Archive for the 'Audience' Category

Of Student Debates and Other Demons

Published
by
Orlando
on November 19, 2009
in Assessment, Audience, BLSCI, Baruch College, Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Debating and Faculty Development
. 0 Comments

20090419_EUD_045
Creative Commons License photo credit: mhonpoo

I finally figured out what to write about for Cacophony! Following the advice of my colleagues at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, the best way to approach this was to write about something I am familiar with in the context of my work.  As a professor myself, I set specific guidelines and objectives when giving assignments to my students in order to avoid writer’s block because of the openness of possibilities. I don’t want to curtail, however: Cacophony’s open posting policy makes it versatile and unique.

I hope this post gives some basic guidelines for anyone out there interested in organizing debates as a classroom assignment.  The topics of the debates I am coaching are in the 12th Edition of the Management and Society textbook issued by the Department of Management at Baruch College. But you can device your own and have students do a little research to defend their positions.

The first step is to assign students to groups and divide the groups into PRO and CON sides of a given topic.   Then, provide precise instructions about the format of the debate.  For example, one format consist of a ten minute opening presentation, followed by a five minute period for rebuttal, and three minutes for conclusions, going back and forth between the PRO and CON side.  Ten minutes for the PRO, Ten for the CON; five minutes for the PRO, five for the CON; and three minutes for the PRO, and three for the CON. You can make them longer depending on the number of participants and the time available.

Make sure students understand that the objective is to persuade the audience that their point of view (in the debate) is the most valid: they need to make arguments.

In the beginning, they should introduce themselves, the issue, the point they are defending and any terms that might be unfamiliar or that might take a particular meaning in the context of the debate.  For example, in a debate that deals with whether genetically modified foods should be labeled, it is necessary to know from the beginning what constitutes a genetically modified food product.

Encourage them to read the materials a couple of times (in the management course I coach these are organized in chapters), even the reading for the opposite team.  In that way they can figure out a strategy to organize their presentation as well as anticipate the points are going to be brought up against their arguments.  It’s also important for students to practice their entire presentation out loud so they have an idea of time management as they become familiar with public speaking.  In terms of oral presentation skills,  you should emphasize to the debaters that they should not read, and should maintain eye contact with the audience,  which is a non-verbal way of engaging their attention.  Index cards are an acceptable way of keeping track of the order of the arguments they will stress, but in order to avoid reading too much from them,  suggest they write bullet points, rather than entire sentences.

If they are using numerical data such as statistics and/or percentages, remind your students that if they are hard to understand, the audience will just glaze over them.  Quantitative data should be easy to read and understand and should make a strong point.  If they are quoting textbooks or the internet, make sure they cite valid sources and not just random articles (especially online),  and that they have those sources (author’s names particularly) readily available during the debate, in case someone asks.

Time does not have to be equally split, but all students in a team must participate.  Have students dress professionally (although this is not a strict requirement).  Attire is a non verbal language that reveals many things, and it is difficult to find credible someone wearing an oversized sweater whose sleeves are longer than the arms. Lastly, remind students to keep their language appropriate and to keep their composure.   Debates can get heated,  but for as much as a Jerry Springer fight will definitely engage the audience, the loudest people are usually revealing insecurity.

The end of each debate could be marked by an open Q&A period where the audience can participate and ask questions or comments to the presenters.  Here you can explain how the topic is still current and give an informal assessment of the students’ participation.

The Afterlife of Ephemera

Published
by
Lauren
on November 5, 2009
in Audience and Media
. 2 Comments

Last June, Hillary wrote a post on zines that led several of us here at cac.ophony to “come out” as ex-zinesters.  To continue the conversation about zines, I’d like to point out to folks the most recent issue of SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.  They’ve devoted a whopping 74 pages to a comparative symposium on feminist zines, featuring both essays and full-page reprints. (Full disclosure here: some of my old zines are cited, including in Barnard Zine Librarian Jenna Freedman’s essay, in which she discusses a zine I edited when I was an angst-ridden teenager. I find this both flattering and terribly embarrassing.)

laurenOver the summer, Jenna invited me and several other people who had donated our zine collections to the Barnard Zine Library for tea (how Seven Sisters!), and we all spent a lot of time in the stacks flipping through the zines that were in circulation. This was certainly a nostalgia trip down memory lane, and a quite physical one at that, as we were literally looking at and holding the very photocopied and stapled pieces of paper that we may have once kept stashed in boxes and bins under our beds and in our closets. Seeing zines in their original form now archived in a college library is quite a different experience from seeing them discussed or reprinted in a fancy academic journal, however. The attention is nice, but one’s interaction with the zines feels at least one step removed. Even if you read the print version of SIGNS rather than online, the reprinted zine excerpts don’t look or feel like the original. (And, in this case, reading this issue of SIGNS online instead of print allows you to see the zine reprints in color).

