Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

What I intend to do is focus on speaking to my nieces and recording their responses to various questions, then editing it until I’ve captured the most cute/funny/poignent examples of the things kids say. I think it’ll pretty much just be a conversation, though I’ll draw up a list of questions so that hopefully I can elicit some insightful responses from them. An example of questions I might ask are “Who are your friends? Why?” (I’ve asked them this before and it’s really funny). Also I’ll ask them what they did on their vacation and things like that. But I’ll probably throw in a few more serious questions too like “What’s something that makes you happy?” and yes, maybe even “What do you think is love?” My main goal is for this to be cute/funny but hopefully the climax will be something really insightful that they hit upon. Oh, and for the record my nieces are 3 1/2 and 5 1/2 yrs old, so that should give different perspectives on the same questions.

Or, on a totally different track, I thought that I could have my mom speak about her mother. My grandmother’s mother abandoned her family when my grandmother was a teenager and she had to raise her little sister virtually single-handedly. She was a brilliant woman who never got to go to college because she was too busy being a surrogate mother. I thought I’d have my mom do the talking for this one because a) she knows the stories and b) she has a really nice speaking voice.

For the people who are supposed to be reading my proposal and commenting on it, and for anyone else who’s reading this, I thought you could tell me which idea is more intriguing to you because as of now I have absolutely no idea which direction to go in.

So…. I didn’t exactly follow the suggestions on our assignment sheet and I’m not sure if I can actually make my idea into a coherent and interesting audio essay but, it’s worth a shot. My idea first popped into my mind during class on Monday when we were talking about Morgan Freeman’s voice. People were saying that there’s a certain quality to his voice that makes you want to listen, when he speaks to you it feels like you’re getting a hug, and it makes you feel good. Well unfortunately, not everyone’s voice or tone or way of speaking is as wonderful as Mr. Freeman’s (he’s just got skills) and so I thought, why not make my audio project about the way people speak and the effect it has on the listener?

I feel like this would be a relevant topic because everyone speaks and there is definitely an effect when they do. I don’t know about other people but, when I talk to anyone, I control the tone of my voice depending on the person I’m speaking to or the desired response I would like from them. I know this definitely sounds very manipulative and a little sneaky, but it gives me time to think about my actions and it protects me from most word vomiting situations, though unfortunately not always. In my Audio essay I’ll be speaking about the different tones I use in different situations and the responses that I usually get. I will probably be the only one speaking because I’m not representative of the entire world population I can’t really generalize the ways people speak.

In terms of materials I need, I have garage band on my computer and I can record everything someplace quite in the dorms so I’m pretty much set in terms of the actual recording unless I decide to get other peoples’ input.

When I do record, some topics I plan to cover are: Setting, Purpose, Tone, and Effect of speaking. I will probably add a few of my own more specific situations and anecdotes and maybe I’ll use different examples online such as video reactions on YouTube. Since the project is supposed to be 3-4 minutes each section will probably be about 50 seconds with a minute at the end for a conclusion though I may allot more time to topics I feel are more important and less time to more supportive topics.

My purpose in choosing this topic is to hopefully make other people aware of the different effects their tones have on people and help myself reflect on the way I treat others based on what I say to them. I also hope that this will, in some way, help people listen better to things people are saying and how they are saying them.

I’ve been mulling over this audio essay for awhile and I think I may have found a decent idea to go on. As you all know, we are nearing the end of the election season. Those of you who are old enough to vote – unlike me, I don’t turn 18 until late December – will hopefully exercise your right to vote on Election Day. The politically charged atmosphere that surrounds us right now is fascinating, and I want to take advantage of that. So I want to ask people one thing, and that is: What does it mean to be an American? As the first-generation daughter of two violently nationalistic immigrants, cultural identity has always been a point of interest for me. This project is the perfect opportunity for me to gauge other people’s understanding of American culture and principles.

I have an unfortunate tendency towards introversion, so I fear this project may be difficult for me to pull off. I know I definitely want to survey a few college students — so I’ll likely pester people in between classes. It’d probably be best if I spoke to people of all age groups, though. Union Square attracts a rather diverse group of people, so I was thinking about sitting on the steps with a sign around my neck that reads “WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN AMERICAN? (answer and help a college student pass her English class)”. I’ll record people’s answers from my phone, and then I’ll transfer everything to my Macbook and mess around with it all on Garageband.

Hopefully it goes well?

Just a warning. This is not very organized, and a sort of “thinking out loud”.

I wanted to document the problem of homesickness in my audio essay. I feel that this issue is very relevant to me now, as I seem to everyday think of home. I wouldn’t call it a “disease”, but it does seem to be chronic and always seems to grow or lessen in cycles. I’ve read many people’s stories on homesickness, and how even after years of living in a foreign country these still experience a sort of nostalgia periodically.

