This class has been helpful in discussing my own personal worldview in that it points out how knowledge has been communicated to me, and what is most helpful about this is it allows me to then identify which kinds of rhetoric I haven’t responded to, and have overlooked and excluded when forming my worldview. For example, in the Information-Argument section, I looked closely at the field of Music Scholarship, and found that musicians often overlook the opinion of the composer of music in favor of the opinions of commentators and historians. While to me personally I found this unfair, the realization could be applied to my own life: if my life could be understood as a work of art of my own creation, then I most often look to the opinions of others to determine who I am, who I should be, and how I will “create” myself. My personal worldview is often much more constructed by the views of those around me whom I respect, as opposed to constructions based on my own experience. However, my experience is closely tied to those around me, because I tend to surround myself with people whose experience is relatively similar to my own (for example, male college-aged students who own computers and cars and share my religious views). This in itself is another formative mechanism which heavily influences my worldview, but leaves massive gaps in experience, information, and therefore knowledge.
Category: Uncategorized
Website Selfy
Follow this link to check out this #selfy:
http://paulschirmer5.wix.com/selfy
Poetics:
In my website, I attempted to convey my screen self portrait and digital identity through different abstract feelings rather than directly. The home page exists as a starting point, and really conveys a belief about how I see myself – I identified trees and snow, and fire, and music, to attempt to convey a distance and separation between my identity and my “digital identity”. Most of how I perceive myself has nothing to do with my digital interactions, and the use of darkness, trees, and fire were a reference to things deep and carnal in our nature that have nothing to do with the digital age and are difficult to express even through media. I also designed the mood of the page to be somewhat mysterious, because i felt that it was in some ways meant to represent the core of who I was, which I myself am in many ways foreign to and still discovering. Thus the link in the word “escape”, which takes you to my second page, a “facebook” page which is not really my own but represents something about how I relate to others through media. I designed this page to be particularly hectic, with two videos playing immediately and gifs everywhere. The videos were chosen specifically because I’m hyper-aware of how Facebook tends to be a platform for displaying one’s best qualities, in particular one’s friends and social life. Clicking on the “Friends” button takes you to a page with an epic gif of Marvel’s Avengers entering battle; this is both how I like to perceive my friends (and myself among them) and how I want others to perceive my friends. Back at the facebook page, the “about” button takes you to a particularly gross page with the words, “messes that I haven’t tried to clean up in awhile” overlaid over photos of friends and me, usually awkwardly among them. These photos were representative of the mess of my current life. In many ways, I simply feel like I’ve made a host of mistakes which I don’t have time to clean up, and so they enter into the history of photos and are forgotten, except for when I see photos of them and memories come back to life. The song in the background contains the text which is overlaid, and I have special and somewhat depressing associations with it. The entire page was designed to be unappealing and “loud” in many senses. The “history” button of the facebook page takes you to a simple page with a picture of my sister. I have many siblings, and this is a photo of my youngest sister. Of any photo on earth, this one perhaps moves me the most, because it reminds me of my own ability to love, and the beauty of our existence. It reminds me of my whole family. It is representative of what is most important. And interestingly, it’s one of the only photos I’ve ever posted on my facebook wall. If you click this photo, you will be taken to another simple page, with a video of “All Glory Be to Christ”, a song by King’s Kaleidoscope. This is the extent of what is most important in my life, as it is represented digitally: my belief in God. Although it takes such a massive precedence in most of my life, I do not make it obvious in my internet presence, except for which youtube videos I watch, because I watch so many videos of worship music. This song, however, does convey some of my most fundamental beliefs. This page has no other links because I want whoever finds themselves there to watch the entire video.
Reflection:
While creating and then browsing my own website, many insights came to me regarding my own digital identity and mediated experience. One of the most significant was, I created a representation of my own distance from the digital community, and did this through a digital mode, and then found that this digital creation helped me understand things about myself, such that in the end my reflexive understanding of identity was influenced by and in some ways reliant on this digital self portrait. Regarding my identity, I realized that I have a tendency to divorce ideas of identity completely from any form of digital representation, simply because of a bias against it, and forget that it is a legitimate form of art and expression. Put in those words, I realize that I regard “art” with great respect, and giving digital media the same respect greatly changes my view of it. In many ways, I realize that my bias is sourced in a simple problem, which is that I am generally unskilled in anything related to computers or digital media. Another source of this bias is my hatred for the misuse of digital media in the form of pornography, which existed well before digital media and thus cannot be attributed to it. This recognition of bias has led me to further appreciate both my own work as well as that of others, and allowed me to continue to find value in reflection as I moved forward with my exploration of my own site.
