The links on this wordpress blog are kind of hard to locate at the bottom, so here’s a direct link to the portfolio:

Portfolio

When asked to define myself as a consumer, at first I just thought, “Pfft, I’m no consumer, I don’t buy anything – I’m a poor college kid!”  However, as I got to think about it, I began to wonder what it meant to be a consumer.  Wikipedia defines a consumer as “a person or group of people who are the final users of products and or services generated within a social system.”  With such a broad definition, it shows that everyone is a consumer in their own way; therefore I must fit a profile of a consumer as well.  Is that what we all are?  Are we only here to live and die and make future generations to do the same?  These are disturbing, existential questions that have no place in a consumer essay, but are a part of my thought process as I try to define myself as a consumer.  If you break it down, everyone must consume products every day.  We consume water food and air in order to sustain life.  We consume electricity to power our machines and our buildings so that we may be comfortable indoors.  We consume large amounts of fossil fuels in the form of coal and gas to power our transportation.  These are the basics that we have become accustomed to, and are understandable that we must utilize them.

In general, America has built a highly consumer oriented culture, where “the customer is always right!”  This culture, much like any other phenomenon, has grouped the population into different classes of consumers.  It is an expectation that people follow this trend of consumption in the United States, and those who don’t are considered strange or are commended for their willpower.  While I would love to tell you that as a poor college kid, I rarely consume products just as most (if not all) Americans do.  However, if I said this, I would be lying.  While it is true I am a college kid living on a budget, and I do only purchase what I need, I purchase exactly that – what I need.  I have found it hard to classify myself as one specific consumer; however after letting the topic ferment in my head for a few days, it came to me.  My identity as a consumer is defined by my use of technology, this is partly because of myself being a Computer Science major, it is an obligation that I spend a large amount of time familiarizing myself with the software necessary to fulfill my major, but also partly because I am a bored college student with nothing to do during my spare time.

I found it difficult to pinpoint myself as a consumer as my consumption habits pale in comparison to those around me.  I come from a very well-to-do family with horrible consumption habits.  I’ll spare you the details, but a large portion of money has gone towards technology – computer parts, laptops, cameras, phones, televisions, you name it – we’ve bought it.  However, technology is unique, in that it does not expire.  Buying a laptop for $1200 that will last me four years through college is a worthy investment.  While I may believe my consumption habits are lesser than most, I do still consume products every day.  As a sit, typing on my Samsung laptop, made in China, I hold my Apple iPhone, designed in California, assembled in China.  My Black & Decker mini-fridge, assembled in China, keeps my drinks cold.  These products have something in common – they are made in China and shipped to America.  So in consuming these products, I have not only bought the product itself, but also the miles it has flown to get here, and the labor of the workers in China.  But if I have bought the product of the labor of the workers in China, have I, somehow, helped reinforce their consumption habits as well?  Where does the consumption chain end?

When I buy something, I sit and visualize how I will use it, and how often I will use it.  If I cannot see myself using it more than once, I ask myself why I feel that I need it.  I have never been too impressed by flashy advertisements or name brands, nor have I been concerned with impressing others with the expensive things that I buy.  Because of this, I rarely buy products other than groceries or school supplies, and will leave more expensive or extravagant purchases for later.  As a college student, I live a pretty low key lifestyle; I am surviving off of summer job money and money from graduation still.  Since being in Pullman, I have refrained from buying what I don’t need, because there are more important things, like books and food that I could be buying.  Because of my conservative spending habits, I am able to live fairly comfortably on a very tight budget.  To some I might seem crazy because I am not concerned with the flashiest trends, but by not investing a large sum of money in my present, I am investing in my future.

The expectation of writing something like this is that I find that my consumption habits are unstable or that I should cut back my spending on certain unneeded products.  However, I have been able to realize that I am fairly responsible with my money, and I buy the things I need and that I will get the most use out of.  Admittedly I am guilty of being an American consumer; I do not fully indulge in the consumer culture I live in.  While I am not a seventh generation toilet paper recycler, I also don’t spend my money too easily.  The saying goes, “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” but I say “keep your friends close and your wallet closer.”

