Advanced Storytelling

Read this recent article in the NY Times and thought I was back in Comm Principles class (in a good way): 2006, Brought to You by You

Every year, I intend to "buy" gifts from Heifer International , but I'm always too broke to do it. However, I was on one of my favorite blogs, A Dress A Day , when I saw this: easy blogger fundraising. Eventually. I promise. But then again, I'll probably end up giving to Project Harvest Hope , since I've been to the Homorod Valley and seen the cows (and goats) come home.

Studio 60 Show-within-a-show was looking for ways to increase advertising revenues, and come up with an ingenious and not annoying way to incorporate product placement. Since their stage set is the Sunset Strip, use a street scene, complete with (actual) billboards, as their main set.

I'm realizing my dream. Sigh. I got another job assignment, writing a report on a membership survey for the Independent Public Relations Society of America. Not interesting in itself, but I get to use a web app called Survey Monkey . You can't be unhappy when you're working with a Survey Monkey. Unless your initials are P.H. Um... so life is boring right now. I've been sucked into Facebook and Second Life , both of which I haven't quite found the potential in so far. There's a little bit of a Second Life "tipping point" frenzy going on here at SOC. I kinda feel left out around here, not giving a crap about internet advocacy.

"The message is only as good as the policies behind it." -Daniel Schulman, "Mind Games" in the May/June 2006 Columbia Journalism Review

All the H.U. graduates in the audience (hello? anyone?) know to which theater professor I'm referring to above. I've now found a man that puts his verbal stutter to shame. I now have a professor that says "okayyy?" at the end of EVERY SENTENCE. In an unspecified Eastern European accent. Also? "Relatability" does NOT mean "related to." Someone tell the class. (Yes, I am being a bad student and emailing during class. Ahh, wireless campus.)

But still without internet access, so my nights at home are spent watching cable tv instead of communicating with the outside world. I've just finished reading an article by Hugh Rank , a professor who's developed a cool little tool for teaching people how to analyze media. Just the schema "Intensify/Downplay." Ask yourself, what is the ad/speech/article hyping up? What is it omitting? His website's got a lot of other tools on it, especially to help kids understand advertising. Oddly enough, reading this I thought of two things: Pedagogy of the Opressed and D.A.R.E. Say what you will about D.A.R.E.- I went through it (and won a teddy bear in a D.A.R.E. t-shirt for an essay I wrote), and the one thing I took out of it was what they taught us about ways of persuasion. I remember posters with cartoons depicting "get on the bandwagon" and "sex appeal" and the others. Now that I think about it, it was probably a pretty formative moment. As for Ped...

Last night I was sitting in my cave, watching The Colbert Report (which I like much more than I thought I would), and the guest was "a linguist who..." I was about to shout "George!" (Funny how comfortable I feel refering to George Lakoff as "George." He's like a big, progressive grandpa teddy bear), but no, it was a guy named Geoffrey Numberg. He's written a book called Talking RIght . I just bought it, along with Lakoff's new book, and Mary Pipher's Writing to Change the World. If I can managed to get to any of them, I'll post what I think about them. Right now I'm deep into week three of grad school.

You want to know how I know this? I'm calling this photo "Dinner Parties Are Not An Option": This contraption is a stove/sink/fridge combo. Yes, my stove is also my sink is also my fridge. This is the luxury for which I pay $1000 a month. Doesn't it just scream "efficiency basement apartment"? No? How about this: This is my bathroom. Or my laundry room. I don't really know what to call it. I took this picture standing in the kitchen (which, by the way, also has a very big table and pantry). Yes, that's my shower. The green door is the toilet. The sink? Is the laundry basin. Brushing my teeth in the morning is quite interesting. Stay tuned for the day I accidentally reach for the laundry detergent instead of my soap. Actually, in some ways this apartment kinda rocks. On a temporary basis.

I read diaries like this and their comments on DailyKos, and it gets frustrating. It's another post among many, trying to articulate, for once and for all, The Democratic Values. As if someday soon, we'll suddenly have the right wording (the clouds will part, the sun will shine, and angels will sing), and our elected officials will start talking perfectly articulated values. We HAVE values and vision-stop trying to get it perfect and start talking. Somewhere out there, Frank Luntz (KUMQUAAAAATTTTT!) is laughing. Every time we write or complain about not having a message, one of his right-wing pundit gets his (or her) wings. Don't get me wrong: this work is important- I'm dedicating my life to it- but the more time we spend brainstorming new lists of values over and over, instead of getting out there, the more time he has to just sit back and relax. Everytime someone can point to a diary like this and say, "see, even the Democrats don't think they have anythin...

This article, Two Views of the Same News Find Opposite Biases , by Shankar Vedantam was in the Washington Post Online this week. I'm often frustrated by the constant complaining about the "liberal" or "conservative" media. For the record, I think that media consolidation can only harm, that mainstream media is biased, not so much to the left or right (except for, of course, Fox News), but toward the status quo, and that mainstream media depends too much on an episodic, rather than systematic, frame for the stories it cover. But that's not the point of this post. I'm not the first , nor will I be the last to rant about these issues on the web. This article described a study that showed that partisans on either side of an issue, when shown the exact same media clips, each find bias in favor of the other side. Kind of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation they call the "hostile media effect." The most interesting part ...