Globalization has rapidly created a generation of people who move constantly. Professionals move from United States, Europe, and Asia more freely than they have before, but I recently read an article of the negative effects of such movement. It seems that more and more people are missing where they came from, and don’t really have a place to call home. Maybe some are “ok” with this idea of being citizens of the world, but the world is much too different to ever become familiar to a point of comfortabiity. I want to share my story along with others and focus on the emotions and the feelings of nostalgia rather than the actual narrative. I think that emotions are very powerful tools to use in audio, both through voice tone and wording.

Music will be integral to my audio project. It can help set the mood that I want to convey.

Baruch, and New York  as a whole, are perfect places for my topic as both our school and city are considered “global”, whatever that means. I know that I have found the move painful at times, and occasionally you feel out of place or isolated.

In the Macaulay program the focus is on how great New York is, how the culture of New York is absolutely limitless. We are told how lucky we are to be here, and how much opportunity we have at our fingertiips. This was the reason I came, and I felt the opportunity to study in the biggest city in the United States was just “too good” to pass up.

I want my audio project to convey a sense of remorse. I don’t want it to be necessarily depressing as a whole, but it will use some of this emotion to force its listeners to consider that opportunity comes with costs. It’s not a simple switch coming from a small town to a large one, or vice versa.

This proposal has become a “stream of consciousness”… I may want to use different passages or sections as well as personal anecdotes and experience to create a sort of audio collage.

Obviously I still have a lot to think about, but I do have an idea of the central point I want my reader to feel, as well as a general method of conveying this message.

Internet

I could not think of a topic for the life of me. I needed inspiration. So, I read the few proposals that were uploaded to the site. Nothing. So, I read them again, I didn’t have any ideas anyway… When I re-read Brian’s post, I got an idea. I read the hashtag “#firstworldproblems” and an idea sprung. Hashtags themselves are new, a creation of the Internet. I am on the Internet right now, writing this prompt. I wouldn’t be able to do this assignment without the power of the Internet. Even though the Internet is a fairly new entity, is time irreversible? For the rest of eternity will the human race be subjected to the web? If so, it’s a good thing… right?

Well these questions are exactly what I want to ask people. The first one being, “Can you survive without the internet? And why?” I am hoping for very interesting responses. Initially, I suspect many people will say no, how they can’t live without it. But, hopefully after a few seconds to think about the question, their minds wander and they present me with fodder to work with.

Hopefully I stick with this idea, but there is always the possibility that I change it, but I have a few ideas. I want to ask a range of people, like young people to old people for example. I hope to ask students that go to this school, but also professors and others. Maybe I’ll even ask a few people on the train ride home.

Judging by the responses, I will organize them in some way. I am not sure how yet, because I clearly haven’t started asking the question. Judging by the responses that I get, I may ask a few more questions but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. I will be using my iPod to record, and my MacBook to edit. Hopefully the responses I get won’t be too long, but enough to get a few ‘Grade A’ thoughts in there.

The purpose of this project is to see why the Internet is/isn’t important to people, why do we need it, and why was it widely successful. I hope I don’t get generic answers, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

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Well, this is my second attempt at an audio proposal. I left the original at the top for my own reference, but please pay no attention to it.

Best/Worst Teachers

I have had my share of… lets say, interesting… teachers.  Some of them have been really good, and some of them have been really bad. For me, the good teachers are the ones that stick in my mind. For the most part, I have been pretty lucky with the teachers that have been shaping what kind of a student I am. A few come to mind, especially my 10^th grade English teacher and my 6^th grade English teacher. The 10^th grade one, Mrs. Connelly, was my favorite. She was interesting, funny, and made me actually like the subject. But, she had to undo a lot of the damage that was done in 6^th grade. Mrs. Ellis, an elderly woman who was nice, but her teaching style was dry and (honestly) boring. She was a tough grader and did tend to get a bit angry if students’ minds began to wander, which was evident in their blank stares out the window and hushed conversations among their peers about the upcoming weekend. Now let me get to the point of the proposal.

The question I would like to ask people is, ‘Who is your favorite/least favorite teacher of all time.’ This question has the potential to be interesting because I want to know if people are more affected by positive or negative experiences in their lives. In the above paragraph, I tended to talk a little more about my least favorite teacher but notice that I put my favorite teacher first. When I proposed the question to myself, I immediately thought about Mrs. Connelly, but when I remembered Mrs. Ellis, I had a lot more to say… So, hopefully the results will be interesting enough for me to use in this project. I suspect that people will have mostly different responses, and maybe even have a few stories to share. I want to see how people learn, not just what people learn. What sticks with us through the years and why?

After haphazardly trying to come up with a concept that would be both mentally stimulating and entertaining, I believe I’ve arrived at a thought. Yes, just a thought. There’s a very good chance I’ll want to scrap everything and start something completely new, but at least I have something.