For our invention mob, we decided to perform a social experiment based on something that we had seen on YouTube. We would place a camera in front of people’s dorm rooms, and knock on their door. When the people opened the door they would be confronted with a question to answer, that would be completely random and force the participant to think on their feet. We thought this would help provide a bright spot in people’s days by breaking up their daily routine and taking them out of their comfort zone in a healthy way. We thought that by doing this, they would have a specific highlight that they would be able to look back on and laugh and say that it was funny or that they enjoyed the surprise.

Initially, when we presented our ideas to the class, they felt very reprehensive about the whole idea and thought that it would be a major violation of privacy. These were viewpoints that we, as a group, had not considered, and made us think of better ways to execute the project. We decided it would be best to perform our project on people that we knew rather than complete strangers, as we could guarantee more responses, and a higher success rate. We would warn our friends that we would be asking them a question soon, but would not tell them the date or time or what question they would be asked in order to ensure that the responses would be of genuine surprise and not of scripted answers.

Personally I really enjoy working with controversial topics and hearing that people were worried or concerned about how the project would be executed really excited me about what we were doing. The whole purpose of the invention mob was to get people away from their work or their games and have them experience something they would really remember. The expressions on the participant’s faces were priceless, and their genuine answers made the project stand out even more.

Our first road block of the experiment was figuring out a way to get a camera and editing software that would allow us to create a high quality end product. However we soon found that WSU has a service that allows students to check out camera equipment, including a tripod, and they even had computer editing software available as well. This made our job a great deal easier as we no longer were worried about how we would be able to execute the project.

After we had the camera, we then had to decide where we wanted to go to tape the project, and we decided that my dorm and Melissa’s dorm would be the best places to go since they were both on the south side of campus, then we could go to the North side of campus and finish the project in Scott-Coman and Streit-Perham. On the first day, we went to my dorm, Rogers, and gathered five responses from some of my floor mates who were willing to participate. Our first responses seemed great and we were happy with the way that they turned out. Later we went to Ganon and Goldsworthy as well as Scott-Coman and Streit-Perham to record more responses. However, after combining video clips we found that the faces of the participants were darkened due to intense back-lighting from the sun leaking through the windows behind them. Unfortunately we were unable to fix this issue, and our videos ended up being fairly dark throughout. We tried going at different times throughout the day, from around noon to nine o’clock at night, but were unsuccessful in fixing the issue.

When brainstorming questions to ask our participants we weren’t sure if we should have used serious questions such as “What is the hardest part of being away from home,” or fun questions like “If you were a super hero, what super power would you have and why?” It wasn’t until we got out and started recording that we found that more fun questions resulted in more genuine responses, and a more enjoyable product. One case that sticks out in particular is with the question “What did you last dream about?” The girl that answered this question, responded that she was following a squirrel through a forest, until a ship carrying an army of orcs started shooting their bows at her, forcing her to run away and abandon the squirrel. This response sticks in my memory, because it seems so silly, yet it makes sense. We all have these strange dreams that we can’t understand, but no one really ever talks about them. It was interesting to see someone laugh so genuinely at a silly dream that they recently had, and it was great to have gotten it on tape.

We had many successes in creating this project; one of them was the eagerness of people to participate. It was difficult to get the first few people to join in, but once people around us saw that people were enjoying answering the questions, they really wanted to try it too. We were also very lucky to have found that there was a service provided by WSU that we could check out a camera and a tripod over the weekend without any cost to us.

We had our fair share of failures as well. Firstly, we had issues with lighting that caused the faces of the people to be very dark and at times entirely blacked out. This was caused by the light from behind them, and we were unfortunately unable to fix it. However after going out to record the first few times in the mid-afternoon, we decided to go the final time at night. We thought that if the sun had gone down, the lighting issue should be fixed, and that we would have no more problems. However when we got to the dorms we found that many halls had their lights turned off inside at night, and once again we had fairly dark video. Another failure that we were unable to solve was that for the final videos we were unable to check out a camera, so we had to use someone’s personal camera that had a different aspect ratio to it, so the video clips turned out different than the first set of videos.

