Category: Writing

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The confusing meanings of "tagging" Air Force One

Over the weekend, I stumbled across the “Still Free” web site, which is a publicity stunt/public advocacy page by the hip-hop/youth fashion company Ecko. The “Still Free” site features a shaky video of Air Force One outside of an airport hanger and hooded people climbing over a barbed-wire fence to get to it. Ultimately, one of these “vandals” spray paints the phrase “Still Free” on the side of the engine of the plane.

Also on the “Still Free” site ia a video of Marc Ecko himself titled “Why I Tagged Air Force One.” It’s kind of a convoluted explaination. He says he did this because the president needs to remember that when he goes places, he needs to represent freedom, and Ecko thought that spray painting the plane would be a great way to open a dialog. Then he goes on about graffiti as an art form and some of the kind of stupid laws that prevent kids under 18 from buying broad-tipped permanent markers in New York City and such. But then he says that vandalism is never right and he’s not suggesting that people go out and do that. Ecko just wants people to chill and talk about freedom.

Ah, okay. A bold (and crazy and illegal) move for freedom, I guess.

But it turns out (and actually, I knew this all along because this is how I found out about the “Still Free” web site in the first place) that this was all an elaborate hoax. As this AP wire story reports, the video appeared real enough that an Air Force spokesman for the unit responsible for Air Force One was “looking into it.” But of course it wasn’t real.

Why did he do it?

“I wanted to do something culturally significant, wanted to create a real pop-culture moment,” said Marc Ecko of Marc Ecko Enterprises. “It’s this completely irreverent, over-the-top thing that could really never happen: this five-dollar can of paint putting a pimple on this Goliath.”

Okay… so, tell us Marc; how did you pull it off?

Ecko acknowledged Friday that his company had rented a 747 cargo jet at San Bernardino’s airport and covertly painted one side to look like Air Force One. Employees signed secrecy agreements and worked inside a giant hangar until the night the video was made. Ecko declined to say how much the stunt cost.

“It’s not cheap,” he said. “You have to be rich.”

So ultimately, this statement about free speech– which appears to come in a form (vandalism) which Ecko says is of course illegal and wrong– is actually a fabrication, a fiction, and something that could never happen. Which, in a very real way, is not an example of free speech at all. And for me it is all the more problematic because it portrays itself as a “real” event in the name of “free speech.” It’s sort of like these faith healers you see getting people to get out of wheelchairs: at first, it demonstrates the powers of the healer; but it then it soon demonstrates the powers of the con man.

Or I guess it’s a lot like the whole Million Little Pieces thing.

That last sentence from Ecko in the wire story, “You have to be rich,” is of course key. It suggests two very important things of this speech act. First, it isn’t “free;” in fact, it’s really REALLY expensive. Second, it isn’t a protest at all, but rather a commercial. In the end, this is simply an advertisement for Marc Ecko Enterprises, which I suppose is a form of free speech, but its purpose is not really to raise awareness so much as it is to sell sweatshrits.

Anyway, I’m perhaps giving this more attention than it deserves, but go check out the video and see what I mean.

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Yet another handwriting story

This one, which I stumbled across from a google news search, comes from the ABC News channel in Chicago: “Should students be concerned with proper handwriting?” The answer, according to these folks, is yes.

A couple of interesting quotes here:

Some educators link the demise of penmanship to the rejection of repetitive drills as a teaching tool. Also, teachers are spending less time on handwriting and more time covering subjects like reading and math, which are measured by standardized tests.

Huh? So, we should have a return to reptitive drills? And by the way, my third grade son seems to still be doing some version of reptitive drills with handwriting.

They talk about the problems of the handwritten portion of the SAT and the fact that many finals still need to be done by hand, etc. I wonder how long that’s going to be the case, though– I’d be surprised if my son will have to do a writing test for the SAT by hand, for example.

And then there’s this:

While teachers who grade the SAT are told not to mark off for sloppy penmanship, research shows that handwriting can send a message.

“It’s hard when you look at some types of handwriting, to not read certain things into it,” says Dana Huff, an English teacher at the Weber School – who also grades essays for the SAT. “You know the big, bubbly handwriting, for instance, can sometimes lead a teacher to think, ‘Oh, Airhead.'”

“If your handwriting is barely legible, it makes them think that you are not really an organized person,” says 17-year-old Adam Levinson, “that you are writing too fast, and you are not thinking about it.”

Which, again, is why I type everything but a grocery list.

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A comic to remember for later… and potentially why…

First things first: the comic for later is PoCom-UP-001, which was a group/collaborative comic of enormous propotions. It’s a pretty slick flash interface, too. Scott McCloud used this in his talk recently as an example of his concept of the “infinite canvas” possible for comics on the web.

Second, some of you, especially those of you who have witnessed my pooh-poohing of the role of “visual rhetoric” in teaching, may be wondering why I’m interested at all in this comic stuff. Two basic reasons. First, while I’m still not convinced that overt attention to “the visual” has that much of a role in introductory writing classes (at least the introductory classes we have here at EMU because of factors that involve both the students and the poor access to computer lab facilities), I am very convinced it’s important in the advanced undergraduate writing class I teach all the time.

