stores reflected changes in work patterns due to immigration and industrialization as well as shifts in the categories of social classification” (27). Were dolls considered to be an accoutrement of the upper classes or did it depend on what kind of doll you had (Raggedy Ann vs. one from FAO Schwarz)?
Flanagan’s use of Turner’s liminality to divide critical play into “unplaying,” “”re-dressing,” or “rewriting” is also quiet intriguing, along with the artists’ dolls of the sort created by Hans Bellmer in figure 2.13 on page 42. Dolls can, therefore, serve not only a a metaphor for the care giving relationship, but also as “life-like” figurine, they can be an expression of one’s dark side; one can do to a doll certain things that one would not do to a human.
In terms of my research involving the ethics of caring, dolls serve to perpetuate the role of woman as caregiver. This is a socialization process that starts from a very early age. Baby girls are given dolls, whereas boys are given toy cars and trucks. One of my mom’s friends, who is a psychologist, bought my brother a toy doll when he was a child explaining to my mom the need for boys to understand that there is nothing wrong with having one. My brother played with it until he got older and then after going to preschool he came to the conclusion that “boys don’t play with dolls.” If we were to work harder from our children’s infancy to move away from the binaries of boy-girl, masculine-feminine, we would have a greater chance of fighting gender inequalities, which begin to get constructed within our minds at a very early age.
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In “Who Cares? The Classed Nature of Childcare,” Jayne Osgood takes to task the website for the U.K.’s Department for Education and Skills (DfES) program called Sure Start Unit, whose main aim is to solve the “recruitment crisis” in educare (a term that Osgood employs to refer to early years of education and childcare services). What Osgood found on these web pages was a rhetoric laden with classed messages in terms of who should provide childcare, where “attention is drawn to notions of long-term unemployed housewives and grandmothers, and women seeking to make friends and have fun!'” (291). Childcare, thus, is trivialized as a profession for those who have nothing better to do and are looking for some form of entertainment. The Sure Start Unit’s website also advertised this type of work as an opportunity to “better oneself” by making a difference in the lives of young children. This “discourse of individuation” also presents the caregiver as a responsible individual who is willing to fight social inequalities through her own efforts. What is more, “the rhetoric implies that those who adhere to the normative middle class notion of individualization will succeed in becoming middle class, by viewing early education and childcare as a transitory mechanism to a better place” (Osgood 293). Osgood argues that such a rhetoric takes the onus off of economic equalities, because the discourse of individualization maintains that if you are working class, it is up to you to make your situation better. Therefore, “the working class educarer assumes a particular position within the occupational hierarchy because she failed to make enough effort or lacks the requisite talent to experience social mobility” (294).
This discourse of individualization is very interesting from the perspective of au pair work in the United States because many au pairs claim that independence and the need to find their own individuality is what led them to participate in the program. The discourse of au pairs being exchange visitors and not domestic employees also adds to this theory. Educare work as a transitory mechanism to middle classhood certainly does not fit into the scheme, however, since au pairs are usually already from middle class homes and do not raise their status, but the status of the families who they live with.
The rhetoric that DfES uses, according to Osgood, promotes equality of opportunity for underrepresented groups and minorities, along with high status, respect and a rewarding career (295). Nonetheless, the author claims this rhetoric is utilized only to maintain the government’s goal of full-time employment to all in order to limit the burden on the welfare state. Educare is the role of women who are undervalued, yet in the eyes of the Sure Start Unit working in childcare is a vocation, which should be a natural choice for women. By presenting it as a ‘labor of love,’ attention is drawn away from low wages, long hours and the absence of sick leave.
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Week 11: Gaming
This week’s readings introduced us to the world of gaming and he culture of play.
Mary Flanagan in Critical Play: Radical Game Design, shows us how games can ” challenge ideas, beliefs, and social expectations and subsequently transform them in their work” (3). Play is central to providing humans with the ability to learn. Flanagan divides play into two types: voluntary means of leisure and socialization, and process of ritual. She describes critical play as “characterized by careful examination of social, cultural, political, or even personal themes that function as alternates to popular play spaces” (6).
It was very interesting to read about the different types of play that Flanagan talks about. She mentions hopscotch as a “technology” with a set of rules, governed by behavior; urinals as scandalous “ready-made” sculptures; activist games, and dollhouses (along with others that I now do not recall).
