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RCL #5: Standing with those who choose to kneel

Given the fact that this is 2017 America where all of us collectively decide a new topic seemingly every week to vehemently disagree on, it is no surprise that almost all the headlines headlines contain the words Trump, controversy, and protests. However, the script is slightly flipped this go-round because all of those titles also include the word NFL.

 

When Colin Kaepernick first kneeled for the national anthem on September 1st, 2016 he gained national attention for his form of protest. Kaepernick chose to kneel to use his platform as an NFL athlete to draw attention to the issue of police brutality in America. He was met with support and praise by some, and criticism (and a couple of death threats) from others.

Now, more than a year later, Kaepernick’s choice to kneel has made enough of an impact that things have escalated into a full fledged political debate, and for the first time in history football seems to fall on the left side of the spectrum.

Despite the fact that there was less media attention as the season went on, a handful of other players aligned themselves with Kaepernick and chose to kneel during the anthem last year and at the beginning of this season. However, it wasn’t until Donald Trump got himself involved did things really explode.

Last week, at a conservative rally in Alabama, Trump was rambling and feeding off of the crowd, and at one point made the comment that any NFL owner should fire those “sons of bitches” who kneel during the national anthem. The resulting outpouring of unity among pro football players and controversial fighting on social media have made this the topic America is butthurt over this week.

I actually find this topic very interesting. It makes sense to me that Colin Kaepernick used his platform as a professional athlete to make a public statement. Similar to how actors and musicians use award acceptance speeches to draw attention to national issues that are often political, this was Kaepernick’s way of using his influence to give a voice to people in the black lives matter movement. The fact that the NYT article that we read had the criticism that football players should just shut up and focus on football. It is wrong to believe that football is all that these guys are capable of, and it plays into the mentality of Trump’s quote that the owners of teams physically own the players, and that the players are in almost a demented form of football slavery. This isn’t actual reality, but it is Trump’s understanding of it all, and part of the unity shown by the NFL has been to combat that notion.

It is important to note that this is a peaceful protest that doesn’t harm anyone, but it provokes so much controversy because it deals with the touchy subject of patriotism.Is it unpatriotic to not stand for the national anthem? Well Kaepernick’s argument is that it is unpatriotic to unjustly target a certain demographic of people, and even more unpatriotic to ignore that this issue is happening at all. America is not built upon the premise of blind loyalty, it purposefully gives citizens the power to the right of free speech, and that includes the free speech of criticizing the government. Keapernick is not purposefully being disrespectful to the flag because he has a message and a purpose to his protest of kneeling.

The only thing that I am worried about is that Trump involving himself in this issue has drawn a lot of media attention, but they are focusing more on the battle between Trump and the NFL. The kneeling no longer represents the protest of how America is treating its black citizens, but instead in defiance to Trump. It takes away from Kaepernick’s original message and makes it all about Trump vs everybody that opposes Trump which is a futile battle that we hear about in the media 24/7 anyway.

I hope that in the coming weeks the NFL continues to show solidarity, but also turns the attention back on the real reason why some players feel that they need to kneel instead of accept the way things are currently in America.

RCL Post #4: The meme of the moment

Even though the solar eclipse was well over a month ago, I know that everyone still remembers most of the memes that became a part of the occasion. The one that I have chosen to analyze this week capitalized not just on the opportunity of the solar eclipse but also on the popularity of this particular meme template.

Most of the time, civic artifacts (especially advertisements) use kairos to give a sense of timeliness and urgency to their message. This meme has timeliness for sure in the fact that it was created and became popular right around the time of the solar eclipse. It is common for memes to be produced in waves when a major event occurs in society, for example all of the memes about the onslaught of hurricanes from the past two weeks. Similarly, this meme was created and posted alongside so many others that were technically sending the same message. However, this specific one became more popular and more relevant because it used the topic of the eclipse and the current popularity of that meme template.

To clarify, many memes are just different words posted onto a recurring picture. The picture itself conveys the message of the meme, and can be reused with different topics or ideas. This specific one that I have chosen to analyze is a couple walking down the street where the guy is checking out another girl and his girlfriends is not happy about it. This template is successful because the situation is very obvious and doesn’t need words to explain it, and the situation of one person lusting over something they shouldn’t can be applicable to other topics.

Here are some other great examples using this meme template:

https://www.bustle.com/p/the-best-disloyal-man-meme-tweets-just-made-cheating-on-bae-cool-again-78711

In the specific example of the solar eclipse version this meme is incredibly successful because it was so relatable. If you think back to a month ago in the days leading up to the big eclipse I’m sure you were all informed about the serious dangers of looking directly at the sun during the event. News broadcasts were warning us, social media was warning us, and obviously your parents made sure to call just to tell you not to look at the sun (duh). But despite everything telling you these dangers there was still the allure of the sight of a solar eclipse, right? And this meme capitalizes on those rebellious, dumb thoughts of “what if I just look at it”. You become the dude in the meme by cheating on the scientific facts that you should be faithful to and lusting after the alluring sight of the solar eclipse.