Anyone who knows me, knows I am practically addicted to editorial cartoons. On the left is a link to Cagle's Daily Cartoon Index , which I check at least a few times a week. One of my favorite cartoons featured there is Jen Sorensen's Slowpoke Comics . She rocks. I mean, what strategic communications geek wouldn't a cartoon titled "Framing Funnies?" Or one that takes on Grover Nordquist, and has inspired me to yell "Kumquat!" at the televion whenever I sense his influence? And shows the power of words through pictures? Really funny pictures? Sigh. I only hope to have this much influence in the future.

A selection from pages 201-204, which seemed particularly important to my 'mission': What concerns me in this chapter, however, are tricky audience situations and, in this case, I am thinking about the many times when you are trying to persuade someone in a straightforward way but actually you are wasting your time... If your readers have a stake in what you are arguing against, you cannot talk straightforward persuasion as your goal. You must resist your impulse to change their beliefs. You have to set your sights much lower. The best you can hope for--and it is hoping for a great deal--is to get your readers to understand your point of view even while not changing theirs in the slightest. If you can get readers actually to entertain to experience your position for just a moment, you have done a wonder, and your best chance of getting them to do so is not by asking them to believe or adopt your point at all. In short, stop trying to persuade the enemy and settle for planting ...

I came across this feature by Crocker Stephenson in the July 4th edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. It's the second of two parts on woman named Rhea Estelle Lathan Stephenson writes: "She was a drug addict. A high school dropout. Her son and daughter lived with their fathers' families. She was banned from any contact with her daughter. She had been convicted of forging checks. She was divorced and had alienated her family. She slept with men for drugs and money....Near the end of that year, Rhea was caught stealing from her employer, a downtown hotel. She was given a choice: Go to jail, or enroll in a residential treatment program through an agency now called Wisconsin Community Services." Now if you guessed this was yet another dramatic life-turnaround story, you'd be right. What caught my eye were the last lines of the article: "Rhea Estelle Lathan, PhD, will begin teaching this summer at Michigan State University, where she will be a tenure-tracke...

1. She holds your purse while you stand on the table to get a better view of Andrew Bird. 2. She gives you her shawl to wear, because it really is "cooler by the lake." 3. She says, "They're good. I like them" right after Wilco does a song full of feedback you thought would bother her. 4. She calls Jeff Tweedy "Dylan-esque," which makes you smile. 5. She buys you tiramisu. She buys herself tiramisu. 6. She points out that she is not the oldest person at the Flogging Molly stage. 7. She dances to Mike Doughty, even though she doesn't have to. 8. Dude, I have a mom that likes Wilco, Andrew Bird, and Mike Doughty. How cool is that? My sister had to work, Beth had a kickball game, my cousin Flannery didn't return my phone call, Peter is out of town (out of the country?), so I asked my mom if she would go to Summerfest wth me. I may punk out of most things, but had I given the chance to see a bunch of really good bands FOR FREE, I would have had to ...

Sarah, these aren't the fireworks. I had wanted to get a picture of a cherubic little girl in a patriotic t-shirt holding a sparkler, but this is the closest thing I got. The batteries in my camera died before they started. We biked down to the lake with half a million of our neighbors, finding a spot right next to a group who had their generator powering a giant stereo system blaring The Who. I'd been in a bad mood all day, what with relatives staying with us, and I'm not a fan of crowds. So I plugged in my iPod and zoned out to Bach's Cello Suites (Side note to Elaine: it's been six months since New Years'! Indeed, Best Year Ever.) while waiting for the fireworks to start. Always works. My dad, to pass the time, decided to do some push-ups. Actually, my 17-year-old cousin decided to do some push-ups, and my dad followed suit. I used the last of my camera batteries to take this picture of him and a very eager soldier just out of basic training who jumped in to...

Downer Avenue comes to an end at the Lake. You think you can see Michigan in the distance, but you really can’t. It’s that big. Makes Lake Harriet look like a puddle. But it smells like dead fish on the beach, which is why I took this photo from on top of the bluff. Continuing along the bike trail along the lake, we hit downtown. For you arts people, this building is the art museum. Which building, you ask? The ugly one or the pretty one? Both, actually. They stuck a graceful, award-winning building onto the side of that brown monstrosity. Like transplanting a swan’s head onto a trout. I guess the front view’s not so bad, but the view from the lake is just a wall of brown. Now downtown, we find ourselves at one of the city’s hottest after-work happy hours- Flannery’s, named after my cousin. If my uncle hadn’t admitted his drug habit and gone into rehab, he’d still own it. Of course, he probably would have spent all the profits on drugs and overdose, so I guess it’s better this way. Fl...

So, first off, what we have here is the Milwaukee skyline as seen from my roof off Oakland Avenue. Yes, my roof. I climb up on my roof. Because I can. Next, we bike down Oakland to UWM. Here’s your definitive proof that I’m in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When I was a kid and my mom was getting her masters, I would sit in on the computer science classes she TA’d and take notes. Apparently, I took better notes that some of the students. Turning down Downer Avenue, we have the iconic green Milwaukee trashcan. This is a classic specimen, reading “Keep Milwaukee Clean” on one side, and “Drugs Are Trash” on another. Continuing down the street, we enter Sendik’s Grocery, where I sneakily took a few photos of alcohol in a grocery store to highlight the differences between Wisconsin and Minnesota. I much rather would have gone into the liquor store across the street, where the cute guys work, but I was on assignment. Across the street is Gil’s café, site of my first real date. I was madly in love wit...

Rockridge Institute - The Value of Values

This is my first post.