Look at Something Invisible Not Through It?

Earlier in the essay Lanham discusses "looking through" something opposed to "looking at" something. He writes "filter out extraneous signals, and concentrate on the conceptual meaning. Look through rather than at" (136). Lanham relates this experience to a personnel and private feeling one gets when reading an actual book. A feeling that seems to happen more often when the reader can hold and feel the book with their own hands. "We feel we must preserve the unselfconscious transparency if we are to truly lose ourselves in a book"(136). Looking through something seems more personnel and in a way more private than simply looking at something.

This brings us to the "C-B-S Theory." The Clarity-brevity-sincerity theory attempts to describe what happens when words are exchanges between people. This theory treats words like "goods" or "physical stuff" rather than just simply words. This theory of communication is based on the belief that the message must be clear, must be brief, and must be sincere. Lanham declares that if you want to describe this theory then you must "look at in not through it. You must deny it's fundamental premises in order to think about it" (141). When looking "at" the C-B-S theory it makes sense. The basic premise is understood and is expected to be taken at face value. If one were to look "through" the C-B-S theory several problems would be found. "It doesn't fully explain what it purports to explain. It doesn't describe accurately what is happening. As a theory of written expression it substitutes for accurate description only vague moral exhortations, satisfying in the saying, but hard in the doing. And it is an unteachable theory" (141). Like Lanham argues, the theory doesn't really fit in with human nature in general. We want language for entertainment and enjoyment, it shouldn't be treated like "physical stuff" that needs to be handed over quickly.

I think that Lanham (although he comes across as a bit dramatic at times) has a point. "We'll learn about these powers only by exploring them. Allowing them to compete with one another" (155). My sister has a kindle and loves it, I can't work a touchscreen phone and tend to shy away from advances in technology. Is my sister "right" because she reads the Twilight saga on a handheld device whilst I am forced to read The Canterbury Tales for the millionth time? No! No way is necessarily better. I believe that because every person has their own individual preferences theories like C-B-S will never be entirely true.

Lanham, Richard. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. University of Chicago, 2006. 130-156. Print.

Think Links

Links conceal and reveal. They hide a long list of things that lead you from one place to another. For example if you were to compare links to a road trip they would conceal every single road and little side street that you traveled on and reveal your final destination. This is important because links do more than simply push a button. Sure most links are in some form of button, but it is important to understand that there is more to the structure of a link than the simple push of a button. If you go back to the road trip example and add in the factor that you slept for the whole car ride, it doesn't necessarily mean you fell asleep and woke up magically in another place. The driver could have stopped and filled up the gas tank, used the restroom, and maybe went through a drive through somewhere, just because you were asleep the entire time doesn't mean none of this actually occurred. I like to think of links in a similar fashion. They are like a speedy road trip that you slept through and the link did all the travel and work for you.

"Links change the way in which material is read and understood: partly from the mere juxtaposition of the two related texts," (Burbules 105). This "implied correlation a link suggests" can be found on any website. However, for example my homepage happens to be MSN.com. For this blog I chose to follow the "Lifestyle" link and then from there I clicked on the "Glo" link (partly out of curiosity) which was all about fashion and celebrity news. This implies a relationship between what is thought of as the stereotypical or maybe "ideal" lifestyle automatically going hand in hand with fashion. The correlation here is that certain lifestyles and certain fashion goes hand in hand.

"Links do not only express semi relations but also, significantly, establish pathways of possible movement within the Web space, they suggest relations, but also control access to information," (Burbules 105). For example when I go to Amazon.com there are several links to different "stores" within the Website. All of these store links are for stores or private sellers that sell merchandise through amazon. That's why you are not going to find a link for a site like ebay when you are browsing on amazon. They "control" and "suggest" relations so obviously they are not going to "suggest" that you spend your money elsewhere.


Burbules, Nicholas. "Rhetorics of the Web: hyperreading and critical literacy." New York: Routlage, n.d. Print.

CAPITAL LETTERS ARE HARD TO READ

According to Solomon "Punctuation directs tempo, pitch, volume, and the separation of words." Basically he discusses the idea that with punctuation you can communicate almost anything. Taking this into consideration I would say that he feel similarly towards the use of capital letters. They can STAND OUT and draw a reader's FOCUS towards certain areas of the page. You can make something seem very IMPORTANT if it is in all capitals or in some cases you may do the exact OPPOSITE AND LOOSE THE READER'S ATTENTION IF THE INFORMATION SEEMS TOO DIFFICULT OR TOO MUCH WORK TO READ. (Williams mentions in The Non-Designer's Design Book that typeface in all capital letters is more difficult to read so use it cautiously)

I think that the only source of punctuation that actually needs to exists are quotation marks because lots of people would get in trouble for plagiarism if they didn't use them in their writing assignments. Also it creates useful transitions or breaks when incorporating dialogue into a written work. You could get away with things like question marks and periods because you could simply read something and know if it is a question without having a mark and you could simply finish a sentence by using a capital letter at the beginning of the next one.

