Public Writing Space

The discussion of public writing versus private writing was really interesting in class today. I guess you can’t really assume that any writing will be private forever. When writing is done publically on purpose- for example, the graffiti we talked about or the open letter, the author or artist knows there will be some audience that they are tending to, but there is also the unintended audience that is created from the public space. I thought it was really interesting to think about writing that are now public which were intended to be private. The Weiner ordeal (and really any other sex scandal) is a great example. But more interesting to think about are the letters and diaries of historic authors who probably never imagined their writings in journals and diaries would be turned into books for the whole world to read.

I feel in today’s world, with the overwhelming use of social media and frankly the popularity of people wanting to know every detail about everything, nothing is really private. Everything is public. Newspapers, quotes from interviews, twitter feeds, Facebook posts, blogs and so on. Even if it was meant to be private ie text messages, voicemails, letters, and one wrong person gets their hands on it, it would now be released in a public space. I think it’s really bold to put something out there in the public writing space. There’s always the audience one is writing for in mind but what about for the audience that may not be expected? There are a lot of different emotions that could be brewed up from something written and I think that’s bold to write knowing that fact. This comes into play with the open letter that we discussed. I personally really enjoyed it and supported everything he said, especially the way he worded it, but I can see how that letter may have offended a large number of people. From the blunt language he used to the phrases he was using to support it.

The breakdown of the graffiti was really interesting. I had never thought about who the artist might be tagging for and what the message is that surrounds said tags. I understand that it’s art and is something I could never do, but I still see graffiti as illegal; which is probably a big part of why people do it. This also applies to the “F NEU” graffiti found in Holmes hall. I wonder who the person who wrote it was intending to read it. With public graffiti, the artist probably has an idea of who they want to read it but with the kid who wrote that in Holmes, I wonder who he wanted to see it. Graffiti is a lot more interesting to me since we’ve broken it down in class because I’ve never thought about the audience or message intended.

I don’t think there is an equal balance between public and private, especially with our world being so centered around technology. I also think people should be a lot more cautious of what they put in the public space and how it might effect those that come in contact with it. 

Reflection

I have really enjoyed this class a lot this semester. With it being my last class ever before I graduate, I was expecting to dread it tremendously and have honestly only heard bad reviews about AWD.

First off, and no offense to older teachers, I have liked the atmosphere that has been created with having a teacher who closer to our age than pretty much every other teacher I have had. It made me feel that I could express in both the classroom and our written work more of how I naturally express things. Being able to talk freely about issues going on and social media in particular and how it’s changing society has been really cool to talk about to someone who actually relates to it.

I also think the dynamic of our class is really awesome and has contributed to how great our discussions have been this semester. I was really impressed with our first day of everyone’s introductions and explaining the co-ops they have just come back from. You can tell this class is full of really diverse and determined students and, as a graduating senior; it’s really great to see the upcoming classes be so determined in their work. The fact that this class is so discourse concentrated really showed off the creativity and intelligence of this group of students. I was always really impressed with the material written in the blogs and the presentations that were given about each project.

I also really enjoyed the blogs. Overall it was awesome to read and comment on the awesome things that were written in them. I also liked that we weren’t given a dead specific topic to write about and how we had the freedom to expand and write on a general topic. I think this really added to the discussions in class and shaped some pretty great conversations. I feel like each student in this class is really unique and brings some diverse topics to the table.

As for my writing, even though I won’t be applying it to my discourse for the rest of college but now to real life, I think I have examined my discourse possibly more closely than in the past. What I have learned the most in this class, which I feel is going to help me the most going out into the work world, is how to present my discourse to those who are not in the community. I am so used to talking about what the field consists of and how we interpret among my classmates and teachers that understand the same vocabulary and references. I almost forgot that 95% of the people I encounter on the interpreting job is not going to understand mainly what I do and what it means to interpret. Giving these presentations and writing these context memos to explain what interpreting is and why it is important to have it is going to be extremely beneficial for me in the months to come.

Overall, I think this class has been designed very well and every aspect, from the assignments to the blogs to the comfort to speak freely in class is going to leave a wonderful impression on students to come and will help them tremendously in their future years. 

Public Writing: Essentially a Social Service

Flash Mobs

               Flash mobs are always fun to watch but before class today, I never really saw them as serving a purpose greater than to just entertain. What I mean is, I never saw what a flash mob does as actually something other than entertaining. After class today, I saw the effects flash mobs have after looking into the seven characteristics regarding publics by Michael Warner and analyzing them in context of a YouTube video.

Characteristics:

1. A public is self-organized - This characteristic is easy to see as a public audience starts to gather once everyone notices that a flash mob is occurring. It also seems, through prior experiences, that organized actions lead to organized reactions. Many other genres of demonstrations illustrate this such as the "organized" protest in Turkey which lead to an "organized" reaction by the police. However, the opposite can be noted as well as when the police started harming innocent people, the people reacted in an unorganized way. Basically a public can be self-organized or even, self-unorganized.