Another difficulty we discovered when working on this project was that not everyone was willing to give the full truth or their most honest answers fearing that they could get in trouble or something. They thought that since they were being recorded that anything that they said could end up being used against them somehow, even though we had no intentions of doing so. But nonetheless, we were unable to get some people’s full responses to some questions due to their surprising or spontaneous nature. People were afraid to give their honest opinions because they were not anonymous, however the fact that our experiment was not anonymous prevented our project from becoming inappropriate or vulgar.

Our project was modified throughout the process, our first idea was that we wanted to knock on people’s doors, leave the camera and run. However, after being – for lack of a better term – bombarded with questions and concerns from our class mates, we decided that we would knock on the doors of people that we knew, and step aside, out of their way, so it felt like it was just that person and the camera, without us in the shot or in the way of the participant. Because of this, the people answering the questions often looked to us for a source of an answer, but we did not provide any assistance in answering the question, we were only there to stop if we were asked to and to ensure that the camera that was property of WSU was not damaged.

Throughout the experiment we found that guys were much more willing to participate than girls, because girls were concerned about being on camera without makeup or their hair done, while guys were more than willing to provide great answer regardless of how they looked. We gathered around 30 responses and only included about 7 in the final product in order to cut down the length of the video. We asked slightly more girls than guys, but we ended up with about the same amount of representation between guys and girls.

Though our project evolved over time and experienced its fair share of failures and successes, I believe that we accomplished our goal by getting people out of their comfort zones and providing a highlight in their day. Just by answering a simple silly question, we managed to get some great laughs out of people as they told stories from their childhood and their life here at WSU.

At the beginning of the semester, I came into class skeptical about what the class was going to be, as it was labeled as a multi-modal class. Going into the first blog post I was unsure what I was getting myself into, and whether or not I would come to enjoy the unorthodox approach to English that this class took. However, looking back at my first blog I can see that I have come a long way in terms of how comfortable I am with putting my ideas out for others to see, and with the concept of blogging in general. Before, I thought of blogging as kind of outdated and irrelevant, but after seeing different blogs by other people, and what kind of audiences they have been able to achieve through these blogs show me their true power in the era of social media. When I look back and remember writing my first blog post, I can actually remember wondering what kind of information I was going to be gaining by writing down my own definition of communication in the 21^st century, and my concept of “learning to write.” But looking back at my writing now, I can see that my views on communication have changed fairly drastically, and I view people differently as well. I didn’t know how much different others were from myself until taking the time in peer revisions and group work to talk to the other people about their views and opinions on topics.

Before this semester, when I thought of an English class, I immediately thought of reading Shakespeare and writing style analysis poems on the rhetoric and symbolism used by Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath. However after completing a semester in a multi-modal English class I learned that there is much more depth than that. Before this semester I dreaded writing essays and reading the works men who had been dead for centuries. But after this semester, I have found that essays can be engaging, and don’t always require a pen and paper, and they can reach an audience far broader than my high school English teacher. This semester I completed an essay about myself as a consumer, I told a story using only pictures, and I managed to get over 20 complete strangers to dance and sing in front of a camera. If you had told me that my English class would consist of any of these topics, I would have laughed, but after completing this semester I can  genuinely say that I have learned a great deal from completing these tasks as well.

My favorite blog is most likely my critique of an ad, where I used an advertisement for AXE body spray that aired in 2006. I enjoyed the AXE product critique because it was interesting to look at an advertisement for a product and see whether it matched the product or not, especially with the nature of AXE body spray advertisements. The ad showed hundreds or thousands of women running in one direction, which ended up being in the direction of a man showering himself with AXE body spray. This ad was fun to write about because I have personally used their products and have not experienced the side effects of having hundreds of women flocking to me in order to take in my scent, but it still provides entertainment and caught the viewer’s attention and managed to sell the product.

