viz.

Here's a Telegu (East Indian) sex-ed video extolling the virtues of using a certain brand of condoms, featuring a Bollywood-style anthem and men dressed up as dancing condoms. I have to wonder, though, who is the target audience for this video? They address men and women both gay and straight, but the message seems geared toward a younger demographic. At the very least, the dancing condoms juxtaposed with line drawings of gay sex is jarring. But this might just be a problem of cultural legibility.

Obama supporters have been called fanatical and naive but something that we've also noticed is that they are also rather musical. MK noted the Will.I.Am video and McCain parody here and Tim posted the somewhat...let's say cheesy...response from Clinton supporters here. Starting with the "Obama girl"'s song (who, it turned out later, didn't vote), and helped along by the accessibility of web publishing, Obama's participatory rhetoric seems to elicit a creative response that belies an identification (perhaps over-identification) with the candidate.

Here in Texas we've got two new videos hitting the tubes. The first attempt to argue against the widely held conception that Clinton is the candidate for Latino (and in this case Mexican American) voters:

Check out a new political ad from the Clinton campaign:

This post is not about a certain viral video that will remain nameless, even though most people probably know what I'm talking about, and even if they haven't seen it they may have heard about the controversy surrounding it. Instead, this post is about the response to this viral video, a phenomenon documented in a recent slideshow presented on slate.com (created by Michael Agger). The slideshow presents a series of youtube videos in which people film their reactions to the video in question. So, a strong disclaimer: if you watch this slideshow, you will NOT see the video in question, but you will be shown a series of videos in which people react to it. Additionally, the videos are accompanied by a written commentary on what they signify; this commentary does, albeit somewhat obliquely, hint at the contents of the video.

The slideshow is prefaced by a brief discussion of the study of disgust, an argument that is related to some of my earlier posts about the representation of the unrepresentable:

Disgust, it seems, is hard to investigate without being mocked or without becoming disgusting yourself. With those caveats in mind, let's turn to the phenomenon of [redacted]. Immediately we run into trouble: [redacted] is a video that's too disgusting to write about. In order to discuss (and perhaps learn from) [redacted], then, we must study the faces of those who have seen it.

My (long, inscrutable) reaction to this reaction to the reactions after the jump!

Perhaps a good point of departure for a discussion of Women in Film would be the creator's earlier attempt to give us an overview of Women in Art:

Does high art create/communicate normative body structures or gender roles in the same way as popular culture?

I recently read a New Yorker article that mentioned the spell-binding youtube video "Women in Film" seen below. It's quite mesmerizing, have a look.

Dove expertly uses visual rhetoric to combat the insidious forces of ... visual rhetoric.

This poster is a political advertisement for the SVP (in English, the "Swiss People's Party"), a far-right political party in Switzerland that has made anti-immigration policies a centerpiece of its campaign in an upcoming election. The posters have been controversial: the tagline reads "to create security," and the image depicts three white sheep booting the black sheep from the swiss flag, presumably symbolic of Swiss territory.

I’m a big fan of Seth Stevenson’s advertising columns at Slate (he’s going on sabbatical and will be missed). On Monday he posted a new column, where he discusses readers’ submissions for the worst ads on TV. Like a therapist, Stevenson doesn’t so much agree with the contributors as he commiserates with the feelings of anger, betrayal, emptiness and loss directed at or prompted by these advertisements. One question that we can ask ourselves (and our students) is: Why do we care so much about ads? Take this McDonald’s ad for example:

A few weeks ago I suggested that the seeming ineptness of many amateur videos indicates that most people are more skilled at textual production than at video production. William Saletan’s piece at Slate on video resumes got me thinking about this topic again. While the popularity of non-commercial videos on youtube argues that our culture is in many ways already video-literate, it is likely that the youtube community is self-selecting for video-savvy individuals. However, Heather Havrilesky’s recent review of Donald Trump’s Apprentice implies that there is a lack of awareness of a broader audience in that group, as well. Since we are near a point when video production will be as ubiquitous as text composition, it will soon become necessary for training everyone in video composition. If this is the case, I think it is likely that a huge part of the training in the rhetoric of video communication will be left to composition departments.