Alex Beall's Portfolio

Robert Kahn, one of the leading pioneers in the development of the Internet, once said, “What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.”  Twenty-five years later, the Internet is one of the most important and ingrained facets of modern society.  Perhaps some of the most used aspects of the Web centers around communication.  As a college student preparing to venture out into the world, I realised the Internet and a fuller understanding of it will be paramount to my success.  English 117 helped me develop my problem solving and communicative skills on the Internet in order to create arguments that aptly and effectively express opinions and information.  

Because this class features many projects that use media that is foreign to many, like photoshop, problem solving skills were needed.  Programs like Photoshop and Rush have a lot of features that can help for the assignments, but their complexity can look daunting.  Many times I had to run trial-and-error methods to create the assigned project.  I was not used to using so much technology for a class.  But thankfully, I was able to solve problems as they arose and used patience to overcome them.  I did not realize that through developing my problem-solving skills, I also improved my sense of adaptability and patience when it came to finding solutions in environments in which I was not comfortable.  

The purpose of this class also rested upon the ability to be able to communicate ideas.  I had to channel what I wanted to say into a medium that was foreign to me.  For example, with the app argument, I had an idea for what I wanted to argue, but I struggled to find a way to present that argument in a clear and meaningful way through an app.  With hard work and creativity, I was able to use my creativity in order to effectively communicate what I wanted to say.  

Reflecting on the process of creating the projects was a very important aspect of the class, particularly during class discussions.  While making drafts of projects, we were encouraged to think about what we could do better.  We reflected upon other people's work by placing an example on the board and breaking down what their projects were.  It really allowed me to think more critically about my own projects and how I could improve upon them.  It made revising my work more useful and effective. 

The role of  types of media explored in English 117 are and have been changing over the past decade or so.  With an increasingly digital world, visual media has risen immensely.  People now view things from a screen rather than from paper.  This has transformed the way information is disseminated.  With the rise of the podcast industry and streaming services, auditory media has also gained a larger role in today's media.  While textual media seems antiquated with the demise of the physical newspaper, it is still integral to the spread of information.  As information becomes more and more easily available, people are always reading or viewing something.  

______________________________________________________________________________________

Twitter Report

For me, the Twitter Report was a great introduction to how people argue with each other over social media and how I can express opinions on the Internet.  For the report, I gathered tweets under a specific hashtag, classified each tweet into "codes," and analyzed the data from the codes.  I decided to study the hashtag #boycottjimmyjohns because, at the time, cancel culture was in full swing, and I was curious to learn about why it is so popular and how it worked.  

To do so, I used a program called TAGs that retrieved hundreds of tweets under the hashtag, #boycottjimmyjohns.  Next, I narrowed the number of tweets to one hundred and classified each tweet into the following codes: Stance, Rationale Behind Stance, and Intent.  There were a few other codes, but the data from those were not as helpful to the thesis of my paper as I thought they would be. 

The results from the data were a bit surprising.  I found that a lot of tweeters' stance on the issue of cancelling Jimmy John's was against.  The Twittersphere called for a cancel due to news that the CEO was a trophy hunter.  Upon analysis of the tweets, it seemed that most people were not fans of trophy hunting, but were against the idea of cancel culture in general.  Most users were in favor of separating the lives of business owners from their business, for it does not affect their product.  

In addition, I learned that the nature of arguing on Twitter is filled with anger.  Because politics today are so polarized and the platform allows users to hid behind their screen and not face consequences of their words, the users' emotions seem to get the best of them. This is further shown by the majority of tweets being made in a provoking manner. 

After submitting my rough draft, I noticed that the images I used did not appear properly on the page.  Along with removing a lot of unneeded words and phrases, I replaced the images and got them working properly. 

My Original Twitter Report did not differ from the Final Report immensely, but the latter is a more polished piece.

The Twitter Report was a rudimentary approach to understanding Internet argument, but a necessary one.  After completing the project, I felt comfortable with what it meant to make arguments regarding the digital culture and was eager to apply that knowledge to new media. 

______________________________________________________________________________________

Audio Essay

The audio essay was a new and more challenging experience for me. I struggled with being able to write in a casual enough way to not sound robotic into the microphone, while also maintaining a certain level of professionalism.  I was instructed to use the program, Audacity, in order to record myself.  It took a lot of patience to be able to record and re-record segments of my essay without stumbling and making speech mistakes.  

I wanted to focus my essay on the problems associated with receiving news digitally.  I have always been concerned with how much we rely on the Internet to receive information.  I aimed to expose the potential dangers of fake news and echo chambers by using not only my words, but from the audio of a Scott Pelley interview, and an informational Youtube video.  

With the program, Audio Hijack, I was able to rip the audio of these videos and incorporate them into my own essay.  These rips strengthened my argument and served as the auditory equivalent to a textual source in a traditional essay.  Scott Pelley provided powerful insight into the influx of news received on phones and tablets and questioned how much of that news is correct.  The second source outlined the nature of echo chambers, what they were, and their negative effects.

 

 

I started by writing a script which laid out the plan for my recording. 

