Weekly Blog Post 6

In the video for "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M., the creator of the video uses a variety of rhetorical appeals to add to the overall effectiveness of the video.

One of the most apparent strategies is the use of logos. The video is in black and white and often shows Michael Stipe, the band's lead singer, walking through the desert, but there are other images projected in the background. This creates a structural visual hierarchy because Stipe is always the most focused aspect of the video and is what the eye is drawn to first. However, as Stipe is just walking and singing, the audience tends to pay more attention to what is happening in the background after initially noticing Stipe. Occasionally, the video cuts back to just showing Stipe, again making him the central focus. As the video is entirely in black and white, there isn't a lot of contrast colorwise, but as mentioned earlier, Stipe tends to contrast with the background clips. The background clips generally look like old TV shows with fuzzy pictures and horizontal lines across them, while Stipe is often shown in a clear picture.

The video also sometimes shows several clips of the same thing at the same time. They appear to be randomly located on the screen, and are each portrayed a bit differently. Since they are of the same object or clip, they serve as repetition and create a sense of visual unity. Sometimes the video shows several different clips at the same time, and this can be confusing as there is a lot going on visually and the audience may not know what to focus on and so has to try to take in everything at the same time. This is effective in that it gets the audience to see everything that is being presented in the video.

The structural use of logos helps to formulate pathos and ethos within the video as well. The only hues used are black and white and don't have much brightness. This keeps the video simple, and the simplicity helps the audience to focus on the clips in the video instead of having to take in all the different colors. This avoids over-stimulation, especially when there are a lot of different images shown, and this contributes to the overall effectiveness of the video.

The video is arranged to visually support the argument of the song that there are a lot of things, both true and untrue that people will believe or not believe as discussed in Weekly Blog Post 4. The clips and images used in the video are all of the references made in the lyrics of the song and are organized in such a way to draw the attention of the audience to each aspect and highlight their importance. The end result is a music video that is both argumentative and entertaining, which was probably the original purpose of the makers of the video.

Weekly Blog Post 5

The video for R.E.M.'s "Man on the Moon" opens with Michael Stipe singing and walking through the desert in a cowboy hat. Coupled with the fact that the video is made to look like an old-fashioned black and white movie, the video immediately establishes an emotional appeal with the audience. Stipe is seen as a down-to-earth cowboy, just a regular guy like the rest of us, and the audience can relate to that. This feeling of identification is confirmed at the end of the video when Stipe goes into a truck stop and everyone there starts singing with him. This intwines both ethos and pathos, as the audience can see Stipe as not a famous musician, but a person, and this identity evokes the emotions of the audience.

Ethos is also established by the name-dropping throughout the song. Andy Kaufman, Fred Blassie, and numerous others including Elvis, Darwin, and Moses are mentioned. Most listeners will be able to recognize these names and understand what the song is about. I had to look some of the events and information up, but when the song first came out in 1992, Andy Kaufman had only recently died and was probably still fairly well-known to the intended audience of the song. This gives a sense of credibility to the band because the audience is able to relate to the song.

Logos is brought forward in the actual lyrics of the song. The whole song is an argument about society's susceptibility to believe things and also the tendency of people, like Kaufman, to take advantage of that fact. Page 203 of Compose Design Advocate names "Lists and Repetition" and "Arguing by Example" as two forms of logos. While these aren't made blatantly obvious in "Man on the Moon" as they would be in a formal written argument, the song mentions and repeats several examples although it doesn't explain them in depth. It is then up to the audience to infer what the specific argument is, which is not that difficult.

Weekly Blog Post 4

"Now Andy did you hear about this one..."

The context of the song "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M. is possibly one of the most important things to take into account when analyzing it. I love R.E.M. and this song, but before this, I had never watched the video and I had never really stopped to think about the context of the song.

The song includes a lot of references to pop culture hoaxes that might not be understood out of context. A major one in the song refers to Andy Kaufman who, I will admit, I had never even heard of besides "Andy Kaufman and the wrestling match" that is mentioned in this song and shown in the video. This "wrestling match" turned out to be a staged act between Kaufman, an entertainer/comedian, and a professional WWF (now know as WWE) wrestler. Kaufman was also known for his Elvis impersonations which are shown in the video ("Andy are you goofing on Elvis?") and there are rumors that Kaufman may have staged his own death.

The chorus of the song "If you believed they put a man on the moon/man on the moon/If you believed there's nothing up his sleeve/Then nothing is cool" refers to the widespread belief that people never really went to the moon and it was all just a War of the Worlds-type hoax. The song goes on to mention Darwin and Newton and Moses, among other things, and ultimately back to Andy Kaufman.

Taken out of context, this song is simply that: a song. But when you take into account everything that makes up the song, I think "Man on the Moon" has a deeper meaning. It is a criticism of society's tendency to doubt things they shouldn't, such as space exploration, while believing things that aren't true (Kaufman's wrestling match and the possibility that he faked his death). It puts questioning Andy Kaufman on the same level of questioning God, which raises the question that since there are so many hoaxes that people fall for, how do we even know what to believe? Are we so gullible that we will believe just about anything, or are we so distrustful that we question everything? As the song puts it, "Are we losing touch?"

Weekly Blog Post 3

I put up the links in the class list and they all work!

Weekly Blog Post 2

Initially, I thought this video was really interesting. It made me realize that while we don't often consciously recognize the role technology plays in our lives, it has a significant impact on almost everything we do. Even something as simple as writing a sentence is taken to a whole new level by technology, as shown in the opening part of video.

The web offers a new medium and new ways to organize and present information, along with making information more accessible to a broader audience and increasing communication. With this new "information age" are new issues and norms, almost a whole new culture. We don't think twice about "googling" or "tweeting" while a few short years ago, most people didn't even know what MySpace was. In a few seconds, anyone could find this video and virtually anything else they wanted to watch on YouTube. Today, we update our Facebook statuses and "chat" with our friends to keep in touch. I recently had a conversation with some of my high school friends at a different college about how we would've kept in touch if there were no such thing as Facebook. Call each other? Write letters? How would we know each other's new addresses and phone numbers? How would we find out when the others would be home on break? The internet has completely changed how most people live and interact, especially in developed countries like the United States.

However, the more I thought about it, the more I disagreed with the basic idea of the video. Yes, the internet and technology play an increasingly huge role in our lives, but I wouldn't go so far to say that it's a machine that's controlling us. See, there's still people behind the phenomena of the internet. The web is just the medium that connects these people. Somebody wrote that article we found on Bing. There's an actual person who updates that blog. And while the format may be different, the purpose of Encyclopedia Britannica Online is still the same as the multi-volume hard-backed set in the reference section of the library. The internet has just made it a bit easier to access.

We don't need the internet for every aspect of life. We still write things in our notebooks with a pencil, we still walk to class every day, we still see and interact with people face to face all the time. Yes, we could type out notes on a laptop, we could take online classes, and we can email anybody any piece of information we could possibly think of, but I don't see a future where everyone lives in their own little box solely connected to the world through their computers. And we have to remember that not everybody has access to the internet. Much of the world doesn't even have electricity or clean water, much less wireless cafes.

Technology is a supplement to everyday life, not a replacement. We control how we use technology; it doesn't control us.