I'm not as big on punctuation as Solomon is. I think there is enough punctuation that's already out there and just waiting to be used in new and creative ways. You can spice up punctuation with different sizes and fonts to create something new. I believe that if a person is creative and has a reasonable amount of intelligence they can use punctuation in many different ways that suit their specific needs or ideas.

Solomon, Martin. The Power of Punctuation. MIT Press. 28-32. Jstor.org. 9 Sept. 2011. Web.

Rhetorical Psychology

According to Charles A. Hill "representational images tend to prompt emotional reactions and that, once the viewer's emotions are excited, they tend to override his or her rational faculties, resulting in a response that is unreflected and irrational." So if affect transfer is done appropriately one is automatically brainwashed into buying whatever anyone happens to be selling regardless of whether they need it or not. What better way to do that than with steamy erotic photos of two people getting it on? Hypothetically speaking, when using this particular advertising method it is playing towards certain human emotions that trigger a response that will hopefully result in someone buying what they are selling. This advertisement appears to be aimed towards the male audience and not just because it is an ad for cologne. The emotions this photo plays upon are pretty obvious (don't make me say it, my mom might be reading this...) and when a man sees this advertisement he is likely to feel certain emotional reactions that probably result in him being intrigued by what he is viewing. He might subconsciously think something along the lines of, "Check out this hot chick wanting to have sexual intercourse with this dude. Maybe if I smelled like him chicks would want to bone me too." We all like to think that as human beings we are smarter than this, but most of us really aren't. So suck it up and get used to buying eighty dollar cologne because that is the only way you're ever going to get any action (just kidding I actually dig guys who smell bad and go barefoot in public). Anyway, regardless of whether you smell good or not, no one really needs to have cologne, but if you do happen to wear cologne it will probably make you more attractive to the opposite sex (at least according to this particular advertisment and its affect transfer tactics).

As for using "presence" rhetorically in my own life I suppose I would go back to when I was a very small child and wrote letters to Santa. According to Hill "when particular elements are given enough presence, they can crowd out other considerations from the viewer's mind, regardless of the logical force or relevance of those considerations." This is exactly the same tactic I (as a child) had attempted to use whenever I wrote out a christmas list. It would usually go something like this: Dear Santa, if I don't obtain a pony soon I will die! Of course no one was actually going to die, but I thought if I expressed how badly I wanted a pony my parents would overlook the fact that they would have to feed and care for the animal I so badly wanted for ten whole minutes. I guess if I wanted my rhetorical presence to be more effective I should have been more descriptive. Something like: Dear Santa, I want a pony so bad that if I don't get one soon I will become so depressed that I won't be able to eat or sleep or wash my hair and I will eventually die of dysentery.

Hill, Charles A. "The Psychology of Rhetorical Images." Defining Visual Rhetic. Ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 25-40

Chris Woods and Evan Rachel Wood for Gucci Guilty. n.d. "Men in Beauty Ads." Stylelist. Web.

SNOW TERROR!

There once was a beautiful, intelligent, young woman named Sara Ehlers who always smelled nice even though she rarely showered. This was because, although she may have been extremely smart, she smoked marijuana. Which is bad and you should never smoke it. Seriously, it’s a gateway drug and you’ll probably die a horrible excruciating death like those college students in Hostel if you continue to smoke it.

One day Sara got her driver’s license and she was very excited. “Horay! I can drive!”

It just so happened that on that particular week in which she obtained her license, it had snowed a significant amount of snow. She didn’t care because for some reason nothing ever seemed like that big of a deal to her. “Oh man it’s snowing,” she said to herself and decided to make some popcorn. Just then her friend called her on the telephone.

“Hello.”

“Sara?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Beth. I just found my old copy of Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail. You should come watch it with me.”

“Ok dude, for sure.”

Sara glanced down at her bag of popcorn and decided to take it with her. Movies and popcorn seemed to go together. So it made sense. She put on her snow boots and went outside.

As she got into her 1985 Monte Carlo (which her friend’s had dubbed The Honey Bucket) she realized that she couldn’t live without her music, even if her friend Beth lived less than five minutes away, she needed her jams.