2. A public is a relation among strangers - The flash mob also creates a relation between strangers as once the audience is engaged in the performance, the audience begins to interact with one another speaking of the amazing performance. Toward the end, when everyone claps in union, each and everyone in the audience shares a common belief that the performance was great hence, a relationship has been established.

3. The address of public speech is both personal and impersonal - Speech in this context is the dance itself and the message it proposes. It is personal because the dance and the dance moves and formations are trying to convey an important message but impersonal in the sense that no one is limited to watching the performance. Everyone can engage in the performance in one way or another.

4. A public is constituted through mere attention - Flash mobs catch people's attention simply due to the grandeur in which they are presented. When people have their eyes caught by someone or something different, they tend to congregate around that idea.

5. A public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse - Reflexive means reactive or instinctual in this case I believe. Flash mobs cause some type of reaction. That reaction is what creates a public and puts the public into a social space depending on the public's reaction.

6. Publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation - Flash mobs, despite their appeal, are temporary. Unlike movies, pictures, and words which can stick around forever, flash mobs only provide a glimpse into a larger message. The longer the dance, the more amount of time the audience has to digest the message. Inherently, the audience will act, or react accordingly, depending upon the mutual understanding of the message.

7. A public is poetic world making - Dance is a great form of poetry, and that too, without words. The public which forms around the dance is poetic in the sense that they all believe in something fun and purposeful; that which dance, the poetry itself, serves to fulfill.

           
               After analyzing flash mobs as a type of public "writing," it's clear to see that flash mobs are in fact a public-generating genre of speech. It meets all the conventions of public speech and as stated earlier, serves a larger purpose than to just entertain. Essentially, flash mobs, like all forms of public writing, serve a social purpose of creating a congregation and bringing people together.

Privacy Terms

We are not aware of how much of our information is actually public and how much our audience is bigger than intended. Every work that we write and every photo that we post or are tagged in is much more public than we know. The worst part about this is that without knowing we agree to this.

Whether it is a smartphone app or an account online every once in a while when we have to sign up we are asked if we agree to the terms and conditions. Clicking on “Read the Terms and Conditions” opens up another window with the content that would take about one our to read. At some point I decided to read through this form while downloading an app for my phone.
Without knowing we agree to share many of our personal information. Some apps access contacts and images. While trying to keep our posts private we post thinking that the audience of our posts are our Facebook friends. This audience rather extends to everyone who can see profiles of our friends and friends are allowed to share posts, which then become more public. The size of the audience can not be controlled. 

Some Facebook apps access all the information we have on Facebook except for our messages.

After signing up for a Facebook account we agree to give them license to our content. They can use our photos in any way even after the account has been deactivated.  Using any of the apps for personalization, like Genius for Mac products, we agree to share not only our music library but our information in order to get personalized results. This is a good way of tracking IP addresses to people, which can give the current location of a user. It acts as a tracking device.

In other cases like online shopping this could cause some additional fees that are only mentioned in the terms of use. One example is paying for the return shipment of articles that don’t fit. Often these fees can be high and sometimes it is cheaper to buy the new items than to pay for the return shipment of the current ones.

The language used in these can be very vague and even after reading it we might not realize what it says. Some companies have decided to help their users by stating more directly what each condition means under each paragraph. For example, under Eligibility under Use of the Services section, they say that “you have to be at least 13 years old to use Tumblr. We're serious: it's a hard rule, based on U.S. federal and state legislation, even if you're 12.9 years old. If you're younger than 13, don't use Tumblr. Ask your parents for an Xbox or try books.”

For some people the issue of privacy is not that important ,but knowing who is licensed to our information can prevent it from being used against us. Knowing that every letter we entered online is being saved makes me question internet privacy and if there is anything that we can keep personal.

Determining a Public around 3-D Street Art

Imagine waking up and walking out of that house on the left the morning after this was finished, I’d probably freak out for a second. Anyway, this is a 3-dimensional pavement drawing by artist Julien Beever. In class, we talked about the formings of a Public, specifically graffiti. Graffiti can be anything from the “Fuck NEU” on a bathroom stall to a highly detailed and elaborate street art. In order to help us define these expressions as Public, we referenced Michael Warner’s seven classifications of a Public from Publics and Counterpublics. Let’s see if we can classify this “graffiti” as a Public based off of Warner’s seven classifications of a Public.

First off, this public is easily self-organized. The public surrounding the pavement drawing consists of anyone who happened to be walking past this street, anyone who lived on this street, and even people like myself who stumbled across this photo through the Internet. Beever did not ask for a media showing for this masterpiece, yet people all over the world have seen this work. This easily falls under Warner’s second point, “A public is a relation among strangers.” According to Beever, this street art was a way of expressing his own curiousity with the medium. Meanwhile, the public has suggested this “graffiti” is meant to represent the ends of the Earth, the plummet into Hell, or is just something that looks really cool. This satisfies both Warner’s third (public speech on a personal/impersonal level) and seventh (poetic world making) requirement of a public. Searching this pavement drawing via the internet, you will come across hundreds of photos of people pretending to jump from one platform to the other, or reaching over the chasm. You can only imagine these photos found their way onto Facebook at some point as well. The popularization of technology makes it easy for anyone who hasn’t visited the street art to still be part of the Public surrounding it. It also increases the amount of attention drawn to it. This satisfies Warner’s requirement for a Public being created through mere attention, as well as the creation of a social space surrounding the Public. To tell you the truth, I am having trouble understanding Warner’s sixth point making up a Public, “Publics act historically according to the temporality of the circulation.” I am sure Beever’s work satisfies this requirement in some way, but if anyone could comment and explain this point, that would be fantastic.