This meme is extremely successful at capitalizing on the timeliness of now (when it was created a month ago) because it employs multiple factors to increase its relevance and popularity.

 

Passion Blog #2: The road to Minnesota

It seems crazy that the last post was only 2 weeks ago because so much has happened since then! It’s been jam-packed day after jam-packed day, but I’ll try to past some of the highlights here.

Last Tuesday (September 12) was our last team off-ice conditioning workout, and our last day in Holuba! Holuba is the indoor turf field where many varsity teams hold workouts, and since the summer it has been the bane of our existence. Any day that we had to go Holuba for a workout put a knot of fear in my stomach and made the team speculate about how KJ (strength coach) was going to torture us this time. Anyway, it was pretty rewarding to stand in the huddle after our last conditioning session and realize I won’t have to do anymore half-gasses for a while, but also bittersweet realizing that this was the seniors last time in Holuba with the team (they weren’t too sad about it, that’s how brutal the workouts there are!)

The season officially started last Saturday, and we kicked off the regular season with a double practice on Saturday and Sunday. During that first Saturday practice, it was great to be out on the ice with everyone working hard on our systems, knowing that we only had a little bit of time before we would be facing Minnesota Duluth. However, 24 hours later when we had to peel ourselves out a bed at 7am on a Sunday, it was a lot less fun and more of a grind. While all of the other students got to party after PSU football crushed Georgia State our team left at half-time to try to get some rest.

With barely a second to rest we were back at it working hard on Monday, and it was the start of MAX WEEK! Max Week is a week in the weight room where we test to see how heavy our one repetition lifts are in certain exercises, and it acts as a benchmark to show our improvement over the course of the preseason. On Monday we tested in Power Cleans, pull-ups, and broad jump. Kelsey Crow had the highest max, with 175lbs! She’s an absolute beast. Since I have a shoulder injury I wasn’t able to max in power cleans, but I was able to do 4 pull-ups and a 7ft broad jump. As a freshman I can’t wait to watch my numbers go up as I complete more workouts at Penn State.

This is our weight room

Wednesday we tested front squat, single leg vertical jump, and push-ups. For the push-up test it was how many push-ups you could do in 1 minute while hitting your chest to the ground for every rep. It was so much harder than I thought it was going to be! Bella, one of our captains, got the most push-ups in a minute with 46! I’m looking forward to Friday when we test in deadlift, front plank, and bench press.

There were two really cool things that happened this past week. The first was that we had a team photoshoot for the propaganda this season. The set-up was awesome with the darkened rink and spotlights and stuff. It made me feel like a real professional, lol! Unfortunately none of my pictures can be used for official stuff because I still had my old leg pads that don’t exactly match PSU colors.

Got the game face going for the photoshoot!

This brings me to the next cool thing that happened Monday…MY NEW PADS CAME IN AND THEY’RE GORGEOUS!!! I have never been more excited for a piece of gear, it was better than Christmas. Now all that I’m waiting on is my custom Penn State mask and I’ll be all set!

Bonus cool thing! The NHL decided to have a preseason game in Pegula this year so Tuesday night we were able to watch the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Buffalo Sabres play each other on our ice! Here’s a video I took from inside the rink: IMG_4650-1q644b9

RCL Post #3: Have Smartphones Actually Destroyed Our Generation?

This weeks RCL post is in response to Jean M Twenge’s article titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation”. In case anyone not from English 137 is reading this post here is the link to the article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/

Now I’m sure that I’m not alone in the fact that I feel like I have read several articles very similar to the one that we were assigned this week. People love to write articles that condemn the workings of the newest generation and then go into lengthy detail about how everything is ruined now. The title of this article actually implies that our generation has already been destroyed, as though there in no hope of salvaging any of it to make a competent generation or whatever. I’m tired of all of these people that don’t even belong to the iGen predicting the impending demise of the human population.

Putting aside these personal frustrations, I did think that this particular article by Twenge was well presented and thoroughly researched. Jean Twenge has obvious knowledge on the subject, and I am persuaded by ethos to trust the message that she is giving. She garners credibility by talking in detail about what exactly her job entails as a person who examines trends in generations The parts about Athena, the young girl, are especially significant in building credibility because it provides a real life iGen perspective in the article.

It is easy to connect the message of the article to individual, personal experiences everyone has because of the prevalence of smartphones and social media in our society. In technical terms, the article makes good use of Kairos to become a persuasive message that I am actually interested in. Despite my exasperation with the doomsday prophecies for our generation, the message that Twenge is sending is one that directly concerns me, and it is based on an idea that has already gathered steam for many years. For those reasons and some others it has made me a captive audience member.

Since the release of the first smartphone and the enormous surge of social media everybody has been wondering what the implications will be. Most people in older generations inherently distrust things that are new and complicate the way things have always been, so it seems like there has always been negative press about the technology wave of the 21st century. However, this article stands apart from all of that chatter because it provides data from the past ten years that decisively concludes that social media and smartphone technology is making iGens unhappy.