I am fascinated by the “afterlife” of those objects that were once considered to be—or were created to be—ephemeral. They live on in discussions by critics and historians, and in historical archives, libraries, and museums. These days, they are also being revived digitally, including on Google Books. You know, in the pre-blogging era, when we were sixteen and pouring our angsty hearts out on paper, did any of us have any idea that the words and images we created would still be in circulation? If we did, would that have changed what we produced, how we presented ourselves, or who we considered our audience to be? I wonder.

Writing Spaces

Published
by
Olga
on May 15, 2009
in Audience, Feedback and Process
. 6 Comments

From where I sit
Creative Commons License photo credit: Olivander

Aside from its main mission to establish a relationship between academic and business discourses, this year’s Symposium has, in my view, peripherally addressed another notorious bifurcation of academic and creative writing. Perhaps Peter Elbow’s proposition to ignore audience for some time can be hard to grasp in the context of business letter writing. It does, however, resonate fully with our experience with more expressive writing forms, those that convey a personal voice and in turn strike personal notes in the audience.

Listening to Elbow, I recalled a Q&A session with Orhan Pamuk. To my question whom he imagines as his audience when drafting his autobiography, he quickly responded “myself.” He explained that thinking about potentially disapproving readers would hamper his authenticity and creative effort. Another writer, whose personal journals have been a subject of my scrupulous analysis these days, connected his inability to write truthfully about his life to his typewriter, seeing it as his immediate audience.

But a self-invitation into a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf has famously called it, is something we seek also when working on projects less posh than a poetic autobiography (though a psychologist can easily make a case that a dissertation is a piece of autobiography); I’m referring to such prosaic items of academic life as seminar papers, articles, and dissertations. For me, an important take-away from Elbow’s speech was that the process of composition happens in very similar ways for writers engaged in creative and academic projects. Whether one is working on a novel or dissertation, the vocabulary to describe the writing process would be the same ranging from such romantic concepts as exploration to such terrifying buzz words as writer’s block.

In both cases, receiving effective feedback from, alas, audience, at later stages of the composition process becomes essential as well!

Two Cultures, Two Kinds of Audiences, and Two Forms of Communication

Published
by
Hyewon
on May 11, 2009
in Audience, BLSCI and Symposium
. 3 Comments

Tuning into the current stream of our collective reflection upon last Friday’s symposium, here I put in my two cents. Like my fellow attendees, I found Jeff Jarvis’s Google speech extremely exciting and thought-provoking, which made him the perfect fit for the morning session. It is, however, Peter Elbow’s talk about the usefulness of occasional ignoring of the audience that resonates more deeply in my mind. I am currently reading his book, Writing with Power, and it allows me to think again about how the relationships between author/speaker and audience should change according to two different forms of communication, verbal and written. To reiterate the point he made, writing is more solitary and process-oriented than speaking is, so audience-forgetfulness can be a good strategy for early stages of writing. Elbow’s empiricist approach also classifies the different types of audiences such as safe or dangerous, caring or discouraging, real or imaginary, and so on. I found his notion of the ghost audience that we carry with us in our head particularly intriguing:

“The audience in our head usually affects us more when we write than when we speak. When we speak, the real audience is right there dominating our attention and drowning out other audiences. When we write, however, all audiences are in the head, even the real audience. In the dark of the brain a real audience is easily trampled by an insistent past audience” (187).

Elbow’s advice is that, in order to exorcize the demon of the dangerous internal audience that inhibits our words or thoughts, we need to actively “change” our audience and capitalize on the support of a loving audience that we once had or that we can imagine. I think that this suggestion could prove useful in improving our teaching methods, too.

Finally, attending the Institute’s symposium reminded me of C. P. Snow’s 1959 argument on the division of two cultures, the sciences and the humanities. I assume that in this case it is the division between business and academia whose cultures we try to bring together, as partly shown by Jarvis and Elbow. I see how these seemingly disparate fields can hit it off and have productive conversations in the right setting like this year’s symposium.

