Reflective Learning Essay
Coming in to English 212 with Professor Marc Bousquet, I had minimal experience writing anything but traditional, linear essays. Now, as the class draws to a close, I have written eight blog posts, created two slideshare presentations, composed a bitstrips comic, created two digital stories, written two linear essays of 2102 and 2833 words, filmed a four minute, thirteen second tactical media YouTube video, and created this project website. My project website is comprised of 20 pages, not including this one or the annotated bibliography, and contains 8174 words of my writing. It also includes a chart illustrating my research findings, three drawings of my own, six pictures taken from other sites, and eight external links. The annotated bibliography includes nine sources.
I did not by any means jump immediately into composing hypertext at the very beginning of the class. Instead, the class started out by focusing on melodrama, introducing us to to the topic by having us write about familiar topics like cartoons and Harry Potter. Only then did we move into more technical discussions of melodrama by authors like Singer and Williams. Also early in the class, we watched Birth of a Nation, and used our developing understanding of melodrama to compose storify digital stories to explain how the film used melodramatic rhetoric to convey its racist message. My comprehension of melodrama solidified particularly well, I believe, when we created slideshows in which we found real-world news stories and issues that we could analyze using writings by Anker and Williams, and issues that we thought deserved to be approached with a melodramatic rhetoric. It was at this point that I clearly saw the power of the melodramatic mode to eliminate room for debate in some situations, and to lend legitimacy to marginalized opinions in others. This slideshow was also the first work I did on the issue of invasive Asian carp, which was to be my central focus throughout the second half of the class.
Shortly after this point, I created a traditional linear paper about Asian carp. This paper was basically in the format I was used to, but it also incorporated the essential element of a literature review, with which I had been unfamiliar before this class. Professor Bousquet emphasized how in a real research paper, sources should not be used merely to support ones argument. Instead, they should serve to show what has been already said about a topic, and to open up a space where the author can step in and create an original contribution.
After reading some melodramatic poems by Langston Hughes and creating poems of our own to learn to convey urgency like him, we made a definite shift into the latter half of the course by writing in a second storify how we could use the melodramatic strategies of Battleship Potemkin to influence people's opinions on the issues on which we had chosen to focus--in my case, Asian carp. After this point, though we also read and analyzed Bachelder's U.S.!, we mostly focused on our project websites and tactical media projects.
I think it was useful that I had the opportunity to ease my way into website creation by designing a personal site before I created my main project site. I am told that Weebly is very user-friendly, and I now realize it's true, but as somebody with little technological experience, more familiar with a trout tag than a hashtag, I did find it confusing at first. However, since I got to work with Weebly for my personal site, by the time I was composing my main hypertext, I felt reasonably comfortable, and enjoyed the opportunity to incorporate some graphic elements.
I found the process of composing hypertext much easier and more enjoyable than I expected. In the past, everything I had written had to form logical, step-by-step arguments. I had often been forced to write in an entirely impersonal tone, gouging the "I"s out of my writing and conveying my opinions by saying "it seems" a thousand times. However, carrying what we had learned about melodrama into our hypertext writing, we were encouraged to allow our personal interest in our issue, and even our outrage about it, to show through. We were allowed to go off on tangents, saying things that did not form part of a central argument, but that were interesting and relevant.
It was also enjoyable to, rather than always trying to bring in a new perspective on information that had already been discussed, to conduct some original research of my own. Rather than speculating as to whether people would be willing to try Asian carp if it were made available in stores, I got to actually go out and ask people whether they would. My research allowed me to reach a new perception of just how emphatically a commercial market for Asian carp in the U.S. could affect the Asian carp population.
I may be most proud, though, of my tactical media project. I created a parody of OneRepublic's "Counting Stars," and titled it "Eating Carp." The original video incorporates many of the elements of melodrama we discussed in class: the use of music (obviously), distribution to mass markets (as of December 15, 2014, it has 571,918,474 hits on YouTube), the demonization of aristocratic money-makers (consider the lyric "said no more counting dollars, we'll be counting stars"), and the idea of a victim-hero empowered by suffering (lyric: "everything that drowns me makes me want to fly"). In my video, then, I decided to apply the great things OneRepublic had already done in my own video, conveying the same urgency and directing it at the need to eat invasive carp, while also incorporating a humorous element. With advice from Professor Bousquet and Chase Lovelett, I was able to create a video with good sound quality and an engaging, visually varied video. The video garnered over 260 YouTube hits in its first four days, and I am hoping that it will continue to be viewed and spread my message.
English 212 was unlike any class I had taken before, and I will not deny that at first I was uncomfortable with the unfamiliar format. However, I began to enjoy it more and more as the class progressed. Both by studying the melodramatic mode and by writing in new media, those of us taking the class learned to compose works that would be viewed by somebody other than just a professor. We learned to create material with the potential to be available and appealing to mass audiences, and that could actually affect the way the population thinks about an issue.