Quite fascinating is her discussion about gaming being a gendered space, where mostly men are the creators and users. The images of women that are created in games are also problematic. Tomb Raider, for example, was a perfect examples of a male-geared game due to the character’s idealized body later put into the “real” body of Angelina Jolie.
Flanagan then looks at dollhouses as socialization tools. Little girls already in the Victorian Era were setting up their houses to resemble the activities of their every day. Play was (and is) “the primary vehicle for and indicator of [children’s] mental growth” (qtd. in Flanagan 24). Playing house, thus, has been symbolic for over a hundred years now of cultural norms negotiated within societies.
Kirkpatrick discusses the “novel experiences” brought about by digital technologies in “Aesthetic Form in the Computer Game.” He uses the theories of Adorno and Benjamin to discuss the aesthetic form of the controller. Hands are an important part of the experience because touch is the point of intersection of the performance and “the artist, the tools, the material, and the form itself” (131). The tension and energy of the body gets condensed into the hands holding the controller. Kirkpatrick calls upon Benjamin’s notion of “dialectical image” to explain the effects of seeing the video game controller on the computer screen. The author claims that this connection between gamer and screen, and tension caused by the controller, create a much more exciting experience. In other words, he believes in the potential of the gaming world.
In The Ethics of Computer Games, Sicart bases his gaming theory on the thesis that computer games should contain ethical content. In Figure 7.1. in a screen snapshot from Knights of the Republic, he shows us the avatar’s Moral-O-Meter, which measures such virtues as intelligence, wisdom, and charisma amongst others. He bases his theory on the notion that “because players are moral beings, they have to be allowed and encouraged to afford their ethical values in the game” (219). Although it is understandable that players are not passive subjects but moral beings, how is it feasible for all games to be ethical if video game companies need to sell their products? Could we consider any games which involve killing ethical?
The community of online gamers that Edward Castranova discusses in Synthetic Worlds is probably one, which I will never be fully able to comprehend. Although I appreciate the complexity of MMORPGs, I cannot help the always-lingering thought in the back of my hippocampus, which screams: “Waste of time!” There is no doubt, however, that the community of gamers is a huge and ever-growing one. All of my students are familiar with World of Warcraft and other similar games, which I have never played and quite frankly, am not dyeing to…What is pretty remarkable, however, solidarity of gamers aside, is the quality of graphics which digitality has enabled, and their multiplayer capabilities. You could be playing with another avatar who is sitting in front of his computer thousands of miles, and several timezones away!
The great problem, which these games have created nonetheless, is as Castranova himself admits, “the line between games and real life has become blurred” (2). Not only are they addicting and cause players to remain glued to their screens for hours (sometimes days), they can also “play” with your mind.
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This week’s articles, were quite pleasant reads for the most part and explained rather clearly how the creation of communities is augmented through the use of digital networking.
The first obligatory article by Muhlke did this rather nicely. The Crop Mob is able to gather a group of plowing and planting savvy farm hands in large part due to its e-mail subscriber list. Yes, word of mouth is often the best advertisement, but how else could you spread the word to 400 people in less than a minute if it weren’t for the internet?
It is pretty remarkable to see that people’s need to feel part of a community is so deep that they are willing to work very hard in hopes that one day, perhaps, this help will be reciprocated. As one of the founders of Crop Mob, Rob Jones, state: ” [Crop Mob] brings that sense of community that people are looking for.”
Sonja Utz discusses a sense of community that is created on consumer sites where people sellers and products are reviewed by the buyers. Although I expand on this article in my second posting, let reiterate Ulz’s findings, that people participate in on-line consumer communities more out of altruism than in order to build up their reputation. By commenting on the quality of a product, contributors are signalling whether it is one that is worth buying or not. In Utz’s article, therefore, we see how digital networks can function as a sort of community, e.g. the community of e-consumers; if someone is prone to shopping on-line, they will also want to help others by rating their own transactions.