And comics play a role there because for the last couple of semesters, I’ve been teaching a simple comic writing/analysis exercise. This has partly been the result of Linda AK’s influence (a HUGE comic fan), and also because of Scott McCloud’s campus visit. Anyway, I came up with a comic assignment– here’s a version of it— and I think it has been reasonably successful. I’m set to teach this course online again this spring/summer (alas, not next school year though), and I’m planning on switching things up a bit. And I want to include some other “wacky” examples of comics.

Which is why I’m linking now.

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Cool Comic Maker

Steve's comic

This isn’t quite how I feel (but close, I suppose). Anyway, the thing that’s really cool here is a page called stripcreator, which I found via a student in my online 328 class.

Oh, and this reminds me that Scott McCloud is speaking tonight; more on that later….

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Blogging as a "career?"

One of my students in my Writing for the World Wide Web page tipped me off to this the other day:

The U.S. Department of Labor puts out what I believe is an annual report called the Occupational Outlook Handbook. I recall this being the sort of thing you looked at when you went to the high school guidance counselor’s office to get ideas about what you wanted to do when you grew up; it was on paper in those days, of course.

Anyway, if you look under the entry for “writers and editors,” you will eventually come to this passage:

Bloggers write for the Internet. Most bloggers write personal reflections on a subject of close personal or professional interest. Some blogs take the form of a personal diary; others read like reports from the field—first-hand, subjective accounts of an event or an activity. Most blogs are written for recreational reasons with little expectation of earning a fee; however, some blogs promote a business or support a cause and may generate interest or income through other activities.

Well, sort of. There usually isn’t money in blogging, but I’m not sure it’s recreational exactly.

Actually, a search on monster.com with the key-term “blog” does turn up a surprising number of jobs. The problem is that most of them are on the computer-geek side of things– design an interface, be the software engineer for, etc. No ads that say something like “Seeking the random thoughts– sometimes useful, often times not– of a middle-aged academic blogger. Low six figures. Pseudoanonymous identity bloggers will be considered.” And so forth.

I guess I’ll keep looking….

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A writing/exercise tally: not a bad idea for me, too….

On Clancy “CultureCat” Ratliff’s blog, I noticed this morning she’s keeping a tally of her writing and exercise patterns. Not a bad idea linking writing to working out, especially while working on the dissertation.

I remember when I was in the midst of that project— wow, I just realized, this was ten years ago to the month (I am getting old!)– I didn’t take this approach. I just ate and ate and wrote and wrote and generally did not take care of myself. I was in even much worse shape than I am right now, and that’s saying something; the workload this term has made the gym seem like a distant memory.

Sigh….

Well, maybe I’ll get some exercise walking to and from my hotel to the Palmer House in Chicago.

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On writing talks

I can’t say that I’ve been somewhat MIA on my blog simply because I’ve been working super-duper hard on talks that I’m giving at the CCCCs and at the Jacobson Symposium in Omaha the following week. That’s only part of it. The week before last was winter break, and while I did blog and work a lot while in Florida, I also vacationed a lot too, which means that I fell too far behind on work things due this past week. And there was also a fistful of meetings and other obligations in the department. It was one of those weeks that felt like two weeks.

Anyway, even if I haven’t been working super-hard on my presentations, I have been working. I’m not completely done with either of these spiels but I have good starts on both and, in a sense, they are both written in my head already. This is not to say that I am ready to give these talks, nor is it to say that I am going to just “wing it.” But I’m getting there.

I know that I’ve written about this here in the past– actually, almost exactly a year ago— but it’s on my mind so I’ll say it again: in the choice between conference performance styles of someone “reading a paper” versus “speaking/talking extemporaneously,” I say “reading a paper” wins out. Listening to someone read something out loud that isn’t meant to be read out loud can be painful, but I think it is much worse to listen to someone, ah, “wing it.” Let me put it to you this way: just “winging it” often ends up being a bit like singing in the shower: sure, it sounds fine in there to you, but try that in front of other people and it usually goes poorly. So, IMO, unless you’re a really REALLY good public speaker and/or you basically have a presentation that you wrote previously memorized, it’s probably best to read something.

If my speaking role is small/short, obviously interactive, and/or extremely casual, I prepare some notes– possibly a hand-out– and that’s about it. These sorts of settings would include what at the CCCCs are called “Special Interest Groups,” workshops (which are basically the same as teaching and things like that tend to be too interactive to plan too carefully), roundtable discussions, etc.

But if my speaking role is not short, which is the case for both of the things I have upcoming, I need to write a script. And I say “a script” as opposed to “a paper” or “an article” because I think a presentation script has to sound good in a way that’s different from something meant completely for the page, and it has to be relatively short. In my experience, a 15-20 minute presentation should be about eight pages long, double-spaced. And better to be the speaker whose presentation is a little short than the one who is still rambling on after 25 minutes.