I also really enjoyed writing the consumer essay, because I have rarely written about myself and my life and my view points. It was also very interesting to be able to experience others’ lives through their essays and their explanations. This project felt like it was one of the most helpful as we were able to critique others’ work and in doing so learn more about the people around us and better our writing as well. This was really interesting because I came into the class very skeptical about the whole blogging process and working with others on projects for the class, but it turned out far better than I had expected. The consumer essay as a whole helped me to realize that in a culture that is full of consumers that it is okay to be a responsible spender.

Another blog project I enjoyed was the invention mob. Our project received a great deal of controversy from the class as it made some individuals uncomfortable at the thought of having a camera in front of their door and us waiting with questions. However I feel that our invention mob went very well and due to the organization and hard work from my team the goal of the project was accomplished. I personally really enjoy working with controversial issues and trying to provide understanding of them, so the fact that our invention mob was so poorly received only drove me to want to pursue it further. I found the different reactions that we faced were very interesting because I was not expecting people to be upset at the concept at all. This is what made the project even more exciting to me, as it was a very interesting idea that would require very specific and careful planning or it could go wrong, but the end product turned out to be really great.

Looking back at the kid I was at the beginning of the semester and who I am now, not much has changed on the outside, but I have learned a lot about the different types of people who surround me at WSU, and I learned a lot more about myself. As I mentioned earlier, through the consumer essay I learned more about myself not only as a consumer but on a personal level, and the invention mob process taught me a lot about the people here at WSU. Through blogging I learned more about the different kinds of literature that is out there, and that not everything comes from a text book or a novel. I learned that style analysis papers are not the full extent of an English class, and I learned about the power of communication in the 21^st century across different forms of media.

At the beginning of the semester, I came into class skeptical about what the class was going to be, as it was labeled as a multi-modal class. Going into the first blog post I was unsure what I was getting myself into, and whether or not I would come to enjoy the unorthodox approach to English that this class took. However, looking back at my first blog I can see that I have come a long way in terms of how comfortable I am with putting my ideas out for others to see, and with the concept of blogging in general. Before, I thought of blogging as kind of outdated and irrelevant, but after seeing different blogs by other people, and what kind of audiences they have been able to achieve through these blogs show me their true power in the era of social media. When I look back and remember writing my first blog post, I can actually remember wondering what kind of information I was going to be gaining by writing down my own definition of communication in the 21^st century, and my concept of “learning to write.” But looking back at my writing now, I can see that my views on communication have changed fairly drastically, and I view people differently as well. I didn’t know how much different others were from myself until taking the time in peer revisions and group work to talk to the other people about their views and opinions on topics.

My favorite blog is most likely my critique of an ad, where I used an advertisement for AXE body spray that aired in 2006. I enjoyed the AXE product critique because it was interesting to look at an advertisement for a product and see whether it matched the product or not, especially with the nature of AXE body spray advertisements. The ad showed hundreds or thousands of women running in one direction, which ended up being in the direction of a man showering himself with AXE body spray. This ad was fun to write about because I have personally used their products and have not experienced the side effects of having hundreds of women flocking to me in order to take in my scent, but it still provides entertainment and caught the viewer’s attention and managed to sell the product.

I also really enjoyed writing the consumer essay, because I have rarely written about myself and my life and my view points. It was also very interesting to be able to experience others’ lives through their essays and their explanations. This project felt like it was one of the most helpful as we were able to critique others’ work and in doing so learn more about the people around us and better our writing as well. This was really interesting because I came into the class very skeptical about the whole blogging process and working with others on projects for the class, but it turned out far better than I had expected. The consumer essay as a whole helped me to realize that in a culture that is full of consumers that it is okay to be a responsible spender.