There were a lot of interesting ideas on ds106 site, and while I would have seriously considered the movie mash-up idea, I don’t have the time, or patience to do something on that large a scale. That, and it’d be really hard trying to come up with a real purpose for doing it other than brining Fanny Brice and Dolly Levi into the same quirky universe.

The “Over-Dramatized Reading” assignment is perfect for me – but I’ve decided to couple it with “Teenage Angst” assignment to give it more of a “meaningful and thought provoking sentiment.” Now the thought…

Everyone knows about #firstworldproblems, #teenageproblems, and how hilarious – if not completely true – they are. “Oh, my life is so hard!!” tweets a college sophomore from his brand new iPad as he has to wait longer than he expected for his coffee order that he paid for with a credit card his parents gave him. One of my major inspirations for this concept has to do with something we’ve all probably experienced at Baruch: the escalator “construction.” As I write this, I’ve already had to enture the trauma that is the third floor up escalator not working twice this week. Yeah, I had to actually walk. It’s ridiculous, but it’s our society.

So why not design a broadcast around the idea of an average teenager (spoiler: me), being stuck in the real world with all these problems? Like on Survivor, the broadcast would be diary-like confessionals where I express the hardships of having to actually buy a textbook because I can’t find a free download of it online, or that I have to get up and move to a different seat in the library because I need to charge my phone. Woe. Is. Me.

It should be a fairly simple process, just recording into my phone every time I come across one of these “problems,” and then editing it together with Garageband. I’m still working on how I want to incorporate music and sound effects, but I can almost guarantee some type of Cher-reference. (It’ll tie in, trust me.)

Oh, right. My purpose. The “grand scheme of things.” The “Modus operandi.” There’s two levels to it. I want to draw attention to the realization that we have so many advantages in life, and we usually take them for granted. I want people to realize how ridiculous they sound when the say the world is over because their DVR reset itself on them. Because it’s true. The second level is more for me personally: Why do I think these things? What drives me to be more upset over a lack of Wi-Fi rather than being happy with the fact that I’m a – supposedly – stable, healthy human being with everything he needs to thrive? I want this project to be a wake-up call.

I am thinking about two possible choices for this project: one, to do something like “50 People, 1 Question” with the question – If you’re going to give away something, what would it be and who would you give it to? Why? Or two, to do the audio assignment “Sing My Life” found in DS106 (not literally sing, but a song that describes my life and I can relate to it). Even though the latter seems more interesting to do, I think it will be more feasible to do the former. I might change if I cannot compile the answers from random people that I will question to get a point/purpose/message across.

The question that I pose before is an inspiration from the word “give” while listening to Ira Glass’s “20 Acts in 60 Minutes” in class. I thought that as human beings, we’re very selfish creatures, always wanting something for ourselves and are willing to rob it from others. So what if the situation is reversed, where instead are asked to give something away? I expect that there would be two sides to this: one, people who will give away something worthless that they don’t want or need, or two, people who will give away something precious that they value and want a special person to have it.

Depending on the answers I get, my direction towards how I want to present this project will be different. If I get a lot of answers of people wanting to give away something because they don’t want it anymore, it would confirm what I thought human beings are likely to be – selfish. And so, I might take a sarcastic approach to how I want to present it, to show the ugliness of the human heart. Or if I get a lot of answer of people wanting to entrust something precious that they have to someone they care about, I would use music to try to bring out the nostalgia and affections that exists between human beings.

For my question, I want to question very diverse people. There’s an event coming up that I will attend on Oct. 12-14 called NYAF (New York Anime Festival). There will be many people from the city and other states attending this event. There will definitely be terrible background noises because of the amount of people gathering, but I think it will be worth a shot. That said, I will be trying to interview people in school or maybe on the street as well. (I only have my phone… hopefully it can get the job done…)

Most of the talking will be directly from the recordings I get from interviewing people. I imagine the segments to have about 15 to 25 seconds for each of the selected persons in the Audio-Essay. That would mean I will have anywhere from nine to twelve different voices in my piece.

I actually do not know where I will exactly record my audio clips. But as I mentioned above, it would be either from people in Baruch College, on the streets around Baruch College, and/or in NYAF (which I believe will have lots of background noises).

To make this possible, I will be using my phone’s voice recorder, sound editing software (Audacity or GarageBand), and various soundtrack(s) that might come in handy to set up the mood of my Audio-Essay. I haven’t decided on which soundtrack(s) or song to use yet; it might become clearer as the project progresses.

As for the questions that I have:

1. Do we need to create some sort of citations for the sounds or songs that we use or can we just use it? The only reason I’m asking this is because I am thinking of using soundtracks from Japanese songs (of course, these will only be instrumentals).

2. What does the draft due on Oct. 15 entail? Does this mean that we should have the “draft” of the sound file? If I understand this, the only written work to hand in is the Draft Cover Letter. Correct? I’m a bit concern because I plan record much of my materials will be recorded in NYAF which is very near the due date for the draft. It will be nice to know what we need for the draft beforehand so we can prepare it properly.