For Public Consumption

I thought our discussion on what it means "to go public" was particularly interesting. There’s a fine balance between wanting to influence, inform, or inspire people and not wanting to be misunderstood or have your work bastardized. The most fascinating part of the public venue to me is no longer having control over context. From the Bible to the Constitution, and from famous works of literature to well known speeches, we constantly see lines and excerpts taken to mean something entirely different from its contextual significance. Take into account the perspective of who’s writing it, which of course often isn't, and the original idea can completely transformed in a short amount of time. If the work gets big enough, it can change and evolve multiple times over generations. I always tend to go back to thinking about high school English classes where everything has to be scrutinized, sometimes unnecessarily so. But there is a method to that reading of material. It is true that in certain time periods censorship was rampant, so having to suggest things through allusions and innuendo was necessary.

The separation, if any, between works for entertainment and works with more ideological significance further complicates these ideas. If an old work of fiction for entertainment alludes to something that at the time would have been scandalous to put into words, which was usually of a sexual nature, and it goes over a modern reader’s head, does that lessen the meaning of the story? What about if the work as a whole was a statement about the author’s current time and all the detail and allusion was part of that? Is it acceptable because, given the medium, the author should have known some people would never pick up on it? Compare that to the Constitution, which we quote so rigidly, yet is a document literally meant to evolve and change with the times. It's impossible to predict how the intent of your work will be changed, but the package it's put in has at least some influence.

While anxiety over an audience, the public, missing things exists because of what their negative reactions could be or because of the author’s meaning being lost, it’s also interesting to look at how that happens in a positive light. My cousin is obsessed with the song “Not Alone” by Darren Criss, which just a few years ago was just part of an EP by another artist trying to start on iTunes albeit with a small fan base from a YouTube project. But when he gained nationwide fame through the show Glee, an undeniably public audience, he became someone worthy of investigation by fans. When they discovered his work, that song became an anthem for the downtrodden, especially LGBT youth. We don’t often think of notoriety as misinterpretation, because no on cares once it’s famous. So many songs are enjoyed, yet so many people at one point are shocked when they hear the original meaning for a song.

So while it’s easier to overlook changes in meaning after songs and books are translated across audiences, I think it’s ultimately the most fascinating because it’s (usually) the most organic. Documents like the Constitution or the Bible will always have ideological meaning, so you have to expect that people will twist it to fit their agenda. Things that are entertainment can have deeper meaning that no one ever sees. Or it could have no meaning at all and become an anthem. While all the same pieces and parts are at play, seeing how things changed based so much on the box (genre) they’re put in is what I find intriguing. 

Graffiti

Graffiti has always been a very ambiguous form of art to me. There are so many different levels of street art. Graffiti can appear as a simple scribble of a message across a wall done with a pen or as a full wall mural taking up the side of the building.  To place all these different medium in one category of art has always intrigued me. The real issue with graffiti though, street art, art for the public to view for free, is whether or not it is truly public.

The audience of street art is intended to be everyone. Every place has a certain audience. Every street corner is only walked by a certain group of people. Any art that is put on that street corner becomes only available to those who engage in it. The idea of a public audience inherently means available to all. The artist who creates art in a public forum, who participates with the environment surrounding them to morph it into art, has the intention of their art being visible for all.

It is very difficult and often inaccurate to argue the intentionality of artists. There is no real way that we can understand the intention that they had in creating a piece of art unless explicitly explained by them. However, with street art, it is safe to assume that the artists’ intentions are for their art to be seen by as many people as possible. The fact that their art is on display constantly in a public space means that their hope is for the public to see it.

However, this is a very vulnerable spot for an artist to be in. Whether the tagging is a simple word, phrase of doodle scribbled across a bathroom stall or if it is a mural taking up the entire side of a city building, their work is on display every second of every day of the week. There art is constantly open to the public. Every time that a person walks by the art, they become part of the audience. Every time someone takes a photo of the art, or even if the art is in the background of a photo, the viewer becomes part of the audience. In a globalized world where we are all connected and intertwined with each other through technology and the spread of images is rapid, we all have the ability to become a member of the audience.

I feel that if this option is available to the piece of art, the art can be considered public. It is completely feasible to argue that something can never truly be public because there are certain limitations of it reaching every person. It is an argument I understand and appreciate actually. Public is a relative attitude. It is subject to the interpretation of each person. In terms of art that is created on the street, I feel that it is public; that there is the chance that any person can walk by and see it without paying any type of fee and that the intention of the artist is for it to be seen by all members of the public.