22 A Hummel Figuring

There are these commercials that keep getting in the way of my cat video enjoyment.  John Hummel is running for district attorney and because Youtube knows that I live in Bend I keep getting hit with the two brief adverts he has in rotation.  I'd like to dance a little semiotic analysis around the way I understand the persuasive purpose of the imagery in these videos.  This analysis is not intended as support for either candidate because I think I'll be voting NOTA.

 The "Deschutes County Trusts John Hummel"Commercial

Shot #1:  Long shot of Hummel talking with women in Drake Park.  

The women "look up" to Hummel.  He is dressed casually, as is appropriate in the park setting.  The children are comfortable around him (he is not scary.)  The urban yet natural setting shows his interest in Bend and Nature (not to mention issues surrounding Mirror Pond).  Note the nice way the red coat of the child on the right balances the red angle on the woman's coat.  In the background is the footbridge, symbolizing Hummel's ability to "bridge" relationships or to create a "bridge" to the future. 

He moves from right to left in the shot as he sits down at the table with the women, showing that while he begins from a position of authority, he is able to "lower" himself to their level.

Shot #2:  Fade to midshot of Hummel Sitting with Women.

In the second shot, Hummel is sitting at the table. During the fade, pictured here, we see him seated from a long shot and then move in for the close up showing the back of one woman's head and Hummel's big smile.  Note the way his eyeline is right at the level of the top of the bridge railing, giving a strong sense of connection between him and the woman, almost as though the eyeline was drawn in.  They are connected.

 Shot #3:  The American Flag seen reflected in the window of the Deschutes County Courthouse. 

A "subtle" (because part of a "natural" shot) dose of patriotism.  Hummel is a good American who cares about justice in Deschutes County.  Note the white sky that allows the red and blue to stand out. 

The camera tilts down until we see Hummel exiting the courthouse.  Now he is dressed in a dark suit.  He is smiling and shakes hands with a couple of gentleman I have a feeling I'm supposed to recognize though I don't.  The voice-over talent is saying something about Hummel having good relations with local law enforcement.  Once again in the background we see one woman.

Then Hummel walks toward the left of the camera.  His head is up and he is smiling, his red hair and green tie complementing each other.  The green tie might also suggest a commitment to "Green" living.  We are "looking up to" him as he goes by, almost as though we were in the position of children.  He has a big, friendly smile on his face.  In the background a young man on the steps is looking at Hummel with what might be admiration.

This shot goes in the opposite direction of the first shot as it winds up with him above the "common people:" us.

Note the stone building and rock wall, each symbolizing strength.

Shot #4:  The "refrigerator" or "Facebook" collage


Here we have kids and families displaying both their friendliness, through smiles, and their support.  The manner in which this is presented, with its frames and fade ins, has a distinctly contemporary feel.  Hummel is old fashioned enough to shake people's hands and talk face2face and yet modern enough to draw on the signifiers of social media. 
 

The "We Can't Afford Patrick Flaherty" Commercial

Ad image

I actually find this ad offensive.  Not because I'm a supporter of Flaherty.  (I'm not a huge fan of either candidate.)  It's because the ad seems to contain a hidden anti-ethnic message.  It not only metaphorically paints Flaherty as a problem, it quite literally changes his skin color from a rather pale white to a dark brown.  See below his portrait from the Office of the District Attorney webpage and a still from the commercial.  The commercial links browness to the problem supposedly posed by Flaherty. 

Office image

Note also the way this ad moves from the red and mottled brown (danger, roughness, dirt) during the "bad DA" part of the ad to white and blue (brightness, cleaness, calm, strength) in the Hummel-focused section.  Below I've pasted a comparison of the ad at 14 seconds (white on red, "bad Flaherty") and at 16 seconds (blue and gold on white, "good Hummel). 

14 sec. and 16 sec. compared

LY #134 If I Were Going To Teach This Again . . .

I would certainly do it differently.

That's what I've been thinking about my new Visual Rhetoric class as well as this quarter's face-to-face interpersonal. 

