Participatory Composition Video Culture Writing and Electracy Review

One More Video Theory (Some Assemblage Required) from bbrittanya on Vimeo.

Video transcript (in PDF)

Introduction

We have been collaborating on scholarly videos for some time now, and we've come to realize that the written introduction that accompanies each slice frames, yet in some ways limits, the ways in which audiences engage with our videos. Nosotros will thus do our best to innovate our electric current collaboration with the hope that viewers connect to and brand something from what nosotros put forth. Bluntly, we are a bit apprehensive most how our latest video collaboration might be received in the context of Present Tense'southward special issue centered around race, especially as race is conceived in the Us/West. Since the video started equally a presentation for CCCC 2015 in a completely different context, nosotros wondered how we could tastefully and provocatively inject race into the project when the groups involved are being persecuted, among other reasons, for political proceeds because of some cultural, indigenous, or economic affiliation, or for religious credo.

When we received the reviews of the first version of the video, we realized that some people may exist unaware that many Middle Easterners cocky place every bit, and are considered, "White" in Western contexts. One only has to expect at the racial categories in the The states Census to meet that in that location is no category for "Middle Eastern" or "MENA" (a category distinguishing Middle Eastern Northern Africa). Co-ordinate to the Usa Census Bureau, someone who is considered "White" is "a person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Center Eastward, or Due north Africa" ("Race").  While some groups are pushing for the category of MENA to exist included in the US Census (see Karoub), information technology has not all the same become recognized as such, and then people of Eye Eastern descent still are "White" in the optics of the United states.  Eye Eastern racial identity is anything but homogenous, and exterior of Western context, race is less prominent than genealogical, ethnic, cultural, and geographical identity markers. There is inappreciably the infinite here to discuss the identity markers of "Arabs," every bit there are no less than eighteen ethnic types, much less the Kurds, Iranians, Afghans, Turks, and Azeris, to name a few, who make up the populations of Western Asia, North Africa, and numerous diasporic communities across the earth. We wondered how a racialized reading would touch on the message that the video conveys about power in rogue groups like ISIS, who proliferate their causes past using established conventions on video sharing sites to entreatment to global audiences. In short, though we are certainly aware that at that place is a "racial" dimension to our video given that race is ever-nowadays, it is the complex, global ability relations at play in video civilization that has absorbed u.s..

Gregory Ulmer anticipated this ability and complication in his 1995 essay "One Video Theory (Some Associates Required)." In the essay, Ulmer argues for the use of video equally a medium that harnesses aural and visual elements to form a discourse that embraces the affective power of what he calls the "artificial retention of television." "Television producers," he writes, "show us scenes of love and decease for the same reason that orators used such scenes equally active images in their places of memory—considering they are memorable. It is merely that we forgot what memorable images are for, or how they might function toward some end other than that of spectacle" (157). A decade afterward, the beginning widely received video sharing site, YouTube, launched giving rise to a database teeming with snippets of artificial retentiveness that could function beyond spectacle. Presently thereafter, video remixes became more accessible to those willing to invest a few hours researching how to participate. Though Ulmer abased the idea, we speculate because of the technical constraints in producing a video remix in the 1990s, remix culture has since proliferated into a global practice. ISIS's Flames of War too as the professional and amateur responses to the grouping'southward horrific and haunting practices underscore Ulmer'southward insistence that such discourse is indeed memorable, and his vision for a video theory seems more than urgent than ever. He writes that the "task of video theory is to show how to reason and calculate with the bogus retention of boob tube, putting in identify the one dimension of new cognition missing from the operation—the noesis content, that about which i is reasoning by means of these fierce, absurd, carnal images" (157). The bogus retentiveness of YouTube reminds us constantly of the ability violent, cool, and lecherous images hold over groups who are insistent on joining ISIS's crusade based primarily on the videos they take watched and studied.

Meanwhile, we take also been intrigued by and interested in Cynthia Haynes'south work on rhetorics of conflict, particularly her call for a "postal service-conflict" approach to both traditional argumentation and pedagogy. Haynes'south "postal service-disharmonize" rhetoric offers an culling to critique-based approaches that aim to point out the flaws and inconsistencies in the videos promoting violence on YouTube. Haynes writes specifically nearly the video depicting the beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl—one of the outset of its kind—not past "joining the soapbox of counterterrorism," as she explains, just past situating linguistic communication and image outside the logic of war, for that, says Haynes, "is where Danny lived" (146). We take up Haynes's challenge to investigate practices that "situate language and epitome outside the logic of state of war" by turning to the videos on YouTube and other video sharing sites that perform parodies of ISIS'south widely-circulating recruiting and beheading videos. The videos have, in near cases, served as sole catalysts that convince people around the earth to bring together their cause (see especially Jonathan Kaiman'due south "Islamic Country Finds New Frontier"). The parodies, memes, and mashups of these videos ridicule ISIS's promises and horrific behaviors and prove how those who ISIS impacts debate with public and private trauma.

