Rhetorical Strategy and Visual Art

I was recently at the hospital (for my little brother who broke his thumb snowboarding), where I noticed a sign that said "ANTIBIOTICS... kills bacteria NOT viruses." But it wasn't the caption that caught my attention, it was the visual animation it was displayed upon. The visual image was a cartoon. It had pictures of cartoon bacteria getting killed by antibiotics and cartoon viruses with a shield, showing that they are immune to the effects of the antibiotics. So below, I have some pictures similar to the cartoon I saw in the doctor's office, and then I also have pictures of what bacteria and viruses actually look like under a microscope.

Here's what viruses look like in the doctor's office:

Here's what viruses really look like:

Here's what bacteria looks like in the doctor's office:

Here's what bacteria really looks like:

Here’s what N1H1 looks like at the doctor's office:

Here’s what N1H1 really looks like:

So the way I see it, is that by reducing the immediacy of the images presented to patients, you essentially "euphemize" an image, or make what is really scary and essentially deadly, appear almost silly and controllable; that is a rhetorical strategy employed in visual art.

Kids get introduced to Technology so young :)

This video has more of a point than just being simply adorable! :) That is my nephew, Jacob. He is 3 months old there, and yes, he is having a blast on the computer. In fact, that baby has used a computer, pushing a particular set of keys for a particular reaction (either noise or lights), before he has said his first word, or used the potty. It seems that modern humans are innately attracted to computers, simply because computers are a remediation of the past, and I wonder how much more of an advantage children who are born into a techno-savvy world have over the generations like mine, and those that came before, who had to learn had to learn how to adapt as opposed to having it immediately available?

Immediacy and Film Censorship

Bolster, David Jay and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P., 2000:
99-112.

Bolster and Grusin make a cool point about immediacy and censorship when they state: "Books are not censored as strictly as film and television because for our visual culture the written world does not have the immediacy that a moving picture has" (99). So while pornographic novels may fall just under the radar of cultural scrutiny, when it comes to photographs, which attempt to mimic the real, "the cultural line is clearly crossed" (99). Moreover, the idea that because movies and television are "photographs in motion" (99), explains why pornographic film and photography is deemed scanty. It seems to me that the immediacy of the photos and film is what alters the cultural acceptation and reception of erotica.; nonetheless, it is all a remediation of what came before; pornographic flip- books, now that's techno-savvy :).

Video Games are Patriotic :)

Bolster, David Jay and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT P.,
2000.

Video games attempt to mimic the real; through transparent immediacy they literally "get into the heads" of players," which may be why many "gamers" have that foggy stare with gapping mouths as they are consumed in their virtual life :). For me the transparent immediacy and the mental consumption that many video games possess is terrifying, especially given that so many of the popular games today are saturated with death, devastation, violence and war. Yet despite the collective goal of violence and destruction that many popular games now promote, Bolster and Grusin claim that "ideologically the player is asked to defend or reestablish the status quo, so that even though the violence of the games appears to be antisocial, the ultimate message is not" (91); which is an interesting thought given that I had believed prior that war video games only sprouted mini-spawns of Satan. .So maybe video games aren’t from the devil after all; I only look forward to examining the cultural affect interactive games seem to have upon people.

Technology and Free Speech?

I was really interested in Bolster's and Grusin's discussion of how "new media, particularly the internet, will bring about a new kind of democracy." (74) While they acknowledge that this is an idea held by "enthusiasts," many theorists also take this idea of technology becoming a means of authorization and democratization. Bolster and Grusin use Howard Rheingold, who states: [computer mediated communication]... challenges the existing political hierarchy's monopoly on powerful media communications and perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy" (74). Yet, I wonder if the internet offers only a mock-freedom? Yes I can make a blog, and a twitter, and I can voice my opinions and political viewpoints on pre-constructed internet forums. Sure I can put up pictures and video clips, but in the end there is always someone at the end of the cord who can close my accounts or remove any inappropriate content; so where is the power? In China the government has controlled the content available on Google; my Google is not the same as theirs. Which comes to a basic question of access: who has access to say what goes on the internet; and in the end it isn’t average Joe, or even an above-average smart person. However, I definitely appreciate the potential implication that the internet allows for some room for free speech, but I’m not too sure if it can lead to a “citizen-based democracy” because the same people who have access and intellect enough to speak opinions and be active in a political (online) forum are the same people who would have had access and intellect enough to participate in politics without internet access. So free speech? No, not necessarily; but what is made available is the chance to become active and opinionated, and isn’t that how all revolutions start?

Media Representation and Reality

Bolster and Grusin bring amazing insight into media and what it presents. I tied their discussion on this innate cultural desire for hypermediacy to Saussure’s sense of the sign and signifier. So in essence, the media presented on the internet is a signified sign, or a constructed representation of the real. Bolster and Grusin continue, stating that “the desire for immediacy leads digital media to borrow avidly from each other as well as from their analog predecessors such as film, television, and photography” (9). So what results is a very purposeful, and rhetorical, organization of media representation. Moreover, despite what exactly is being represented through media “all of them seek to put the viewer in the same space as the objects viewed” (11), which is a terrifying thought in itself. It seems that if reality is emulated through media, then what is real becomes obscured. But Saussure’s argument on the signified and the sign was configured far before the internet and digital media. Yet Bolster and Grusin argue that “new media [is] doing exactly what their predecessors have done: presenting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other media” (14). Bolster and Grusin even discuss how this hypermediacy can be emulated in oil paintings (36-37), stating “earlier media sought immediacy through the interplay of aesthetic value of transparency with techniques of linear perspective, erasure, and automaticity, all of which are strategies also at work in digital technology” (24). So should anyone really be concerned with how digital representations attempt to mimic the real representation? Isn’t that what all artists have done for centuries? Maybe the real is made so through our representations of it, whether it be filtered through technology or art, or any other type of mimicry. Either way, it’s obvious that humans will continue to create representation of reality, and will do so in a rhetorically strategic way.

Broadband for all?

The news today has been saturated with discussions on this idea of giving ALL people access to high-speed internet... interesting idea...

Here's a link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/broadband/6949561/Super-fast-broadband-for-the-whole-country-is-vital-to-future-prosperity.html