Blog 10 meme checkup

As I revisited my meme from last week, I found what I suspected I would find. The platform I used was based on the audience making likes and comments on memes (iFunny). My meme performed poorly, only getting seven likes (one of them was my like) and zero comments out of the 470 people that viewed it. There were a couple of things that I could have done better to make my meme circulate more. First, I posted my meme around 3 a.m. which was not peak meme hour so not as many people were exposed to it. Second, my meme was not made in a normal way; for an assignment. Memes are usually spontaneous and it was hard getting used to taking it seriously for class. Lastly, my meme was not as exigent as it could have been. It was funny because it vaguely was directed at UIUC students and the Dos Equis commercials, even though they are still funny, first aired a long time ago. Something else I could have done to circulate the meme more, was to add it to other social media for more exposure. I still think that the meme I made was pretty funny, but my opinion is biased since I created the meme even though I recognize that it could have been funnier and that there are better memes than that specific meme.

Meme blog

For my meme I choose to combine an image, text, as well as drawing in part of the image. I believe that just an image with some text is a hilarious way of getting a message across the Internet. People don’t always watch videos and images with text are much quicker and easier to read, therefore making it a more popular choice. I choose an image from Google if a squirrel dressed in a spiffy suit. I then felt the need to add a top hat to complete the image, so I drew it in with standard tools on the iPhone. I also added text referencing the Dos X commercials with “The Most Interesting Man In The World”. The personification of the squirrel in my meme catches the reader off guard which makes it funny. I choose a squirrel because that is constantly relevant to student at UIUC since squirrels run rampant in the community. Also the Dos X commercial are relatively new and still referenced in pop culture. For my meme to be seen, I published it via iFunny collective with the tags #squirrels and #themostinterestingmanintheworld. I chose iFunny because it is an easy method to generate memes even bough it is not the most popular choice. There are still thousands of daily users on iFunny so hopefully my meme can get some recognition through this platform. I do not have a Twitter unfortunately so I am not able to post it on that platform. I personally did not think the meme was funny enough for Reddit and did not want to hurt my cred. IFunny was the next best option to post my meme.

https://ifunny.co/fun/Y1DWmQuK5?s=cl

Discussion 11/28

An affordance of maps is that maps are much more easy to read than directions or text describing a location. Maps have been around for a long time and there is already a map for most places.  A map depends on space. Space allows a reader to interpret the map more easily by noticing the spacing between elements and comparing the space to reality. The space on a map helps the reader visualize what is shown on the map. All the gathering data required for creating/designing maps and presenting the maps spatially tells the reader what the author finds important. The author controls what the map is about and what it contains as well as what the map does not contain. Something that could improve this unit is using the program Arc GIS; it is kind of difficult but map making on this program is cool.

Map Proposal

Edgar and I are planning on making a map to view where the amount and type of crime that occurs in areas in Chicago and creating a different map to view the amount and type of fast food restaurants in these same areas in Chicago. My partner and I would like to see the correlation between these two subjects and measure their relationship. After, we discover the relationship between fast food and crime, we would like to understand how closely the two subjects are related and why the two are related or not and by how much.

Several arguments can be claimed with our findings. Our original hypothesis is that places with more crime will have higher amounts of fast food. We still are not sure until we actually put the map together. We believe that our claim could have several explanations as well. More fast food chains in an area could be a result of greater population, average income in the area, customer taste, etc. More crime in an area could be a result of greater population, average income in the area, and other possible explanations that just so happen to overlap with the same possible explanations for the amount of fast food chains in an area. Physically viewing a map that details both of these statistics could be an interesting find.

Once we have done enough research where we can start planning out our map, the next step would be to draft it out. With pen and paper it would easy to get in and plan out our vision, after solidifying our draft we will go into Illustrator to construct our map. With Illustrator’s use of layers, we can easily overlay the different information we have and categorize the information on our end to work smoothly.

Our intended audience could be anyone who could learn from this study and anyone who wants to make a positive difference in an area by reducing crime and improving health for citizens. Potential candidates that fit in these criteria are city planners, doctors, politicians, nutritionists, etc. The wide difference in living conditions between neighborhoods have a very big impact on the lives of the people living there, especially on younger lives.