There are two different things I’m playing around with this year that are new for me. First, PowerPoint slides, and lots and lots of ’em. At last year’s CCCCs, I went to see a fantastic presentation by Lawrence Lessig. Most of Lessig’s fantastic-ness was the very smart things he had to say, but almost as impressive to me was the “show” of his presentation, which included about a million slides. Most of them were very simple– just a few words on a screen– but the effect was fantastic. So while I’m not hoping to imitate Lessig exactly, I am going to have a bunch of slides in the spirit of Lessig.

Well, that and Stephen Colbert’s “The Wørd” segments on his Comedy Central show. In other words, I’m hoping to have a lot of slides that are a combination of informative and entertaining.

Assuming the LCD projector works, of course.

The second thing I’m playing around with– probably after the conference, actually, though who knows, maybe before– is this software that Collin mentioned recently in this post which is supposed to make it easy to merge audio and PowerPoint (or Keynotes) presentations and end up with an mp4 multimedia presentation. The software is called Profcast, and other than what I just wrote, I have no idea how it works yet. If I get around to finishing my presentations soon, I’ll let you know….

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Edison's "Multi-media" Inventions


I was going to subtitle this post “If I write about this on my official blog, does at least part of my trip become a tax deduction?” But I’m not…. And I had also meant to post this a couple of days ago. It’s funny how being “on vaction” actually meant I had more time to do this sort of blog work. But I digress…

Anyway, my last stop on my winter break vacation in Florida was The Edison and Ford Winter Estates in Fort Meyers, FL and, among other things, I was quite struck by the number of ways in which Edison’s inventions paved the way for the writing and multi-media technologies we use now.

Some of it is stuff you all knew about already. At the top of this entry is a photo of an early phonograph. You turned the flywheel on the left to a specific speed and then talked into the small thing in the middle/right part of it, which then etched the vibrations/recordings in a piece of tin foil-like stuff. To play it, you reversed everything.

Edison phonograph
Not a very good picture, but this is a phonograph that Edison himself worked with. Apparently, Edison was so deaf that he literally would bite into the phonograph to hear/feel the playback. According to the information at the exhibit, Edison’s teeth marks are in the upper-left hand side of the machine.

Edison film stuff
And of course, Edison was one of the inventors/innovators responsible for “moving pictures.” Here are some examples of early movie cameras. One thing I didn’t realize/learned from the exhibit: Edison set up a film company in Queens, NY, and his company made what is often considered one of the first “great” silent films, The Great Train Robbery. But apparently (and this is again according to the things they had at the Edison/Ford museum), Edison was soon passed by other early film pioneers like DW Griffith and Louis Mayer.

Early networking?
But then there are the inventions that are a bit less well-known– at least to me. Here’s a (bad, unfortunately) picture of an early office dictation machine. Essentially, the boss talked into the contraption at the bottom and then the recording was sent out to one of “the girls” via a telephone-like interface so that it could then be typed up.

Mimeograph #1
I don’t know exactly what this says about me, but I guess the writing/media technology that I found most surprising was the Mimeograph. You remember the mimeograph machine, don’t you? I certainly remember getting those purple-lettered hand-outs all the way through my schooling, and I think I actually used one of these babies when I first started teaching college as a grad student in the late 1980s.

Anyway, it turns out Edison earned a patent on the mimeograph in 1876, though his was quite a bit different from when I remember it. His original machine was flat (the one on the right) and the stencils were created by what was called an “electric pen:”

Electric Pen

When I first saw this in the museum (with just this label of “Electric Pen” and no explanation), my first thoughts were “what the heck is that?” This explanation at the IEEE Virtual Museum helped. Basically, you used the pen to create a stencil-like sheet that could be run through the mimeograph machine. As the IEEE site points out, this particular technology was replaced with the more efficient typewriter, first a special kind that could make stencils and then with carbon paper.

There were a few other pictures, but you get the idea.

I don’t have time to puzzle it all out right now, but I guess I just found it striking somehow that this sort of simple duplication technology has been around as long as it has. This sort of simple “desktop publishing” certainly was an important part of my own education and my own study as a writer; perhaps there’s something worth exploring here a bit more? Hmmmm….

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Blargon (?!) in the NYT (and none of it from me…)

Loyal readers, do you remember how, a couple weeks ago now, I had a post seeking blog specific jargon? Well, I feel comfortable now revealing that the inquiry that prompted that post came from none other than William Safire and it resulted in this article in the New York Times Magaine this weekend.

Well, okay, it wasn’t from Safire directly; it was from one of his researchers. But he (the researcher, that is) did email and leave me a phone voice mail message about this back at the end of January/begining of February, and I obliged with a blog posting trolling for requesting input.

It’s an okay enough piece, but I guess I have two critiques, both of which I suppose are semi-obvious. First, a lot of the terms/jargon in this article seem, well, a bit of a stretch for me. I mean, “moonbats?” “deliciousing?” “blegging?” I dunno…

Second, Safire makes no mention of me nor any of the comments on my post about this. I feel kinda used.