Through my site I realized that although I have stopped updating my own facebook over the last years, my identity is still formed somewhat by other people when they view it. This shared identity is unavoidable; indeed, even if I were to delete my facebook entirely, those who know me would search for me online and not find me, and this is itself would inform their opinion of me. Similarly, my conscious decision to “shun” the facebook world would reinforce my own opinion of my identity; I would regard myself as “above” the social media world, and thus form further bias toward those who do have facebook accounts. This all points to a further conclusion: in this day and age, digital media and identity is generally unavoidable, and if one is unfamiliar with or purposefully distant from a given form of media, especially related to an online community, they are distancing themselves in some way from a very real community. communities no longer exist apart from their presence online; whether it be through a facebook event, instagram post, or tweet, social media and online discussion is how they present themselves, discuss and plan events, and codify views on the purpose of their own existence which in many cases would not otherwise exist. To separate from our digital identity would in many ways be separating from real people – or at least, their digital identity, which they consider to be themselves.
What is most concerning about all of this, to me, is that the nature of online mediated experience is just that – mediation. We all have the ability to mediate our own portrayal of ourselves. Certainly, we as a human race have always been able to do that to an extent, even if that is just choosing what to wear in the morning and how to style our hair; but just as the placing of mirrors in our homes has made us self-conscious to our own appearance, the introduction of the digital into our social lives provides both a place for us to perceive ourselves as others see us and make an attempt to control it. This control of the opinion of others is a disease which many have identified as such, and it is a result of the nature of mankind and our lives that we should care what others perceive us to be. It is negative because it gives us yet another reason to think more constantly about ourselves and less about the needs of others, which we need no more encouragement or occasion to carry out.
It was relieving to create a page which I had no intent to show to others (besides Dr. Hink of course) and the result was a page I actually wanted to show to others. I wanted others to view it and ask what it meant. I suppose this is what it feels like to create art that you’re proud of; you want others to see it, perceive it, experience it, and ask, “why” simply because they felt something they could not explain or describe. I’m not suggesting that my art necessarily does that; but I have recognized it as art, which is a big step. I wonder how much the idea that we are artists applies to this idea of digital identity, where it seems as if we create ourselves. Perhaps that is really where the addiction lies: at last, we have a form of media and art that both describes us and creates us at the same time; we can create ourselves. I don’t know if that’s good, or even really possible, but if we are convinced that it’s true, then it certainly has power.
Blog Entry 5
Autobiography:
Profession:
Noah’s Ark Whitewater Rafting
Community:
Entertainment/Culture:
“When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always exhilarating and sublime” – Henry Thoreau
I like Sprite
Exercise 4
Watching Sunrise:
Part 2:
The aspects of this experience that could not be quantified are many. The general mood of accomplishment a person feels when reaching the “top” of something couldn’t be quantified; relatively, it was a peak, but the hiker reached several such relative peaks on the way to this one without any thought of accomplishment. Which lead to the fact that the hiker reached his goal upon sitting down to watch the sunrise at the top of the hike. The increasing light made his steps more sure, and gradually reduced his fear of wild animals (which was a somewhat unfounded fear, but real to him nonetheless). So, upon sitting to watch the sunrise, his mind felt more peace; there was also an anticipation of this sunrise, knowing what it would probably look like but also aware that every sunrise is different. The thoughts that crossed his mind as the sun came up went from anticipation to wonder to contentment, once the experience was nearly finished and it was clear that the ‘moment’ had passed.
“George claimed that due to the history of composition studies, we have limited the possibilities for the visual in the teaching of writing, due to the filed of composition’s traditional ties to the written world” (Knight). In this passage, Knight begins to argue for the inclusion of more visual material in the classroom, due to the present generation’s heavy ties to and dependence on visual screens primarily. This relates to the experience of the hiker because in his mind, there is a big difference between what a picture can tell of a sunset, and what seeing one over time is like. With the hiker were two people, one of whom was taking pictures as the sun came up. Likely these photos will end up on a social media site, but looking at photos on a screen will not fully convey the experience of the sunset. Even combining the data information above with the pictures taken by the girl could not account for many things that the hiker was experiencing; namely, the associations he made with the past and memories of previous hikes, his hunger and how that distracted him from the sunset, or the guilt he felt at being distracted from the sunset by hunger. With a silent hiker, sitting watching the sunset, such unsaid thoughts or feelings could not be quantified or even identified, although perhaps they had a larger weight on his experience than did the sensory input of the light from the sun itself.
Blog Post #4
“We use the data to adjust the stories we already tell ourselves about our lives, and we use our stories about our lives to adjust, excuse or understand our data”
“The most important thing about today’s cryptopticon, Vaidhyanathan (2011) writes, is that ‘we don’t know all the ways in which we are being watched or profiled – we simply
know that we are. And we don’t regulate our behavior under the gaze of surveillance. Instead, we don’t seem to care’”
I think that for the most part, my “data self” is slanted toward what I do for school, and what I do for work, which is mostly related to music and Jewish Studies.