Another blog project I enjoyed was the invention mob. Our project received a great deal of controversy from the class as it made some individuals uncomfortable at the thought of having a camera in front of their door and us waiting with questions. However I feel that our invention mob went very well and due to the organization and hard work from my team the goal of the project was accomplished. I personally really enjoy working with controversial issues and trying to provide understanding of them, so the fact that our invention mob was so poorly received only drove me to want to pursue it further. I found the different reactions that we faced were very interesting because I was not expecting people to be upset at the concept at all. This is what made the project even more exciting to me, as it was a very interesting idea that would require very specific and careful planning or it could go wrong, but the end product turned out to be really great.

Looking back at the kid I was at the beginning of the semester and who I am now, not much has changed on the outside, but I have learned a lot about the different types of people who surround me at WSU, and I learned a lot more about myself. As I mentioned earlier, through the consumer essay I learned more about myself not only as a consumer but on a personal level, and the invention mob process taught me a lot about the people here at WSU. Through blogging I learned more about the different kinds of literature that is out there, and that not everything comes from a text book or a novel. I learned that style analysis papers are not the full extent of an English class, and I learned about the power of communication in the 21^st century across social media.

For our invention mob, we decided to perform a social experiment based on something that we had seen on YouTube. We would place a camera in front of people’s dorm rooms, and knock on their door. When the people opened the door they would be confronted with a question to answer, that would be completely random and force the participant to think on their feet. We thought this would help provide a bright spot in people’s days by breaking up their daily routine and taking them out of their comfort zone in a healthy way. We thought that by doing this, they would have a specific highlight that they would be able to look back on and laugh and say that it was funny or that they enjoyed the surprise.

Initially, when we presented our ideas to the class, they felt very reprehensive about the whole idea and thought that it would be a major violation of privacy. These were viewpoints that we, as a group, had not considered, and made us think of better ways to execute the project. We decided it would be best to perform our project on people that we knew rather than complete strangers, as we could guarantee more responses, and a higher success rate. We would warn our friends that we would be asking them a question soon, but would not tell them the date or time or what question they would be asked in order to ensure that the responses would be of genuine surprise and not of scripted answers.

Our first road block of the experiment was figuring out a way to get a camera and editing software that would allow us to create a high quality end product. However we soon found that WSU has a service that allows students to check out camera equipment, including a tripod, and they even had computer editing software available as well. This made our job a great deal easier as we no longer were worried about how we would be able to execute the project.

After we had the camera, we then had to decide where we wanted to go to tape the project, and we decided that my dorm and Melissa’s dorm would be the best places to go since they were both on the south side of campus, then we could go to the North side of campus and finish the project in Scott-Coman and Streit-Perham. On the first day, we went to my dorm, Rogers, and gathered five responses from some of my floor mates who were willing to participate. Our first responses seemed great and we were happy with the way that they turned out. Later we went to Ganon and Goldsworthy as well as Scott-Coman and Streit-Perham to record more responses. However, after combining video clips we found that the faces of the participants were darkened due to intense back-lighting from the sun leaking through the windows behind them. Unfortunately we were unable to fix this issue, and our videos ended up being fairly dark throughout. We tried going at different times throughout the day, from around noon to nine o’clock at night, but were unsuccessful in fixing the issue.

When brainstorming questions to ask our participants we weren’t sure if we should have used serious questions such as “What is the hardest part of being away from home,” or fun questions like “If you were a super hero, what super power would you have and why?” It wasn’t until we got out and started recording that we found that more fun questions resulted in more genuine responses, and a more enjoyable product. One case that sticks out in particular is with the question “What did you last dream about?” The girl that answered this question, responded that she was following a squirrel through a forest, until a ship carrying an army of orcs started shooting their bows at her, forcing her to run away and abandon the squirrel. This response sticks in my memory, because it seems so silly, yet it makes sense. We all have these strange dreams that we can’t understand, but no one really ever talks about them. It was interesting to see someone laugh so genuinely at a silly dream that they recently had, and it was great to have gotten it on tape.