Gardner Teaches, Part 4

Published
by
Luke
on May 9, 2009
in Audience, Symposium and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

In this final segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at the “Mother of the All Funk Chords,” a Youtube mashup by the Israeli musician Kutiman, they discuss the implications of the notion that “you choose a channel; your audience will choose the channels after that.”

This video is 12 minutes long.

Gardner Teaches, Part 3

Published
by
Luke
on May 8, 2009
in Audience, Symposium and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment

In this third segment from Gardner Campbell’s workshop “Speaker, Listener, Network: The Concept of Audience in a Web 2.0 World” from the 9th Annual Symposium on Commumication and Communication-Intensive Instruction, Gardner and the participants look at an advertisement from Kaplan University (featuring Uncle Phil) and explore the nature of authenticity and credibility in a Web 2.0 world, the implications of tools that empower the audience on “for-profit” higher education, and the challenges producers of information have in maintaining control over their intended messages once they get out.

This video is 10 minutes long.

American Idol: Audience as Juror

Published
by
KateR
on April 30, 2009
in Audience, Fun and To Ponder
. 1 Comment

I admit it – I’m a fan of American Idol. The popular talent competition is now in its 8th season on Fox, and I’ve watched almost every year (I missed 2004 when Fantasia won … perhaps not a coincidence that I started my PhD program that year). I actually don’t start watching the show until they select the Final 12 performers, because I believe that’s when it gets most interesting. Each week the contestants perform, the audience votes via phone or texting, and the person with the lowest number of votes has to leave. Although the judges critique each performance, it’s the viewing audience that holds the power to keep their favorite contestants in the running.

Whether or not you’re a fan of the show, you have to give American Idol credit for continuing to be one of the highest rated shows on television. Some people attribute this to the fact that the show is a true “family program,” and in essence people of all ages and across all demographic groups can watch it. But I believe its popularity has a lot to do with the interactivity of the show. The audience has power over the outcome – “America votes!” Whether America agrees with Simon Cowell’s sneers or Paula Abdul’s cheers is somewhat irrelevant. Sure, this year they implemented the “Judge’s save,” but ultimately it’s the audience who selects the next American Idol. Of course, not everyone who watches the show bothers to vote (I draw the line there myself). But millions of audience members do vote, and that’s pretty amazing. The audience is not merely spectators, but jurors as well.

On a somewhat related note, I often feel like an American Idol judge when I help students rehearse their class presentations. It’s our job as fellows to critique their “dress rehearsal” and provide feedback on how to improve their skills before the final presentation in class. Just like the American Idol judges, however, we don’t grade the students (i.e., vote them off) … the professor does that. So should I tell it to them straight like Simon Cowell? I know I should, but it’s important to be encouraging as well, so I also emphasize the positive things I see (a la Paula Abdul). Has anyone else had these thoughts while conducting rehearsals, or do I just watch too much TV?

Torture? culture? Torture-culture?

Published
by
Ryan
on April 22, 2009
in Audience, Debating, Higher Education, Language, Liberal Arts, Media, Non-verbal Communication, Politics, Style, To Ponder, Uncategorized and What if . . .
. 1 Comment

In an undergraduate class I teach on the social and cultural history of the US during times of war we always end the semester with a discussion of the contemporary conflicts we’re involved in now — “GWOT”, Iraq, Afghanistan — and attendant domestic issues like privacy, constitutional rights, legal jurisdiction over “unlawful enemy combatants”, balance of power between branches of government, political rhetoric, etc.

This semester we read and discussed the recently released Red Cross report on US treatment of terrorist detainees, treatment which was conclusively shown to be torture. Once we got the basic history stuff out of the way, I asked students to think through whether such treatment can ever be justified — a little dime-store ethical philosophy thrown in to the history classroom. There are usually some who think there’s no justifiable use of such harsh tactics as have been regular lately. Others insist that, if torture could be known to be likely to work, then we have to leave moral absolutism behind for a more utilitarian approach — i.e. it just might be OK to do some pretty rotten stuff to someone if it saves thousands, hundreds or scores of lives. This is always an interesting discussion, but it’s one that also makes clear how much the understanding of the torture question has been framed for my students by popular culture (“24″ (the worst culprit) and the many other movies and shows we all can probably remember).

This year however, in two separate classes, something new arose: Students, on their own started advocating torturing people not to in order get intelligence that would prevent 9/11 Pt. 2, but as punishment. Eye-for-an-eye sort of thinking — you get what you deserve, and there are no real limits to what you might deserve except how egregious your own crime was.