Blog Entry 3
In my Project on belief/story, I made a video about a friend of mine and her experience marrying two people. It conveyed a belief in spontaneity and confidence, and was told through voice dictation and brief sketches on a chalkboard. That medium lent itself well to conveying a feeling of charm and lightheartedness, but perhaps excluded aspects of that experience which were truly frightening as well as ignoring the aspects of the event which were deeply personal and complex.
In Project 2, Information and Proof, I found that things often included are many primary sources with regard to thought of different persons across a long period of time, and something excluded was the sense of life in music that can be covered by extensive, well-intentioned “research”.
Project 2 Summary and Reflection
Summary:
I organized my webtext to be easy to navigate and interesting to read. I tried to not give it an obvious or required flow between pages; to some extent, all the pages flowed into and contributed to each other, so I laid out the links to each page at the bottom of the page, with no intentional order. The audience that I imagined for this webtext was an audience of music students. I assumed that this group of students would be familiar with the ideas I offered and the examples I used, especially with regard to the types of texts. I imagined that my audience were musicians, and therefore pointed out things that they would be familiar with but may not have noticed. Rather than attempting to prove something that musicians might disagree with, I offered concrete examples to show them things they probably could support with their own experience. In terms of the images I used, I mostly just used snapshots of the pdf texts themselves. Sometimes this only included text, and other times it showed a graph; although these are not necessarily visual “hooks” like you might see on a blog post, this was not meant to be a blog but rather a scholarly commentary on other scholarship, so I didn’t think that anything more than that – like adding stock photos of music notes – would be helpful.
Reflection:
This project gave me great insight into how to zoom out and see the field of music scholarship as a specific worldview in itself. In terms of argument and proof, I found that information was never absolutely trusted as authoritative, nor was it ever considered entirely false or useless. As I suspect is true of many fields which study art, the grey area between fact and opinion is where scholarly conversation exists. When mounting an argument, no one authority could be cited as sufficient evidence; rather, a mountain of separate but congruent opinions could prove that a theory was legitimate, but could not prove anything as fact.
The topics of discussion in music are also quite varied: in the three sources I chose, one argued for the historical influence of an ethnic group on a single composer, one argued over the meaning and inspiration of a single piece, and one argued for a specific approach to a specific field in music theory. This shows that often it is not the music itself that is topic for discussion, but rather the context and surroundings of music which are discussed – most likely because it is the context, the composer, and the audience itself that gives music any meaning at all. So I suppose that scholarly writing in the field of music is a discussion of the source and foundation of meaning which inevitably people and composers find within music.
As for the creation vs. discovery of knowledge within music, I think there is a wide variety of opinion and worldview. Depending on how a person thinks about it, new music is either created out of nothing by people or it is discovered to some extent, and brought to the forefront of where it already existed. Through this project I think what sticks out to me about knowledge in music is that musicians are still digging up knowledge about composers who died centuries ago, and this new information finds life in the re-playing of the music these composers wrote. New discoveries about how a certain instrument was played or what certain notation meant can give new life to old music. It is for this reason that musicologists and music scholars continue to interplay with the field of history.
Situating these topics in the context of a worldview, I am first inclined to note that one cannot lump all musicians or music scholars or music historians or musicologists into a single uniform “worldview”. With this said, it is at least interesting to speculate on the effect that studying music may have on those persons, and how it affects their “information paradigm”. It seems to me that there is at least a common belief in beauty, and in the human being as a source or a conduit of beauty. Whether this beauty comes from within a person, or is the product of that person’s context, or is a reflection of a power much beyond a single person’s senses, is a subject for further discussion; but what all musicians may wrestle with more than many other fields is a fundamental belief in the value of music as art, as expression, as communication, as history, and as so many other things.
Knowledge and Context in the Music Discourse Community
In the article “Beethoven and His Jewish Contemporaries”, Malcolm Miller makes a case for the importance of Beethoven’s Jewish contemporaries on the Beethoven himself as well as the music of the time. This article represents a specific and interesting discourse community within the larger music community, and represents a category of Music literature that focuses on the composers and the context of the times, and provides insight into how information is collected and presented about composers and how these conclusions can be applied to other fields of study in the arts.