Nosotros see these parodies and memes as burgeoning forms of response to Haynes's call for a postal service-disharmonize rhetoric, and they exemplify Ulmer'southward notion of conductive reasoning and video intelligence. By blending Haynes's mail service-conflict rhetoric with remix civilization and video intelligence, we put forward an alternative form of intervention into the public trauma ISIS videos instigate. Rather than producing critiques of the videos, we might aim for an intervention into the situation as a ways of engaging through production. The ISIS parodies endeavour to reason through the fell images that bombard us and require mail-conflict rhetorical interventions. These videos practice not strive for an human activity of unification; rather, as Ulmer explains, unification is "shifted to the side . . . partly to leave room for the procedure of interference that is involved in understanding any written text or event, and partly to invite additions to the sequence, to enrich the chain of associations in guild to give the theory greater complication. The questions is configuration of idea on video" ("I Video Theory" 139; emphasis added). We attempt to configure thought on video by offering and performing another video theory that relies on practices found in viral videos, memes, snippets, and parodies and that encourages immediate response and participation.

"1 More Video Theory (Some Assemblage Required)" has three parts. Beginning, after establishing that ISIS manipulates, distorts, nonetheless effectively and persuasively employs tactics found on YouTube and other video sharing sites to recruit people to their cause and spread their message, we and then turn to the parodies of the group'due south videos to show ways in which ordinary people (and state-affiliated groups) can intervene and disrupt these causes not past critique or violence, just by the strategic use of parody and satire. These comical remixes of ISIS don't stem from academics, simply from those ISIS impacts. The final portion of the video demonstrates and performs an alternative mode of rhetoric that borrows from this existing civilisation. We signal out how remix and participatory civilisation are constructive rhetorical moves confronting this type of psychological terrorism. By repurposing Ulmer's genre of the "popcycle," we put forrad the concept of the "participatory popcycle."

Works Cited

• al-Hayat Media Center. "ISIS Has a Really Slick and Sophisticated Media Department." 26 Aug. 2015. Web. 10 Sept. 2015.
• Dawud, Ibn, and M.A. Hussein "Muslims Around the Globe are Making Parody Videos to Mock ISIS." Countercurrent News. 2 Sept. 2014. Spider web. 12 Sept. 2015.
• Haynes, Cynthia. "Postconflict Pedagogy: Writing in the Stream of Hearing." Beyond Post Process. Eds. Sidney I. Dobrin, J.A. Rice, and Michael Vastola. Logan: Utah State Upward, 2011. Impress.
• Kaiman, Jonathan. "Islamic Land Finds New Frontier." Los Angeles Times 8 Aug. 2015: A1, A4. Impress.
• Karoub, Jeff. "Census Agency May Count Arab Americans for the First Time in 2020." The Rundown.PBS Newshour, 30 Jan. 2015. Web. i October. 2015.
• Keath, Lee, and Hamza Hendawi. "Experts Explain Why ISIS Isn't Very Islamic." Business organisation Insider. 2 Mar. 2015. Web. 12 Sept. 2015.
• Roffee, Ben. "Nippon's Response to the ISIS Hostage Crisis is Absolutely Brilliant."Riot.Feb. 2015. Web. 12 Sept. 2015.
• Ulmer, Gregory. "Who Speaks: The Interlocutor." The EmerAgency: A Virtual Consultancy. 3 May 2014. Spider web. 12 Sept. 2015.
• —. Cyberspace Invention: From Literacy to Electracy. New York:  Longman, 2003. Print.
• —. "One Video Theory (Some Assembly Required)." Critical Problems in Electronic Media. Ed. Simon Penny. New York: Country U of New York P, 1995. 253-75. Print.
• Us Census Bureau. "Race." Web. 1 Oct. 2015.

About the Authors

Sarah J. Arroyo is a Professor of English at California State University Long Beach, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses ranging from Theories and Practices of Limerick to Critical Theory to Digital Rhetoric and Video/Participatory Cultures. She also co-directs CSULB's First-Yr Composition Plan and mentors Lecturers and Graduate Teaching Associates who teach in the plan. Sarah'south areas of interest include: histories and theories of rhetoric, visual rhetoric, digital rhetoric, video and participatory cultures, limerick theories and pedagogies, and post-secondary teacher didactics. Her enquiry explores the intersections of rhetoric, writing, electracy, and video/participatory cultures, and offers both theories and practices that operate as alternatives to traditional, literate-only conceptions of writing. She has published articles in JAC, Composition Forum, Kairos, and Itineration, and her book, published in 2013 by SIUP, is titled Participatory Limerick: Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy.

Bahareh Alaei earned her M.A. from California State University, Long Embankment, where she teaches courses ranging from first-year limerick to digital rhetoric. She has been published in Kairos and Itineration and had fabricated contributions to Sarah Arroyo's book Participatory Composition. She is currently revising her thesis, "Producing as a Listener," for publication and has a few videos in the works.

beordayinceds.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-5/one-more-video-theory-some-assemblage-required/

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