Coombe & Herman discuss the property of cultural commons. They use the example of the Lego Corporation, which appropriated elements of Maori culture in their Bionicle line of toys. The Maori were highly disappointed and started a “cyber-war,” which Coombe and Herman refer to as a “hack attack” (564), on a Lego fansite BZ Power. Maori contributors were highly against Lego’s use of any elements of Maori “heritage, culture and spirituality” (565). This debate ultimately became an issue of First Amendment rights, with one of the contributors commenting that the languages people speak, be it Spanish, English or Maori, are not personal possessions, but common property (566).
The common, however, also has its limits and boundaries. Coombe and Herman see the ecumeme, a moral space & global market of exchange, as a solution to the intellectual property issue. The “sovereign corporation” and the “sovereign consumer” are the two main inhabitants of informational consumerism (567). The authors argue that “the ethos of the informational commons is characterized by the creative collective effervescence of the sharing of ideas ruled by the logic of the non-proprietary” (568-9). The article envisions a future of “contact zones,” which will be social spaces where cultures will be able to clash, and challenge individual cultures’ understanding of the concepts of property and propriety.
The community of online gamers that Edward Castranova discusses in Synthetic Worlds is probably one, which I will never be fully able to comprehend. Although I appreciate the complexity of MMORPGs, I cannot help the always-lingering thought in the back of my hippocampus, which screams: “Waste of time!” There is no doubt, however, that the community of gamers is a huge and ever-growing one. All of my students are familiar with World of Warcraft and other similar games, which I have never played and quite frankly, am not dyeing to…What is pretty remarkable, however, solidarity of gamers aside, is the quality of graphics which digitality has enabled, and their multiplayer capabilities. You could be playing with another avatar who is sitting in front of his computer thousands of miles, and several timezones away!
The great problem, which these games have created nonetheless, is as Castranova himself admits, “the line between games and real life has become blurred” (2). Not only are they addicting and cause players to remain glued to their screens for hours (sometimes days), they can also “play” with your mind. One of my students this week told me with a straight face that he believes that he is a descendant of dragons…(I couldn’t even make up some of the things that he tells me even if I tried).
The Galloway and Thacker article posed the hardest nut to crack for me this week, perhaps because of its innovative design. The authors attempt to theorize how networking has become an all-pervasive term in our society. They start this discussion in their “Prolegomenon” by asking: “Is America a sovereign power or a networked power?” (4). The concept of network creates a sort of “apolitical natural law” (27). This dialogic relationship between sovereignty and networking in our culture is quite paradoxical. On the one hand the liberal democratic tradition was founded on the need to appreciate and respect individuality, while on the other hand highly privileging community and connectivity.
Galloway and Thacker remind us of how “the 2001 USA PATRIOT ACT and other legislation [has allowed] increased electronic surveillance [to] further reinforce the deep penetration of networked technologies and networked thinking” (26).
It is this dialogic between sovereignty and networking which I am left to ponder at this week’s end.
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This week was pretty enjoyable in terms of the readings, however I am not quite sure whether the topic will be useful specifically for me in my research on domestic migrant laborers. Certainly, as Anne mentions in her comment to my discussion of the Utz article, a sense of trust (of *some* kind) for both the potential nannies and the potential employers needs to be established. Initially, this trust is superficial, and based on pictures, phone conversations, and rhetoric used in application forms. Sanctioned sites most definitely utilize the visual aspect to build this trust, portraying au pairs and children who are always happy. The short testimonials that sometimes appear on sanctioned sites, however, are quite superficial and tend to attract potential au pairs rather than host parents. The testimonial of Marta Kostkiewicz, au pair for Cultural Care Au Pair is an example of one such testimonial: http://www.culturalcare.com/AboutUs/testimonials/T9/Testimonial9.aspx
The two questions that are asked of Marta are: “What was it like to meet your host family for the first time?” and “What has been your favorite aspect of being a Cultural Care au pair?” These questions, along with the audio present on the site, are clearly aimed at making au pair work seem like an attractive experience.
A sense of community is nevertheless established between au pairs, both in the digital and non-digital world. Cultural Care Au Pair also hosts a blog entitled The Buzz (http://buzz.culturalcare.com/post/125080994/hi-my-name-is-larissa-feigl-im-20-years-old-and), on which prospective au pairs can ask a current au pair questions. Moreover, outside of the digital world, girls meet on a weekly basis at networking events for au pairs, which then allow them to socialize after work with other au pairs in the area.
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