I'm not sure why I'm unhappy with the results of the Visual Rhetoric class when I was very happy last spring with the Rhetoric of Film.  In this winter's class they needed to make a still image while last spring they were required to make a short movie.  It was obvious to me that most students did more work last spring, and not just because movies are more work than photographs.  I was over-the-moon about last spring's student movies.  This winter, however, several of their final project visual texts looked thrown together at the last minute.  Then there were the analyses they did on them.  Right there in the directions I wrote that As would be applied only to essays with researched sources in them.  I provided several examples of those possible sources in class.  But how many of my students had sources, even googly ones?  ONE. That's right.  Just one!

Ack.  And after I showed them in class and in their homework how to super-fast-find supporting evidence on the web? 

Well, at least I got to teach the class.  And teaching it gave me the chance to return to the work of John Berger and readings I enjoyed even though my students didn't.  And, yes, because of my own obsessions the class was too theory heavy and if I taught it again I would place much more emphasis on the performative aspects of visual rhetoric and communication so that it was more closely related to our advertising and marketing classes rather than a replication of my own ancient graduate student interests.  (In my beginning is my end . . .)

And then there's the face-to-face interpersonal.  I wasn't happy with it for a variety of reasons.  First, I didn't do my work of memorizing their names very well.  It was a once a week class and what with the day lost to fake snow danger and my own trip out of town my mind just wasn't sticky enough to keep the names present to me.  Second, a good chunk of them didn't have the textbook  in a timely manner (i.e., by midterms, for f---'s sake) and so they didn't keep up with the  material.  I've faced that issue for 2 1/2 decades, however, so it "shouldn't" have ticked me off but for some reason it did.  Maybe because this was the last time I was teaching the class live and I was hoping for more.  Finally, I'd changed one of the assignments in class from writing/thinking to thinking/test-taking.   I made this change to get the live class more parallel to the online sections.  Big mistake.  It saved me the time usually spent in reading and grading but it didn't push them to think through the material as much as written homework would have done.  The quizzes also did not do their job of encouraging reading before class meetings.

Oh, well.  It's all done except for the complaints.  I've given my online interpersonal communication students until 5:00 pm this afternoon to write to me with any complaints they may have about my assessment of their course projects.  They need to read my assessments first, however on Grademark.  I sent out two course emails with links to how to find the Grademark materials and even then I received an email from a student who continued to read Grademark as "GradeBOOK" and kept looking for comments where they weren't.  So I'm not the only one with "technirritation."

LY #130 When is a Compliment "Real"?

From Emergency Compliment site

Got this as part of an email from a student who has been doing well in my Visual Rhetoric class: "Also, I wanted to let you know that I really really enjoyed your class. I loved everything you taught us and really felt like I understood the topics and concepts. It made me rethink my career path, actually. I am extremely grateful that I took this course, thank you for offering it."

This compliment felt good to get for a variety of reasons having to do with both the sender/encoder  and the receiver/decoder of the compliment.  Well, honestly, all the reasons have to do with the receiver/decoder, myself, because I take power difference and sender motivation into account when I receive a compliment.  If I don't actually quiz the person giving a compliment (which I don't) I need to run through my own list of possible purposes.

1. Compliments are given to create identification with an authority figure in order to receive something from that authority figure.  This is called "Flattery."  When flattery is the intention, one cannot believe the content of a compliment because a flatterer will say something positive to a person in authority whether or not it is based on fact or not.  Of this motivation the bard has warned us often, most cynically in Timon of Athens: 
   O, that men's ears should be
   To counsel deaf, but not to flattery!                                                   
2.  Compliments are given because they are a shared communal practice and thus an expected performance.  Such compliments may be based in fact or not, depending on the situation and the self-concept of the person giving the compliment.  If a person thinks of him or herself as "honest," then they will be motivated to give an compliment based in fact.  If people don't mind being dishonest then they will bend the truth in order to keep the peace.
3. Compliments are given out of a desire to "make" another person feel good.  Such compliments may be based in fact or not.  They may arise from the following aspects in a sender's psyche.  a)  The sender may have a desire to have all people in the vincinity feeling good about themselves because that's the way the sender can feel comfortable in the world.  b)  The sender perceives the receiver as "broken" and needs to fix the break.  c) The sender seeks attention and gets a neurotransmitter "ping" when the complimented person smiles.
4. While the sender may have many unexplored psychic reasons for giving a compliment, the sender perceives that compliment as arising out of an honest and direct response to an experience of the receiver's performance or appearance.