I found this truly unsettling. How did we get here? I think that the way we got here is a good old fashioned slippery slope. On TV, the bad guys get tortured and either give it up or not, die or not, feel terrible physical pain or not — but they’re the bad guys, so in the verbal and visual rhetoric of trashy (and extraordinarily popular) TV, it seems OK to many viewers. Torture becomes a regular adjunct to justice.

In addition, there are movies every year which prominently feature torture of human beings either in the same context or as “horror films” (really sadism films), in which the torturers are bad guys, the enemy. In the second case, torture seems despicable, so in one evening of viewing a person could be treated to a rather schizophrenic overall depiction of the issue – the cruel device of the worst fiends and the necessary tool of the righteous. But also in the second case, the problem is not that torture becomes linked with justice, but rather that it becomes entertainment; it’s a fun way (apparently) to get scared for an hour or two before making out with your girlfriend or checking on the sleeping kids.

What separates us, ideally from the Taliban, among other things, is our idea that justice and vengeance are different things. What renders us humane instead of merely human is, among other things, the idea that there are some acts which are simply morally unacceptable. What separates adults from children, among other things, is that adults see the real social utility as well as the moral truth of the old saw that two wrongs don’t make a right.

As a culture, we’re letting go of these things by the way we accept depictions of torture, as both titilating and just. To have a torture culture is not just to accept depictions of torture without clear disapprobation; it is, as the term “culture” implies, to grow, to nourish torture. And so, I think, when you have a culture rife with torture perhaps you end up seeing the fruits of that tortuculture blossoming in your nice calm classroom one April day.

Uncultured Oafs?

Published
by
Olga
on April 20, 2009
in Audience and To Ponder
. 0 Comments

A recent NYT Op-Ed piece addresses a curious issue of what it means to be perceived and self-perceived as an intellectual, and the expectations and anxieties associated with it. The author, Calvin Trillin, a graduate of a prestigious university, is concerned about “whether or not [he is] an uncultured oaf.” He has found a good way to evaluate his intellectual and cultural inclinations: by comparing his likes and dislikes to those of his highly respected intellectual friend James. He was particularly glad to learn that James shared his admiration for a recent dance performance. BUT the reviewer of the performance “implied, without using these precise words, that the program had been designed to make modern dance palatable to, well, uncultured oafs.” He concludes the article, pondering, “What did that say about me? What, for that matter did it say about James? Is it possible that I’m such an uncultured oaf that the person I’d always considered the most cultured person I know is also an uncultured oaf?”

Surely, once we receive a particular degree or become a part of a particular profession, we immediately set expectations and become anxiously self-conscious about fulfilling them. In various ways, academic settings tend to enhance our sensitivity to whether we come across to our audiences – and to ourselves – as uncultured oafs. The article brought back memories of my first year in graduate school when I felt like a total impostor in a circle of aspiring young scholars. I was also reminded of the eagerness with which beginning graduate students sometimes imitate the convoluted and often incomprehensible academic prose they read.

Trillin wants to do away with the very label of uncultured oafs, it seems to me, as most of us want to do away with the bifurcation of high and popular culture, or academic and real worlds. Have we all been successful?

Missing Connections

Published
by
Olga
on March 26, 2009
in Audience, Fun, Internet and New York
. 2 Comments

Continuing with my subway theme and in light of our next Symposium topic, I found myself being very self-conscious of my eavesdropping on a conversation on the F train last night. What never fails to grab my attention in public places is Russian speech.   So there they were – a couple, in their thirties, discussing … and this is where I get tongue-tied because I couldn’t quite get the context of their conversation. I heard, “She goes to all the popular places in Moscow. … Why they’re together is a mystery to his parents, and to hers as well!” And then, oh how I hoped the guy would repeat the subject of “was the biggest mistake of my life. It was, really was the biggest mistake.” I was reminded of a wonderful passage from Rachel Cohen’s essay “Lost Cities”:

Walking in cities is an accumulation of small fragments of loss. A woman you want to keep looking at turns a corner; two people pass and you hear only, “It cannot be because of the child”; you look through a window at a drawing that looks like a print you have seen somewhere before, and it’s obscured when someone pulls a curtain across the window; a woman turns ferociously on the man standing next to her, but by the time you reach home you can no longer remember her face. – “Lost Cities”

Craigslist, of course, has attempted to assemble those fragments of loss in its “missed connections” section. Do you ever read that stuff? Doesn’t it make for a fascinating research topic?