Rhetoric: January 2008 Archive Page

Frontline (PBS). This quote is from one of the producers, Caitlin McNally. There's not a whole lot there that's new to me, but it looks like the show will be good introduction to the subject.

The majority of teenagers we talked to expressed good-natured exasperation that their parents "didn't know how to work a computer" or barely understood text messaging. I was confident that because I'm completely comfortable using a computer, e-mail and a cell phone, I'd relate pretty quickly to how the kids we met communicate online. This was not the case.

Writing an e-mail for a lot of the kids we talked to is equivalent to sitting down and hand-writing a letter for me. They described e-mail as a slow, archaic way to keep in touch with your aunt halfway across the country or apply for a summer internship. Even the most articulate kids who aced all their English classes could switch effortlessly into IM or text-speak; quick, pithy, shorthand Internet language was second nature to almost all the kids we met. They're bilingual, and they intuitively understand an entire culture generated by the Internet, with customs and vocabulary that we had to learn step-by-step.

Maybe even more striking to me was how social networking sites have become fully integrated into kids' lives. I didn't build my first profile until after college; it felt underground and novel, like being in on a joke. I'd never even heard the term "social networking." Having a profile on the Internet was ancillary to my "real" life, while for the kids we met, it has become a fundamental element of what they do each day and how they represent who they are.

A close professional contact who regularly takes on student interns shared this list of guidelines, which she has found necessary to include when orienting a new intern to the routine of office work.

Although the site is a non-profit educational organization, and thus the environment is more relaxed and forgiving than it might be in the typical business setting, I have seen student interns wearing sweats over a team uniform (with bags of gear piled in the corner).

Millennial students are very social creatures, and they are used to being able to choose how to channel their enthusiasm and interests. Students who are used to multi-tasking may be tempted to fill up slow spots with Facebook or Youtube, which may be acceptable in a work-study position that asks them to check out library books or just make sure people don't vandalize the computer labs. But most entry-level jobs require stretches of solitary vigilance -- by the telephone in the front office, in the hall waiting to escort a visitor to and from a meting, or simply waiting to get a word in edgewise while their immediate supervisor conducts routine business with a constant stream of customers or co-workers.

Seeing exactly what my contact felt had to be spelled out is a useful starting point for the professional development component of my "Intro to Literary Study" class.

1. The Center's daily dress code is casual business attire--no jeans or sports clothing.
2. The dress code for Center events is formal business attire, i.e. suit.
3. When you are working, friends may not visit you.
4. Cell phone use during work is strongly discouraged.
5. You are expected to focus on your work, make good use of your time, and avoid interrupting your supervisor or fellow students unnecessarily.
6. Please greet visitors, welcome them to the Center and ask how you can help.
7. When answering telephones, please use this format:  "Hello. You have reached [ORGANIZATION NAME]. [YOUR NAME] speaking. How may I help you?"
8. If you are stuck on a project or need direction, you are expected to make this known in a timely manner.
9. Remember that no task is too small. All tasks are important to the functioning of the Center. You are expected to do your best work on all assignments, and to contribute to the smooth functioning of the Center.
10. Team work is important to the success of all Center events. All interns are expected to take part in planning major events and to contribute ideas for carrying out projects effectively. When possible, you will have opportunities for decision-making and supervision.
11. Interns are expected to act professionally in representing the Center to other departments or even people from outside the University.
12. If you are unable to work during your scheduled hours, you must communicate this to your supervisor in a timely manner. Missing work or events without communicating with the supervisor is not acceptable or professional behavior.
13. You are expected to keep all work areas neat and organized. File folders are to be returned to their proper places before you leave work.
14. You are expected to document progress in planning and carrying out activities on the proper forms in the event folders.
15. You should maintain a folder under your name (Smith, Mary Spr08) on the Center computer that you use. Projects should be organized within your folder by title so that you supervisor or another student staff member can access materials in your absence. You should log in under the account provided to you, not your own account.

Some thoughtful development of a powerful meme in cyberculture studies, from Henry Jenkins:

Talking about digital natives and digital immigrants tends to exagerate the gaps between adults, seen as fumbling and hopelessly out of touch, and youth, seen as masterful. It invites us to see contemporary youth as feral, cut off from all adult influences, inhabiting a world where adults sound like the parents in the old Peanuts cartoons -- whah, whah, whah, whah -- rather than having anything meaningful to say to their offspring. In the process, it disempowers adults, encouraging them to feel helpless, and thus justifying their decision not to know and not to care what happens to young people as they move into the on-line world.

In reality, whether we are talking about games or fan culture or any of the other forms of expression which most often get associated with digital natives, we are talking about forms of cultural expression that involve at least as many adults as youth. Fan culture can trace its history back to the early part of the 20th century; the average gamer is in their twenties and thirties. These are spaces where adults and young people interact with each other in ways that are radically different from the fixed generational hierarchies affiliated with school, church, or the family.

Great satire from The Onion.