The author of this piece is someone from the University of London, who is evidently both a music scholar and a Jewish Studies scholar. In the abstract for this article it is noted that the audience was originally a crowd at a Jewish music festival in 1997, and it was originally presented as a lecture before it was converted to an article. The festival was also hosted by the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe. The evidence of this audience is evident in the article: first, Hebrew words were used, such as “Haskalah” (referring to the Jewish Enlightenment), which a Jewish audience would most likely be familiar with. Similarly, a given familiarity with Beethoven is assumed in the article, when it refers to his life, works, and relationships without much explanation. One such example is when the article references the “four note motif” in Beethoven’s string quartet in c# minor, assuming that the audience is familiar not only with this motif and this piece of music, but also with the Jewish music it supposedly takes from. I think this is very common in historical writings on composers in the field of music – most music scholars assume that their audience is familiar with a rather specific set of famous works by the most prominent composers in Western Music History (I’ve experienced this even in my classes, when a professor assumes the students know a specific piece). This is evidence that often, scholars write to other learned scholars in their field; rarely will a scholarly article come out that is written for non-professionals.
The source of information referenced in this article is also telling: in many cases, primary source documents such as letters, schedules, and contemporary writings are used to shed light on what a composer’s social life looked like. I chose this article because it focused not on the music of Beethoven so much as his social world and historical context, which is common in music – scholars are always either studying the music or connecting that music to its context. So, when context is studied, primary sources are used in conjunction with encyclopedias. Encyclopedias such as “the New Grove Dictionary for Music and Musicians” are used for basic information like birthdates, where composers were and when, and the works they made and when. An example of a primary source being used in this article is when the author presents a letter from Beethoven to a Jewish composer, written with obvious affection, simply to prove that they had a healthy relationship. In music literature it is equally important and difficult to identify why a piece of music was written – important because music is in nature reactionary and a commentary on the times, and difficult because it is often a matter of opinion. Yet this identifies a key subject in music literature as well as a paradox within its values.
Project 1 Reflection
In my project, I found that it was much easier to default to narrating as I would have before this class as opposed to actively making choices to put into practice the techniques we reviewed in class. Many of the concepts we talked about made sense in one way, but when it came down to putting them directly into my story it was very difficult. For example, I wanted to relate to the audience through as many senses as possible. One cool way I succeeded in doing that was by drawing the scenes as they came. I initially also tried to use descriptive language to help the story come alive, but found myself unsure of what really happened – what did it actually smell like, look like, feel like? Because I was telling another person’s story, I knew something of what she was feeling, but very little beyond that – so I was bound by how she told the story. I also found it hard to include very much beyond the plot itself, because 5 minutes was barely enough time to actually tell the story. Other than this, however, I was happy with the outcome of the story, and happy with how much it spoke for itself, in terms of plot and meaning.
Composing Summary
My narrative approach through my video, “The Officiant” was to be as descriptive as I could with setting in order to identify with the audience, and then to tell a funny story in order to convey a belief about people and being brave. I used the first minute of my narrative to set the stage for the rest of the story, by describing the main character and the setting she was in. I felt this was necessary in order to make familiar a setting that would otherwise be somewhat foreign to most viewers. I decided to make my narrative sound as natural as possible, even conversational, because it’s a casual story with some funny parts and an entertaining plot. To make it conversational, I added some of my own comments and let myself chuckle or pause when it felt right, just to show that I personally found the story amusing. When I was composing I didn’t have a clear thesis about the belief I was going to try to convey, but by the time I published it I knew that it was about Katie’s personality, and how she believed in stepping out of her comfort zone for the sake of other people and also for the sake of adventure and risk itself. Largely I let the story tell this on its own, and I hope that it was communicated, because I never say it outright. The genre I was going for was informal and fun, so that the audience felt drawn in by its light-heartedness and cheerfulness, and with the narrative itself I accomplished this by sticking to the plot but adding small anecdotes and descriptions of interesting personalities to create a certain culture of story within the viewers mind.
To accomplish this same goal with regards to genre and belief, the multimedia aspect of the story lent itself very well. Drawing simple pictures with a chalkboard automatically sets a precedent of childishness, which I think can have positive connotations with a certain level of freedom and lightness which compliments the theme of the story well. Most of the cartoons I chose to draw were of simple facial expressions, which was intentional to convey feelings of joy, anxiety, or simple happiness. Once again, these simple expressions helped to perpetuate a feeling of childishness and simplicity. The music I chose to play in the background I chose because it sounds funny to me; the catchy, repetitive bass-line coupled with the simple yet exotic sounding beat also contributed to the mood of the video, which I intended to be compelling and still fun.
With regard to how I accommodated to my expected audience, I did a couple things. I first expected that my audience knew the basis of the story – what a wedding was like, how the ceremony usually went, and what an officiant was. I also expected that this audience was somewhat in my age and demographic, to the extent that I used common conversational language and made no effort to change my narration from how I might say it to a friend. Knowing that it would be published to the Web, I got my main idea for the chalkboard from a general idea of videos I’ve seen, wherein the narrator uses drawings, animation, stop motion, or the like to convey ideas along with words, often in music videos. So to some extent, I think subconsciously I was imitating what I knew to be an acceptable form of web-video.
The Treehouse - Schirmer 