Genre: Tweet Author: Mark Duplass (actor, director, screenwriter) Audience: Twitter followers Context: Increasing political polarization in the U.S. Purpose: To connect liberal followers with a trusted, well-intentioned conservative thinker in hopes of bridging the divide between political parties Many of the digital communication breakdowns featured in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed include people who had no consideration for the impacts of the things that they share online. However, a recent, notable example of a breakdown in which someone had positive intentions that came crashing down would be Mark Duplass tweeting about Ben Shapiro. On July 18th, 2018, director, producer, and screenwriter Mark Duplass (of the Duplass brothers) tweeted the following: Ben Shapiro is a conservative political commentator who serves as editor in chief for The Daily Wire and hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show.” He has a sizable following and is respected in many conservative circles. However, as Mark Duplass quickly learned, he has also made comments that would make him lose respect in others. Instant outrage was sparked on Duplass’ Twitter account as people made him aware of Shapiro’s controversial comments about transgender people, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, President Obama, and Trayvon Martin, among other hot topic issues. After tweets against Shapiro directly at Duplass, not to mention a vast number of tweets now against Duplass, Duplass issued an apology, as seen below: Ironically, this backlash triggered an anti-backlash from conservatives, decrying the sharp cultural influence of political correctness. Shapiro responded to Duplass’ apology, saying: This whole incident, triggered by one well-intentioned tweet, became microcosmic of issues about partisan disagreements in public discourse.
The rest of this post is and has to be subjective. There is no objective way in which politics, public discourse, or digital communication must be conducted, which is why incidents like the one involving Shapiro and Duplass are not only able to happen, but that they happen so frequently. There has to be a place for people to say things that are wrong. There has to be a way for us to engage with the ideas that other people have even if we can not agree with everything that they say. Even if the question here is not whether or not we can be able to do this, it is about how many off-base views about things someone has to have before we can no longer legitimize them. It is for this reason that I would submit that Mark Duplass did not say anything wrong. I would like to think that there is a way for him to effectively use communication to resolve this issue in a bipartisan manner with no offended parties. However, this simply is not possible. In a country characterized by increasing ideological polarization, I have to respect Duplass’ efforts, not only to cross the aisle and be willing to listen to or legitimize the opinions of people with whom he disagrees, but his use of his own public influence to encourage others to do the same. By no means do I agree with some of Shapiro’s comments, and I likely do not align with many of Duplass’ political views either, but if there can be no effective communication or healthy discourse until the public exists under homogenized ideology, we will be waiting and fighting online for a lot longer than we may like.
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For my “Hamlet” site layout and logo, I wanted to create something that was simple and easy to navigate, but still allows important information to have the space and emphasis that it deserves. I was drawn to the idea of using this dark, shadowy photo of Hamlet cast in a blue light on the left side of the page and then echo the palette of black and blue tones across the rest of the site. For the header logo, I used the font (“OldSansBlack”) is a classic, sans serif font, but with a simple creative flourish. By altering the alignment of the top part of the word “Hamlet” from the bottom part, the logo conveys a subtle sense of uneasiness or disorder that reflects the theme of divided mind and will by which the play is characterized. The simplicity of the design allows strong emphasis on the photo to the left of the page body and the white back of the page body sets the content of each specific page apart from the rest of the page layout. The start contrast between the white body and black background, as well as the light blues, gives each element proper contrast to be distinctive. Key to the page’s simplicity is the organization of the pages elements into a stack (logo, buttons, page body). It is also important to note that the white page body would scroll while the background image would remain in place. In my site design, I only included 5 pages to minimize clutter, but I am more than open to the idea of including more pages than those listed here. All in all, I think this design is effective because it prioritizes simplicity, making its content easy to view and understand by audiences familiar and unfamiliar with The Nashville Shakespeare Festival all the same.
Building this website was a learning process to say the least, but I am very satisfied with my final product. I did not use a template and instead wrote the HTML and CSS in Notepad++. I referred to the class tutorial HTML and CSS files to get a sense of how mine should look or function, and I occasionally consulted the w3schools website to learn more complex commands like how to lock a background element. I ended up creating a new p class for nearly every element I wanted to control on my website, and I while I was never sure if there was a more expedient way to accomplish what I wanted to do with them, it ended up allowing me to control how my website looked in a way that I really liked. I relied heavily on embedded content (YouTube videos, SoundCloud music, Spotify music, etc.), but doing so allowed me to have a greater quantity and diversity of content on the site. Once I became comfortable with adding photos and embedded content, as well as spacing and arranging them both in the HTML and CSS, the rest of the writing of this website was fairly intuitive and fun to figure out.