This site was created by Joey Benevento in Emory University's Domain of One's Own Program as part of an English 212W class with Professor Marc Bousquet.
I did not by any means jump immediately into composing hypertext at the very beginning of the class. Instead, the class started out by focusing on melodrama, introducing us to to the topic by having us write about familiar topics like cartoons and Harry Potter. Only then did we move into more technical discussions of melodrama by authors like Singer and Williams. Also early in the class, we watched Birth of a Nation, and used our developing understanding of melodrama to compose storify digital stories to explain how the film used melodramatic rhetoric to convey its racist message. My comprehension of melodrama solidified particularly well, I believe, when we created slideshows in which we found real-world news stories and issues that we could analyze using writings by Anker and Williams, and issues that we thought deserved to be approached with a melodramatic rhetoric. It was at this point that I clearly saw the power of the melodramatic mode to eliminate room for debate in some situations, and to lend legitimacy to marginalized opinions in others. This slideshow was also the first work I did on the issue of invasive Asian carp, which was to be my central focus throughout the second half of the class.
Shortly after this point, I created a traditional linear paper about Asian carp. This paper was basically in the format I was used to, but it also incorporated the essential element of a literature review, with which I had been unfamiliar before this class. Professor Bousquet emphasized how in a real research paper, sources should not be used merely to support ones argument. Instead, they should serve to show what has been already said about a topic, and to open up a space where the author can step in and create an original contribution.
After reading some melodramatic poems by Langston Hughes and creating poems of our own to learn to convey urgency like him, we made a definite shift into the latter half of the course by writing in a second storify how we could use the melodramatic strategies of Battleship Potemkin to influence people's opinions on the issues on which we had chosen to focus--in my case, Asian carp. After this point, though we also read and analyzed Bachelder's U.S.!, we mostly focused on our project websites and tactical media projects.
I think it was useful that I had the opportunity to ease my way into website creation by designing a personal site before I created my main project site. I am told that Weebly is very user-friendly, and I now realize it's true, but as somebody with little technological experience, more familiar with a trout tag than a hashtag, I did find it confusing at first. However, since I got to work with Weebly for my personal site, by the time I was composing my main hypertext, I felt reasonably comfortable, and enjoyed the opportunity to incorporate some graphic elements.
I found the process of composing hypertext much easier and more enjoyable than I expected. In the past, everything I had written had to form logical, step-by-step arguments. I had often been forced to write in an entirely impersonal tone, gouging the "I"s out of my writing and conveying my opinions by saying "it seems" a thousand times. However, carrying what we had learned about melodrama into our hypertext writing, we were encouraged to allow our personal interest in our issue, and even our outrage about it, to show through. We were allowed to go off on tangents, saying things that did not form part of a central argument, but that were interesting and relevant.
It was also enjoyable to, rather than always trying to bring in a new perspective on information that had already been discussed, to conduct some original research of my own. Rather than speculating as to whether people would be willing to try Asian carp if it were made available in stores, I got to actually go out and ask people whether they would. My research allowed me to reach a new perception of just how emphatically a commercial market for Asian carp in the U.S. could affect the Asian carp population.
I may be most proud, though, of my tactical media project. I created a parody of OneRepublic's "Counting Stars," and titled it "Eating Carp." The original video incorporates many of the elements of melodrama we discussed in class: the use of music (obviously), distribution to mass markets (as of December 15, 2014, it has 571,918,474 hits on YouTube), the demonization of aristocratic money-makers (consider the lyric "said no more counting dollars, we'll be counting stars"), and the idea of a victim-hero empowered by suffering (lyric: "everything that drowns me makes me want to fly"). In my video, then, I decided to apply the great things OneRepublic had already done in my own video, conveying the same urgency and directing it at the need to eat invasive carp, while also incorporating a humorous element. With advice from Professor Bousquet and Chase Lovelett, I was able to create a video with good sound quality and an engaging, visually varied video. The video garnered over 260 YouTube hits in its first four days, and I am hoping that it will continue to be viewed and spread my message.
English 212 was unlike any class I had taken before, and I will not deny that at first I was uncomfortable with the unfamiliar format. However, I began to enjoy it more and more as the class progressed. Both by studying the melodramatic mode and by writing in new media, those of us taking the class learned to compose works that would be viewed by somebody other than just a professor. We learned to create material with the potential to be available and appealing to mass audiences, and that could actually affect the way the population thinks about an issue.
This site was created by Joey Benevento in Emory University's Domain of One's Own Program as part of an English 212W class with Professor Marc Bousquet.