In a way, it felt like a storyboard, something that we would explore in much more depth later in the course.  At first, it was hard to imagine my written words as spoken.  The first few takes I made recording myself were rocky and frustrating.  I discovered I am not great at speaking perfectly when under pressure behind a microphone.  

I did not end up following my script exactly as it was written.  I was constantly changing things as I went along, which added time and misguidance to the whole process.  

In the end, I was mostly satisfied with the first draft:

 

Upon revisiting the assignment for revision, I learned a lot when it comes to editing previously recorded audio.  I found that re-recording parts of the piece was nearly impossible.  My voice in the new recordings could not match the sound, volume, etc. in the previous one.  In the end, I re-recorded all of my personal script, as well as trim down some of the ripped audio clips.  

 

The final edition of my audio essay is here:

 

This project allowed me to explore a completely new way to construct an essay, forcing me to be choosey with my wording and eliminate excess fluff.  I adapted to the new essay environment and now understand how to use a valuable type of media in an age where less and less people read text and more and more listen to it.  

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Podcast

The podcast took a lot from what I learned in the audio essay and allowed my group and I to have a conversation and argue on a contentious topic.  While the audio essay was scripted and had a very rigid structure, the podcast was free-form and casual.  At first, this seemed daunting to me.  I didn't understand how we were going to keep up a conversation for over twenty minutes.  Luckily, we picked a topic that was complex and deep.   My group and I unanimously decided to discuss the topic of cancel culture.  We selected it because it is something very prevalent today and we all seemed eager to express our opinions about it. 

In preparation, we created a google doc which outlined, in order, what each of us would say.  My group dedicated the first half of the podcast to providing a skeleton of the issue by giving definitions and a few key examples.  It provided the audience with extensive framework to our topic before we delved into the opinion and analysis on the matter.  Therefore, the second half featured us discussing, arguing, disagreeing and agreeing across multiple aspects of cancel culture.  Our conversation flowed well and no one was left out. 

While I was sharing a few of my ideas, I remember being a little nervous that I was either speaking too much or not providing enough ideas to keep the conversation progressing.  Looking back at the recording, I feel like there were times where I could have cut my idea short in order to give someone else an opportunity to jump in.  The idea of communication played the largest role in this assignment.  I wanted to be more vigilant of how I came across while sharing my opinions.  I did not want to speak for too long or control the conversation but still be able to contribute effectively.  

 

Our group's podcast:

 

I learned a lot about how to communicate effectively in the assignment.  I now understand the importance of getting your opinion across efficiently so that others may be able to share theirs.  The podcast assignment also forced me to listen to other more before speaking.  If I failed to do so during the recording, my segments could have easily gotten off topic and ruined the flow of the conversation.  

 

______________________________________________________________________________________

App Argument 

The app argument shifted the class from auditory arguments to visual ones.  Using the Adobe XD program, I created a phone application that made an argument about Internet culture.  After Professor Anderson talked to the class about how parts of the computer, like the desktop, borrowed their names from things outside of the digital realm, I was inspired to create a quiz to test people on their knowledge of the origins of those words.  

The app tests people by prompting them with a word and asking them to imagine the object the word describes.  I test users on three words and if their perception of the word is the digital form of it (eg. the desktop of a computer rather than the top of an actual desk), they obtained one point.  At the end, if they had at least one point, I explained how this is most likely due with the overwhelming prevalence of computers in the world, and how digital representations have replaced the very objects they mimic. 

Here is my original app. 

After receiving feedback and taking a second look at the first draft, I noticed the app did not look or feel like a real app.  I proceeded to change how users selected what object they were thinking of and made the flow of the app more complex rather having it flow linearly.  

I made more significant revisions to this project than any other.  The aspect of reflection in this course allowed me to look critically at my work and improve it. I am much more satisfied with the final result of my app than the first draft.  

The app argument taught me a lesson on showing rather than saying.  Sometimes, your message can be more impactful when you don't explicitly say it in words.  When someone experiences my message by interacting with my app, I feel that it might resonate with them more than it would if it were spoken to them. 

______________________________________________________________________________________

Memes

While I did explain my message in words to some degree in the app argument, the effectiveness of a meme relies solely on inferences taken away from the piece.  In other words, there is no analysis or conclusion at the bottom of each meme.  It must speak for itself.  

I created three memes, each making a different argument, that hopefully had some degree of humor to them.  I used one pre-existing meme format and created two others using Adobe Photoshop.  While Photoshop was very confusing at first, after going over tutorials in class and fidgeting with the program on my own, I was able to create the memes to my satisfaction, each with increasing levels of difficulty behind their formation.  

The first meme I made drew from a lot of the ideas previously expressed in my group podcast.  I wanted to satirize cancel culture through the use of hyperbole.  Because I have seen people who have done good things to get them famous be cancelled for a trivial mistake or old character flaw, I created a meme that cancelled Gandhi.  I wanted to show that cancel culture, while sometimes warranted, can go to ridiculous lengths to attack people in the public limelight.  The point of this meme is to have viewers see the potential slippery slope that cancel culture can fall onto. 