The entire city of Chicago is a very large and diverse place, both in terms of people and living conditions. While we started our thought process with the city in mind, we will probably need to focus on certain areas whether that being Northside vs. Southside, certain neighborhoods, downtown or. areas further away; once we move further into this project’s timeline we will get a better idea on what to do, especially with peer review and comments. The same thing goes for fast food, we can focus on a specific restaurant, we had McDonald’s in mind, or use fast food in general. Both choices we have to make have the risk of skewing the data. Choosing a more specific area will have the audience see a place with hardly any crime/fast food or one with a ton of both. For someone with little knowledge of Chicago, they could get a biased impression of the city as a whole.

Audio Wrap-Up

Sound as a mode is great for focusing on what is being said in a message. Videos can be distracting with visuals and sound is more pure in a sense.

The relationship between audio and space is powerful  because the location of audio in relation to other audio could have a different meaning based on that location. To make sense of audio and space in a relationship, we can think of it as a movie; if scenes were out of order, then the movie would be bad and not make sense.

Recording, editing, and recombining audio tells a lot about writing, literacy, rhetoric, and WAM at large. All of the editing done to audio can completely change the meaning of the original audio. The audio can be re-purposed to a brand new and original audio/message.

The only thing I can think of at the moment to improve this unit would be finding a better standard audio editing program than Audacity.

Freewrite 10/17

All of the formatting, disruption, and glitches that we talked about last week is important throughout WAM. Different formatting and glitches help readers distinguish works between different authors. Every author has a unique style that can be detected and enjoyed through these glitches. We discovered that works do not have to be perfect to still be legitimate. This applies to all sorts of writing, including, books, songs, etc.

Audio as a medium can be manipulated and distorted. This helps to make the audio unique and can even create something brand new.

Blog 5

Mashup described by Sinnreich is sampling music. This is a form of art as Sinnreich sees these mashups as “post-postmodern”. Sinnreich went back to the history of mashups by recalling cut-ups, which are the very essence of postmodernism. Cut-ups forced people to evolve and think in different ways. The cut-ups, however, were meant to “disrupt the ‘master narrative,’”(Sinnreich), while mashups give the master narrative more power. Every sample of a mashup has is there for a reason and brings the cultural history and meaning of the original sample and combines it with other samples; this makes for a greater whole as a complete project. Reappropriation is trying to redefine meaning of sounds and how stereotypes are giving false information. A Tribe Called Red remixes the Atlanta Braves’ “Tomahawk Chop” anthem into an anthem that “prompts listeners to reinterpret this facet of American sports culture as a racist pageantry of ‘savage violence,’” (Giacona). Native American culture is associated with “savagery” in the world of American sport culture. A Tribe Called Red  attempt to reappropriate these stereotypes by making music that does not marginalize Native Americans. The song “Tomahawk Chop” does not come close to resembling any Native music; it is just a song based on stereotypes. In this case, the key difference between reappropriation and mashup is that reappropriation is the attempt to untie any previous connections to a theme and redefine these connections, while mashup is using many different parts of different things and combining them into a unified whole that includes the history, culture, and depth of each individual part. The term reappropriation is important when it comes to writing across media. One must be careful when redefining themes to make sure the message is clear and powerful, as well as distributed throughout a target community of people. The term mashup is more closely associated with composition. Mashup is about all the individual parts creating a whole project and composition focuses on the parts that make up a whole work which is essentially the same thing.

Graffiti Reflection Questions

The relationship for graffiti and space has evolved from my perspective. Before, I thought that each piece of graffiti needed its own wall or to be singled out. After going to the Sipyard, I witness art interacting with surrounding art and those pieces interacting with other pieces. The art was a collection of smaller pieces of art that create a magnificent whole. The less space between graffiti, even if it overlaps, makes something greater than each individual piece.

 

Exploring graffiti reveals a lot about rhetoric and writing. The rhetoric reveals deeper meaning in each piece of graffiti. Many political statements were made in different pieces of art. Writing reveals more about the message that the artist wants to depict as well as about how the audience interprets the message and what they take away from the piece of graffiti.

Angels’ Town

In Angels’ Town, graffiti is represented as gang territory. This is a different perspective on graffiti than what we have looked at in class. Now, colors represent a gang instead of tone if one were to rhetorically analyze graffiti. Rather than telling a story through the art of graffiti, Angel’s Town views graffiti as acts that are “anti-society”. Similarly, both styles of graffiti have deeper meanings than what we view on the surface and could be deciphered.