Ten minutes later (the length of time it took her to locate her Tom Petty c.d.) she was back in The Honey Bucket and ready to travel. Placing the bowl of popcorn in her lap she turned the key. Tom Petty blasted through the speakers Even the losers get lucky sometime… Baby… Even the losers…

Sara proceeded to back out, but something terrible happened! She got stuck in the snow and her popcorn spilled onto the floor of the car!

“Oh no!” Sara exclaimed as she bent down to retrieve the precious kernels. As she collected the spilled popcorn into the palm of her hand she continued to press on the gas in an attempt to free the car from the snow.

This went on for a considerable amount of time. Sara turned up the radio even louder and continued to pick up the popcorn whilst backing out against the blocking snow.

After a few minutes of the same routine, Sara began to hear a noise that sounded a lot different than Tom Petty. It sounded horrible and angry. It wasn’t a pleasant sound. And when Sara looked up from the floor of the car she realized that the noise was coming from her sister Miranda.

Miranda was standing on the porch waving her arms around in an angry manner. Sara wondered why her sister was so angry.

“WHAT I CAN’T HEAR YOU?” Sara hollered.

“What the f@*& are you doing?” Her sister was really mad.

Sara decided that it was probably a good idea to drive away really fast and get out of there, but she couldn’t because of the snow. So she decided to turn the car off and get yelled at by her sister.

Sara got out of the car and asked her sister why she was so mad.

“Dude, what’s your problem?”

“YOU’RE RAMMING DAD’S TRUCK! YOU STUPID B#$%@!”

Sara’s heart stopped in her chest and dropped into her stomach. She turned around slowly to see her father’s new Ford parked in her blind spot. The red truck now had a dented in scrape that seemed to stretch out for miles and miles (But in actual reality it was only about three feet).

“F%$@ ME!”

Sara’s mouth hung open in despair because she was about to learn a very valuable life lesson. Not only was it important to check your blind spot, but it was also not a very good idea to try and eat popcorn off the floor of your car (no matter how clean it is) if you’re in the process of driving.

Horay! Rhetorics!

According to Foss, Foss, and Trapp’s Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, “rhetoric is the human use of symbols to communicate.” However, I think that is a bunch of crap. I mean who would buy this junk? Just kidding, I don’t actually feel that way at all. In all seriousness I agree with their definition for the most part. I believe that this particular definition means that humans use the arbitrary symbols they named themselves to communicate with one another as well as communicate with themselves. I especially like the point they brought up about how when we change the way we communicate or the symbols we communicate with, our world changes as well. I think that this is extremely true. For instance when I talk to myself in the morning (the dialogue inside my head, I don’t say it out loud because that would be a little weird, or if I do I make sure no one’s home first) and I say something like, “Oh my gosh! I can’t believe I have to wake up at 8:30 in the morning! Who does this and like’s it? Why is my life so hard?” The usual result is that I have a pretty crappy day. However, if I wake up in the morning and I say, “Oh my gosh! What a beautiful day. My alarm clock is super annoying, but that’s okay! Today’s the best day ever! I’m even going to call my mom today. Well maybe not, but it’s still an awesome day!” I usually do have a pretty enjoyable day. This is just a small example of how I believe my internal rhetoric affects or changes my world. The reading used a pretty good example of a child trying to interrupt or get someone’s attention. The rhetoric used or the symbols of communication used during this particular event could change everything. For instance, if a child throws up on me (like my four year old nephew did the other day while he was trying to eat me) I could use harsh tones and scream or yell at my sister, “What the heck is wrong with your offspring?” However, I could calmly tell my sister, “Hey, um, Miranda… There’s uh, some orange vomit on your new rug in the living room and on my shirt sleeve.” I chose to use the calm approach and it resulted in my sister washing my shirt for me and apologizing profusely. Now, if I had screamed at her like a madman it probably would have resulted in me being escorted off the premises by her ninja husband.

Foss, Karen, Sonya Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Waveland Press Inc.Print.

Rhetoric flourished in ancient Greece as a subject of formal study and a culture of performance.[1] Its most well-known definition came from Aristotle, who called it "the art of finding [seeing] the available means of persuasion" [2] More simply, rhetoric includes the study and the use of language with persuasive effect.
“Rhetoric.” Wikipedia. 2011. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. August 24, 2011.

rhet•o•ric
1. (in writing or speech) the undue use of exaggeration or display; bombast. 2. the art or science of all specialized literary uses of language in prose or verse, including the figures of speech. 3. the study of the effective use of language. 4. the ability to use language effectively. 5. the art of prose in general as opposed to verse.
rhetoric. (n.d.). Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. Retrieved August 24, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/rhetoric