Here’s Brian R.’s review of Barbara Warnick’s Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web:
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Very nice, Brian. I think it sounds really interesting because we do tend to try and apply old models for new applications without really thinking about some of the fundamental changes that often occurr during and as a result of innovation. It seems that people often try to force things into old models rather than attempting to develop new models that might fit better. But, I think it’s tough to really develop a model without a letting enough time go by so that more accurate generalizations can be made. Since we’re really just starting to get into a time when entire generations are raised on the web, I think new rhetorical models are sure to start emerging.
Brian, being the theory-guru that you are, it seems as if you picked the perfect book for your review! Your screen-captures are great (yay, Avatar!), and you look and sound very scholarly on camera. Did you do all of your own stunts?
Warnick’s reasons for not using existing models for rhetorical analysis make a lot of sense to me. The create-your-own-adventure effect of reading on the web differs greatly from how we read/experience printed media where the order is predetermined for us. “Authorless messages” abound on the web, and the unsavvy user can fall victim to propagandized sites wearing legitimate sites’ coding. And as some of us touched on in our discussion of YouTube, archives are important! They provide information about trends and views and updates and edits — all things that, as you say, capture the ethos of a site and help us to determine where the site falls on the credibility spectrum. I visited waybackmachine.org long ago before I got the tech bug, so I’ll have to check it out again. Thanks for mentioning it!
Warnick’s methods for assessing a site’s credibility seem like good ones, though they also seem as if they would be rather cumbersome for students. However, I could see making an assignment out of it: ask students to pick a site and then analyze if it is credible or not by following Warnick’s model. While students may never do an in-depth analysis of a site ever again, they would at least know what to look for when evaluating a site in future web adventures.
Anyway, all super interesting stuff, and again, very well done on the cinematography. You’re a YouTube star in the making, Brian!
Good job, Brian. I am impressed. Sounds like a rather stiff book-I am glad you chose that one and not me. It seems that Warnick is a little too political for my taste. I do appreciate her model for determining a site’s credibility. I do a little of that with my students, but primarily, we handle that in 9th grade now. Our media center lady does a great job of taking kids to sites that look very official and then showing them that they are not.
At any rate, Brian. Good job! How did you do that? I used Jing, but did not know that it could capture more than a still image. What DID you use?
Thanks Judy. I used iMovie. There’s a feature that allows you to decouple the audio from the video. This way you can switch out visual components but keep the audio track moving along.
What I did was: 1) record just me speaking about the book. 2) separately recorded my computer screen as I navigated through pages. 3) removed the original visual component with the decouple audio feature and put in the new video of my screen as I clicked through web pages.
The process is pretty tedious but not too difficult once you figure it out. Although I did watch the Apple tutorial on using iMovie, I mainly relied on Yahoo Answers to figure this stuff out.
FYI, i used movie maker 2.6 (for you pc’s out there) and from brian’s description, it was a similar process. i filmed myself, copied/pasted the audio track into the narration track, muted the original audio track, inserted the still frames, and cut out the left over visual track of me speaking. i also relied on a youtube tutorial to figure it out ’cause i just couldn’t figure it out on my own. and, as brian said, it was very tedious at first but got easier as i went along. also, from what I could see the newer version of Movie Maker doesn’t seem to let you do this… i guess it’s streamlined and meant for simpler editing. But i downloaded the older version and it seemed to have a lot more possibilites.
That sounds super difficult, lol. I’ll have to see what I can do!
Hey Brian, Once you mentioned Foucault’s name, all the pieces fell into place…sounds like a very politically charged book that’s coming from a specific philosophical perspective. Interesting. Were you able to think of ways to connect the author’s ideas to your teaching?
Andrea; I have been tinkering around with ideas from Warnick’s book for use in my own classroom. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about ways to incorporate a site she talks about called AdBusters. AdBusters makes spoof ads that comment on the current political and social atmosphere. I’m having my ENGL 120 students look at the site and present an analysis of a regular ad as well as a multimodal (video/sound) ad. I’ve mentioned this to my students and put the assignment on their updated syllabus. However, I won’t be formally introducing it until later this week. I’m also probably going to be incorporating some of this stuff in my paper for our own class.
Warnick’s theory seems to be really provocative and interesting to learn about.
The internet was used strictly for military purposes for missile and bomb communications. I don’t know when and how globalization came into the picture.
I think the internet gave birth to globalization, not the other way around, although there have been mini-globalization ideas around since migration. Hmm maybe I am mixed up.
You seemed to tackle this thing head on! Good job!
Hey, Brian this reminds me of days when we had Rhetorical Writing and Theory together. You sounded very professional and convincing. I wondered like Renee which came first globalization or internet? I thought the net brought many cultures together… globalization with industry. Mixing old concepts with a new era is hard for specific age groups to let go. Warnick does make sense in some areas. LIked your presentation.
About the globalization/internet thing. No idea. However, I do think globalization was a concept long before the internet was a fact. What I don’t know is when people were actually using the term the way we do. Then again, I suppose it depends on what you consider globalization. You could argue that Alexander the great was a force for globalization.
I feel like the way the internet allows people to post is a good thing. I know that some things are not good but there are lots of good things you can find online. I like being able to connect with people that I would not meet if we didnt have the web. I also get to see my family more in the sense that my sister can post pics, email them or put them on FB and I get to see my nephew more often. The one point you make about authoring website and I dont see that as so much of an issue except for students who are not taught this.
Wow Brian, this is really fantastic and your book does sound dense! II did find the intertextual piece to be really interesting because it’s something I write a lot about in the field of CHL and never thought of in terms of politics and the WWW, but JibJab definitely got a lot of miles in the Bush-Kerry era and I see how it all pulls together. Great use of examples and setting up tough concepts for the viewer