 For a more scientific view of compliments, the reader might want to review such work as Ming Chung-yu's "Sociolinguistic competence in the complimenting act of native Chinese and American English speakers: a mirror of cultural values," in Language and Speech (March, 2005) in which she offers a great literature review and finds the following:  

"It is argued that the main function of compliments is to establish solidarity between speaker and addressee . . .In other words, compliments can be considered social lubricants that serve to "create or maintain rapport." Compliments may also be employed to serve other functions . . . A commonly seen phenomenon in human interaction, for instance, is that people frequently offer praise to reinforce or encourage the desired behavior in specific situations, such as teaching and learning. Another possible function compliments may serve is to strengthen or replace other speech acts like apologizing, greeting, reprimanding, or thanking, or to soften acts such as criticism, or even to serve as acts like sarcasm or a conversation opener . . . " 

The Journal of Politeness Research also offers a variety of articles on compliments.

No matter my perception of the motivation for a compliment, I always say, "Thank-you."  BUT, how much of the compliment I "take in" as having anything to do with me, personally, depends, as I said above, on my perception of the sender's motivation.

When it comes to compliments from students my perception is colored by the student's grade status and his or her previous displayed honesty.  I will tend to accept a compliment as "genuine" and a believable response to the sender's experience of me or my behavior if

• the student  has been receiving As and I have received no compliments from that student previously. (So I assume that there is no motivation for higher grades and also that the compliment is not just a habituated practice)
• the student has problems with controlling utterances in the classroom:  has a tendency to "blurt."  (So I assume that the compliment arises from an ungoverned honest response to experience.)

The reasons I felt good about the compliment above are

• The student has been doing good work in the class
• My previous behaviors could have been interpreted as being hard on the student by requesting she send me a scan of a hospital receipt when she claimed an emergency visit.
• My own discomfort with how the class has gone.  I've been presenting the class by the seat of my pants and would do it completely differently if I were ever to teach it again.  I have been highly critical of my own performance.  Thus, to be honest, as a receiver/encoder I am motivated by a hunger to hear that the class wasn't as incoherent as I thought it was.

Now I want to finish up my discussion of compliments by talking about two other situations of their occurrence.  I do not mention here the motivations of the "decoder."

 When a comes to compliments from institutional workers with less status than I have, I accept the compliment if

• both of us know I have no power to influence assessment decisions made about that person
• I have never heard that person offer a spurious compliment to another co-worker who they have previously or afterwords trashed

When it comes to compliments from institutional workers with more status than myself, I accept the compliment if

• it isn't followed by a request to do more work.

LY #38: Clap Your Hands if You Believe in Fairies

Oh my goodness.

From the Deschutes County Assessor's Office

If my Introduction to Visual Rhetoric class "makes" this winter or spring, I must talk about the Deschutes County Property Tax Fairy.  She is the star of an unusual bit of explanatory visual rhetoric.  Frankly, I liked her and she helped me out but I'm having trouble figuring out her underlying meaning.  I guess that if I do teach the course I'll have to track down the creators of the lecture and ask them.

By the way, in case you want to register for the class, it's

SP 234     12558 Visual Rhetoric  12:45pm-02:00 TuTh Boyle Education Center 155

Winter quarter, Central Oregon Community College 

Another Disappointment

Another disappointment included not receiving help from faculty and staff at our "partner" university, Oregon State. I'd been planning to teach a brand new course, Introduction to the Rhetoric of Film. The only school in Oregon that offers it is OSU so I needed to know their student learning outcomes in order to create a course that they would accept so our curriculum committee would accept it. Last year, in winter 2009, when I emailed the department chair for the first time, he didn't answer me. This year, I emailed the teacher of the course and spoke with him twice. He promised to send the syllabus and the outcomes but never did. I also emailed the departmental administrative assistant who didn't sent me a syllabus either.

So, by the time COCC's registration started in late February, I was feeling very unprepared to teach the course. None of the current textbooks I've found, like The Terministic Screen or Narrative in Fiction and Film, are suitable for community college freshmen. If I was going to work without a text I really needed outcomes and a bit more help. Didn't get it. After a weekend of registration filled almost all the other speech courses but left my new SP199 course with only two bodies, I decided to abandon the course and teach another section of the ever popular small group communication.