Now, I am never one to be completely swayed by any persuasive argument, and it the same case regarding this article. I do find myself in agreement with the author that ultimately social media has direct correlation to unhappiness in iGens, but I think that many other factors play a role. Comparing generations to each other is not the most accurate way to evaluate the successfulness of a generation because of these other factors. We live in an age where information can be shared quicker and to a larger audience than any generation before us, and this means that we can share how we feel with others. We can know what others are feeling in a more intimate sense and and a larger scale because there are platforms for exactly this purpose.

Ideas can trend among demographics in ways that they never could before, and this has lead to the issue of “hot-button topics” These are issues that are sensitive and usually garner response in some way. Concussions are a hot-button issue right now because of the level of attention being paid to them. In any other generation if a kid got a headache after playing a game there would be little attention paid to it, whereas now there are multiple protocols, warnings, and information about concussions everywhere. And because of this there has been an enormous spike in reported concussions, a majority of them mild ones that would never have been diagnosed in an older generation.

I believe that in a similar way to concussions, depression (and mental health in general) has become a hot-button issue. Twenge talks a lot about the significant increase in depression rates and suicide rates. Personally, I think that these number have jumped so high not just because of social media and smartphones, and not just because of the more anti-social behavior of iGen, but because more attention is being paid to mental health in our current society compared to other generations. If you tell someone that you feel unhappy nowadays it is an easier and less humiliating process to get professional help than it was 5o years ago. Also, as more information is circulated about mental health issues, more people are exposed to what exactly depression entails, and are more likely to understand that they might actually be dealing with it.

I got a little off topic, but in conclusion the article did a very good job establishing ethos to make the core message more persuasive. It was also written at a time when this issue is relevant, which also helps its persuasion.

RCL Blog Post #2: What Were They Thinking!!!

When I was told to pick an advertisement that made me exclaim “what were they thinking creating this ad?!?” I immediately thought of Kendall Jenner’s disastrous Pepsi ad. I’m sure you have seen it because of the big scandal it caused, but if you haven’t here is the commercial:

https://youtu.be/dA5Yq1DLSmQ

 

There was immediate outrage after this ad hit the market, and it was taken off the air within the SAME DAY! However, it was not quick enough as it seemed like everyone was talking about it for quite some time, myself included.

The fundamental massage of the ad is fairly straightforward, if everyone drank Pepsi we would all be happy and there would be no conflict between anyone. Although this is a stupid proposition it is not that far away from messages that a lot of ads in the media send. “Buy this and your life will be so much better!” is constantly being shoved down our collective throats by a lot of different kinds of products, but Pepsi crossed a certain line by running this ad.

The first major flaw that Pepsi made while making this ad was trivializing all of the social tension that is present in America today. There are many different conflicts going on right now including the Black Lives Matter movement, gay rights, the new wave of feminist movements, and many others. Pepsi doesn’t specifically divulge which movement it was depicting, but it was obviously clear that they were recreating scenes similar to the ones that these real-life movements have had.

A specific example is the moment at the end of the video where Kendall Jenner walks up to the “police” and stands there face to face. This scene directly echoes the scene that has become iconic of the young black women standing alone in front of lines of police officers in full riot gear. Although Pepsi has made these two images look similar to each other, they are inherently different and do not stand for the same thing.

It is not wrong for corporations to draw attention to current events or other social issues, but it is wrong to exploit and trivialize them. If Pepsi’s underlying message had been something other than “Hey, sharing a Pepsi will solve this major conflict happening in society right now”, then maybe this ad would have been more successful. Instead Pepsi focused on it’s own brand promotion, while using a scene that instigates deep emotions and opinions in people without giving that scene meaning. It completely downplayed the serious violence and unrest that is a part of these movements and instead portrayed it as a giant party where everyone wants Pepsi as a refreshment.

The second major mistake that Pepsi made with this advertisement was using Kendall Jenner as the celebrity endorsement here. Even watching the video was awkward where it would go from super serious, politically charged shots of the individuals and the rally, then to shots of Kendall’s modeling photoshoot. The advertisement tries to make it obvious that Kendall is distressed by the commotion in the street and chooses to leave her comfortable position to walk among these regular people. However, this message misses the point because 1.) It’s Kendall Jenner who is a part of the Kardashian crowd who are famous purely because of reality tv 2.) This ad is clearly linked to the Black Lives Matter movement and Kendall has no explicit connection to this movement (unlike Béyonce)

Relating all this back to our course, the three appeals come big into play here. Pepsi fails in ethos, because it fails to give credibility to the idea that drinking Pepsi will solve social conflicts. It falters in logos because again, the logic behind Pepsi being the savior for all major problems in the world completely defies logic (and makes me think “HOW COULD THEY POSSIBLY COME UP WITH THIS AD”). Finally, Pepsi tried to appeal to people’s emotions by using something that people are passionate about to drive home their brand. This is not altogether a terrible idea, but it was very very poorly executed, and became a spoof of what those emotions should have been.

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