Before beginning to write this website, I had few to no exact ideas about how I wanted the site to look. I knew that I could use it to create a simple showcase of different things that I have made (videos, music, etc.), which ended up being exactly what this website was. However, I had not made many specific design or layout choices. With that being said, I am very happy with how this website looks and functions. It is minimalistic, organized, and it is definitely not bloated with superfluous content. I used the same background image on all of my pages, partially because it was easier to code, but it also created a sense of consistency between pages. I created a lot of transparent images with text in Microsoft Paint to use as navigation buttons, and they are one of my favorite features of the site. They contribute to having a consistent aesthetic design across the website while being clean and functional as well. If I knew all there was to know about code, I would have loved to have integrated more kinds of media per page, but it was far easier to have each page consist of very few elements (music page, video page, etc.). I used plenty of visual (photos, photo background, videos, consistent font), aural (music, audio from video), and linguistic modes (“About Me” page, homepage, etc.) within pages. However, spatial arrangement is one of the most important elements of this site. I designated a page for each kind of medium (music page, video page, etc.), and I arranged elements within each of these pages (Video Essays separated from Music Videos, etc.). I spaced out each element with padding in the CSS to give an uncluttered look to the site. The most essential design choices I made were in the site’s contrast, organization, and alignment. I chose a dark, abstract background to contrast the rectangular buttons with white, sans serif text. This contrast draws attention to the elements of minimalism and intentional structure, which was also the goal with the page organization and in-page element alignment and simplistic spatial arrangement. Overall, I feel like I was able to create a simple website that is both functional and visually appealing. When analyzing the rhetorical and design choices made by the designers of Stanford University’s “Shakespeare in Asia” archive, there is a lot that could be changed to create a more effective website. Displayed above is the homepage, a black screen with a logo, a side menu, and a small amount of text about the Shakespeare in Asia initiative. The website's purpose is to provide information about this group of shows and how they can be seen. The context is that the Shakespeare Initiative is special because the works of Shakespeare are almost definitively Western art, and it is novel and exciting for these shows to be presented to a wider audience. The audience seems to be anyone who is interested in seeing live theater, especially this particular Shakespeare initiative, particularly because the website is not making great strides to be accessible to a wider audience. The homepage is extremely important, rhetorically speaking. It gives the viewer a first impression of what the creator has to show and if the front page does not hook the viewer, then it could compromise the integrity of the rest of the website’s content. The content of this front page is wanting as it hardly describes what this initiative is or what the website is showcasing, but its design is just as unremarkable. The white, sans-serif text on black page gives the text body a fair contrast, but there is almost nothing else on the page to attract the viewer or convey any information about the initiative. The almost immediately noticeable failure of this front page to be interesting or rhetorically effective is an excellent and useful reminder for our own performance archive that perhaps on no other page than the homepage must a website be more rhetorically effective by employing multiple rhetorical modes, interesting color, contrast between various elements of a page, or creative organization of elements to make sure that the viewer is hooked. The smallness of the text creates an issue, not only with the homepage, but with all of the text-based pages on this site. Even on pages with more thorough text content, there is a distinct lack of emphasis on any piece or part of the information on this site because of the text’s lack of any variation in size, style, or alignment. The lack of emphasis damages the site’s rhetoric because the reader becomes unsure of what information is most important. The lack of contrast between text and other multimodal elements also blunts the website’s impact by lessening or removing contrast between different elements on the page. Even on the website’s image gallery, what could have been the most prevalent use of color and elemental organization and a strong tool for creating emphasis on certain aspects of the initiative through contrast of content and color, the images are displayed very small and next to long lines of text, making the images rhetorically ineffective to remember when it comes time to work on our own archive. If there is anything worth noting or emulating from this website, it would be the page menu. The page choices made by this website’s creator are effective, relevant, and there are no unnecessary or extraneous pages. All of the pages are easily accessible from the side menu that uses the color red against the black background to draw some emphasis to what the website has to offer.
Today, having some form of a digital presence is virtually inevitable. Even though my digital presence has been greatly lessened since I deleted my two main social media accounts, Instagram and Twitter, over two years ago, there are still many instances in which I both consciously and subconsciously curate my personal information and appearance online for both continuity and quality.
Perhaps my most measured and intentional use of digital media has been through my personal Facebook page. I created this page so that I would be able to take an administrative role in a Facebook group for school, but I also made use of it for networking before coming to Belmont University. I met my roommate through a Facebook group for students admitted to Belmont, and as a part of this group, I tried to use it as online profile for my fellow classmates (and future roommate) to get to know me. I selected basic pieces of information about me to present to other people an idea of who I was (i.e. photos of me and my family, my school, the summer camp where I worked). I never post status updates or use it to connect with other people, but for the purpose of being a basic representation of who I am, it has served its purpose despite and perhaps because of the small and select information it has to offer. My creative life exists most publicly on my YouTube channel. This channel exists as a combination of school projects, personal videos, music projects, and videos I made for different jobs and purposes. Despite the variety of content made public on the channel, it has still been curated heavily. I have been making videos and publishing them online for almost eight years, but there are only eight videos currently available on this channel, all of which I made in the previous two years. The only ones that I have published (or kept published) are the ones that I worked the most on to have a more compact and impressive library of content online, not to mention that there is a significant vulnerability to personal blackmail if you leave content online that you made when you were ten years old. As a very order-driven person, I take great pride in the public playlists on my Spotify account. As a collection of the kinds of music I like to listen, it represents my taste well, but as a portfolio of individual collections, I enjoy curating them. I always use cover photos for playlists that belong a similar aesthetic, there is consistency in title capitalization, and I even have a subcategory of specific genre playlists marked by a “G /” in their titles. I think that I’m most driven to curate these playlists because of how often I see and use them myself and my personal affinity for order and continuity. However, I am well aware that they are public for others to see and I still take pride in receiving compliments from friends who appreciate them. |
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