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

Lauren Collins (The New Yorker)

Teen-age identities mutate so quickly online, and can be masked so easily, that by the morning after Megan was pronounced dead Josh Evans had vanished from MySpace. It wasn't until a month after her death that a neighbor named Michele Mulford told the Meiers that Curt and Lori Drew, who lived four houses down, had created "Josh" in concert with their thirteen-year-old daughter, a longtime friend of Megan's. (An eighteen-year-old girl who worked for the Drews was also involved.) The two thirteen-year-olds had recently quarrelled. Mulford's own daughter, also thirteen, had been given the password to the account, and had sent at least one unkind message to Megan in Josh's name. Megan had accompanied the Drews on several vacations, and they knew that she was taking medication. For nearly a year, on the advice of the police, the Meiers had kept quiet about the Drews' involvement in Megan's death.

On Jan 14, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games rolled out Fatworld -- a digital work that illustrates the complex connections between health, class, economics, and politics, via the rhetoric of the sandbox game. 

A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined "winning" outcome.  A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player to shoot waves of attacking enemies, because the game ends when the enemies encroach upon the player's position.  By contrast, an open-ended game such as Sim City permits the player to decide whether the goal of the game is to create a thriving gridlocked metropolis, a road-free utopia. a network of hamlets insulated by forests, or an urban wasteland.

Fatworld presents a series of interconnected systems, such as a socio-economic model, a political model, and (the most complex in the game) a nutrition and health model.  Playing Fatworld is a matter of figuring out how the game depicts connections between these systems.

The release of Fatworld seems perfectly timed, after McDonalds UK CEO Steve Easterbrook, ruminating on the causes of childhood obesity, noted last week that "there's fewer green spaces and kids are sat home playing computer games on the TV when in the past they'd have been burning off energy outside."  

Bogost is an accomplished games scholar and proponent of what the field in general calls "serious games."  His studio produced the Howard Dean for Iowa game, and has provided editorial material to the New York Times in the form of "newsgames" (a cross between a game and a political cartoon) such as Food Import Folly.

His book Unit Operations introduces a universal method for analyzing texts from literary works to video games, and this week students in my Video Game Theory and Culture class are reading his book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Knowing Ian was behind Fatworld, I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.

I wanted to write a review that discusses the game's educational potential, its elegance, and its rhetorical effectiveness at using the game format to communicate a message about health (and politics, economics, and lifestyle). 

I wanted to say I loved the isometric cuteness of the game world, and that the puffy menu bars and the bloated cartoon hand that serves as the mouse pointer fit wonderfully with the theme of the game. I wanted to praise the Govern O Mat, where you can select food-related legislation and click the "Bribe" button to influence a politician. I wanted to try to work restaurant review clichés into my review.

I did not want to do what I'm about to do instead -- bellyache about a confusing interface that violates basic UI principles; puzzle over displays with unexplained readouts that never change and clocks that count up by increments of four and down by increments of two (why?); grumble about design flaws that make mini-games unnecessarily confusing; and grouse about bugs that make minigames cut off abruptly for no reason.

FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game's goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies, and regulations. Existing approaches to nutrition advocacy fail to communicate the aggregate effect of everyday health practices. It's one thing to explain that daily exercise and nutrition are important, but people, young and old, have a very hard time wrapping their heads around outcomes five, 10, 50 years away. You can choose starting weights and health conditions, including predispositions towards ailments like diabetes, heart disease, or food allergies. You'll have to construct menus and recipes, decide what to eat and what to avoid, exercise (or not), and run a restaurant business to serve the members of your community. FATWORLD comes with numerous foods, recipes, and meal plans, or players can create their own from the foods in their pantry or their imaginations.

I'm assigning this as tomorrow's discussion question for my Video Game Culture and Theory course. The in-game tutorial is long, and it's not immediately clear how to exit out of some windows (the circle with the X in it is not close enough to where the information is listed), and when the message "enter" appears on the screen, I keep wanting to push the "enter" button (rather than space, which is what the game expects). So I'm still exploring at this stage.

It's always hard for the kids to make the transition to "Daddy is working" when, from their perspective, it looks like I'm just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time.

When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just learned that I had accidentally deleted the directory that contained the entire database for the Seton Hill weblogs, as well as the last 7 or so years of this weblog.

I knew that my ISP backs up my whole site weekly, and I knew that I had added a nightly backup for those crucial files, but I knew that I'd have to put in a support ticket and I knew I'd lost the work I'd done since the last backup.  I have an RSS feed that sends me all the comments that get entered into any of the blogs, and I can recover any missing new blog entries from the HTML pages generated by the database.  I've been through this before, though not as a result of my own stupidity.

I was a bit cranky, but I got the thing from the shelf. Even though I knew I was poised for a couple of hours of copy-and-paste tedium, as I recreated a course website from the HTML files generated by the database, something penetrated my brain when my wife offered a very nice "thank you."

My wife is of the "I shouldn't-have-to-say-it-because-it-should-be-obvious" school of thought. That generally goes for saying "please" and "I'm sorry," too.

But a few days ago, when the kids were clamoring for attention and she was curled up in bed with the lights off, she said something like, "Your kids are so excited to be able to play with you."

So it seemed, for a moment, that maybe my wife was making a particular effort. I asked her whether maybe she had made a new year's resolution to be extra nice to me.

She had an instant reply. "No, I am not going to spend the year sucking up to you. That's not my idea of a new year's resolution. You can put that in your blog."

Oh, well. It was a nice thought there.