We had many successes in creating this project; one of them was the eagerness of people to participate. It was difficult to get the first few people to join in, but once people around us saw that people were enjoying answering the questions, they really wanted to try it too. We were also very lucky to have found that there was a service provided by WSU that we could check out a camera and a tripod over the weekend without any cost to us.

We had our fair share of failures as well. Firstly, we had issues with lighting that caused the faces of the people to be very dark and at times entirely blacked out. This was caused by the light from behind them, and we were unfortunately unable to fix it. However after going out to record the first few times in the mid-afternoon, we decided to go the final time at night. We thought that if the sun had gone down, the lighting issue should be fixed, and that we would have no more problems. However when we got to the dorms we found that many halls had their lights turned off inside at night, and once again we had fairly dark video. Another failure that we were unable to solve was that for the final videos we were unable to check out a camera, so we had to use someone’s personal camera that had a different aspect ratio to it, so the video clips turned out different than the first set of videos.

Another difficulty we discovered when working on this project was that not everyone was willing to give the full truth or their most honest answers fearing that they could get in trouble or something. They thought that since they were being recorded that anything that they said could end up being used against them somehow, even though we had no intentions of doing so. But nonetheless, we were unable to get some people’s full responses to some questions due to their surprising or spontaneous nature. People were afraid to give their honest opinions because they were not anonymous, however the fact that our experiment was not anonymous prevented our project from becoming inappropriate or vulgar.

Our project was modified throughout the process, our first idea was that we wanted to knock on people’s doors, leave the camera and run. However, after being – for lack of a better term – bombarded with questions and concerns from our class mates, we decided that we would knock on the doors of people that we knew, and step aside, out of their way, so it felt like it was just that person and the camera, without us in the shot or in the way of the participant. Because of this, the people answering the questions often looked to us for a source of an answer, but we did not provide any assistance in answering the question, we were only there to stop if we were asked to and to ensure that the camera that was property of WSU was not damaged.

Throughout the experiment we found that guys were much more willing to participate than girls, because girls were concerned about being on camera without makeup or their hair done, while guys were more than willing to provide great answer regardless of how they looked. We gathered around 30 responses and only included about 7 in the final product in order to cut down the length of the video. We asked slightly more girls than guys, but we ended up with about the same amount of representation between guys and girls.

Though our project evolved over time and experienced its fair share of failures and successes, I believe that we accomplished our goal by getting people out of their comfort zones and providing a highlight in their day. Just by answering a simple silly question, we managed to get some great laughs out of people as they told stories from their childhood and their life here at WSU. 

After spending the past few weeks working on researched issues related to violence in visual media and its effects on child behavior, I’ve found it really difficult to translate to an essay. I’ve decided to change my topic to an issue I have more experience with and have researched previously on my own. Hopefully I won’t regret switching topics, but I think writing about something that has more proven tests and research will be simpler and may be less forced.
My new topic will be the use of torture as a legitimate interrogation/counter-terrorism technique. The use of such techniques can be crucial to preventing possible attacks on US troops or citizens, and has been shown to provide useful information in the efforts of counter-terrorism.

Recently, it seems like we cant go a week without another school shooting being in the news. It really saddens my heart to think that people have been pushed so far to the edge that they feel the need to kill the people around them. Just recently there was a kid who had shot up his school and in his court hearing, took off his collared shirt to reveal a white tshirt with the word “Killer” written on it, as if he were proud of the fact that he had killed and injured several of his classmates. I’m not quite sure this is the best place to be posting a rant about this kind of thing, but I need to get it off my chest. I’m not sure when I hear these stories whether to be sad for the families or angry at the shooter, or maybe a combination of both. I can understand that it may be more difficult for other people, but I can never see justification for killing another person, let alone mocking their memory in front of their family as well. 

Many believe we shouldn’t talk about the issues because all it does is glorify the shooters, because they are getting the attention that they are looking for. I agree with this to a certain extent. These killers, who are looking for attention should be forgotten, but their acts should always be remembered. The only comfort I can find with these people being caught and brought to justice is that we will not have to worry about them hurting people again, as they will spend the rest of their lives behind bars.