 The second meme I created was more light-spirited and fun.  The format of this meme was borrowed, but I replaced the Cat in the   Hat with the face of Rameses the Ram getting ready to hit the Duke fan with at bat of "any sport."   This was a fun way to symbolize UNC's dominance of Duke in the sporting world.  

 The third meme took me the longest and was the most frustrating to make.  Once again, I wanted   to comment on the nature of Internet culture, by showing how it can be distracting from the world   around us.  I did this by photoshopping a man looking at his computer onto a photo of an empty   room with a window.  Surprisingly, it was difficult to find a stock photo of that kind of room without   stock photo watermarks.  Once I put those together, I photoshopped a picture of an explosion behind the window.  This took quite a long time, for it was very tricky and meticulous to get it just right.  

This project further emphasized the idea of showing rather than saying.  I had to adapt to a foreign and extremely complex program to create my arguments well.  I had to have patience and problem-solving skills to make the pieces correctly. 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________

Animated GIFs

The GIF assignment took the same approach as the Meme assignment, except the message was expressed through an animated clip.  Using Photoshop, I was able to create three 3-5 second GIFs, each serving a different purpose.  As with the memes, the messages of my GIFs had to speak for themselves through the clips. Using the program Snagit, I was able to record small clips from my computer screen and save them relatively easily. 

The first GIF I made was very simple.  It features a clip I found from a soccer Instagram account that I follow.  The original clip was mocking of a professional soccer player named Roberto Firmino, who often shows off by looking the other way when scoring a goal.  I thought the impression was hilarious and thought it could be used in other contexts.  I then related the way the man in the video shoots to blindly guessing on a test and hoping its correct.  I simply put that text above the clip and looped it.

The second GIF did not have a deep message, but rather was created for artistic purposes.  I was inspired by the massive dustorms (or "Haboobs" as we call them) that occur every Summer in my hometown of Phoenix, AZ.  I wanted to personify the eerie cloud of dust by putting a face on it.  I made the dust cloud move on the screen as I increasingly changed the color saturation.  The final result of the clip shows the massive cloud with the face of a Goomba from Nintendo games under a ghostly purple sky. 

The final GIF was assigned to have the most meaning behind it.  As always, I attempted to critique Internet culture.  In this case, I wanted to emphasize our over-reliance on search engines like Google to find information.  In this GIF, I show someone ironically googling how to live without Google while it is literally crashing.  My message expresses how, if Google disappeared, such an integral part of daily life would be gone and many people wouldn't know where or even how to turn to other places for knowledge. 

By now, I was a lot more familiar with Photoshop, so I had an easier time making these clips than I did the memes.  I felt more comfortable and did not have to deviate from certain ideas because of not knowing how to make a function work in the program.  

 

______________________________________________________________________________________

Portfolio Video

At the end of the course, I was instructed to create a video that exposéd some of my work.  Using the Adobe Rush program, I honed in on three projects I both enjoyed making and found important to the class.  I created a storyboard and a script to go along with it so that I could discuss and reflect upon my projects as well as providing visuals and examples of the pieces.  After I collected screenshots, screen recordings, and photos for the video, I recorded myself reading the script and placed the visual content so that it aligned with what I was talking about. 

The tone of my speech was a happy medium between that of my audio essay and the podcast in the sense that there was structure to what I was saying, but it was much more casual since I was reflecting rather than arguing. The first draft of my video was very bare-boned.  I did not collect enough media to add variety to what viewers saw in the video.  This made my portfolio video boring and stagnant.  

My original portfolio video can be found here.  

Upon revisiting my video for revision, I was motivated by the examples of my classmates' portfolio videos to improve my own.  I started by collecting more visuals to make my video more interesting to watch.  I added more transitions to help with the flow as well.  Lastly, I re-recorded the audio for the introduction.  In the draft, it was a little choppy and some of it was improvised.  This time, I wrote down what I wanted to say and was much more careful with my speech.  Although I ran into the problem with my voice sounding different between the different takes, I feel that if only the intro sounds different, that it won't harm the video too much.  I've seen this before with a lot of podcasts to which I listen often.  The host normally prefaces his/her content on a different day and there is often a volume discrepancy. 

Below is my final video:

______________________________________________________________________________________

Comments 

Here is a list of links to all the comments I have made over the course of the semester:

Audio Essay Peer Edit

Pizzagate Discussion

Baby We Were Born to Tweet

These comments were not about my own projects, but the projects of other and discussions for the day.  I found this very helpful for learning from others' methods. The daily readings also allowed me to stay engaged with and be mindful of things happening outside of the classroom. 

______________________________________________________________________________________

Final Thoughts

Before I took English 117, I never considered myself a technology buff, nor cared to be.  If anything, I tried to avoid using technology as much as possible.  However, through the course of this class, I came to understand how important it is to be able to use technology and the Internet to my advantage.  In a world practically run by computers, it is integral that I be equipped with the wearwithal and tools to help succeed on them.  Thanks to ENGL 117, I feel confidant in my ability express myself through digital media.  The processes in creating the projects were also highly valuable.  I was able to strengthen my problem-solving skills, my ability to think on my feet and adapt, and fully understand the importance of reflection on my own work.