Standing Ovation: Cultural Reinforcement and the “Slow Fade”

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Cultural Reinforcement and the “Slow Fade”

In Robert Schles' article "On Reading a Video Text", he explains to his readers why it is so much more appealing to watch a video than it is to read a text. Schles goes on to give an example of a commercial made in 1982 about an african american baseball umpire who has worked hard all his life and gets a "big break" and gets a Budweiser beer and the end of a tough game. This commercial was not only to promote Budweiser, but to establish cultural reinforcement, which he defines as "the process through which video texts confirm viewers in their ideological positions and reassure them as to their membership in a collective cultural body." In other words, this video text was able to promote the cultural change that was going on at that time in history-when the blacks were starting to become accepted as a people.

In the music video "Slow Fade" performed by Casting Crowns, the life of a family is being displayed throughout the song. The parents are fighting in the kitchen voices raised about an affair that is happening with the husband which their daughter hears from her bedroom. Their son is out drinking and passes out, and then the camera focuses on a shattered photo of the family. From that point on, time goes backwards: the secondhand is now moving counter-clockwise, the glass of the frame is back into place and the photo put back on the shelf, the wife unwrinkled the picture she found of another woman, the husband walks backward out the door, and the son gets up off the floor and the alcohol is returned to him. Their whole lives are going in reverse until the time comes when the father has to go on the business that started it all, but this time the daughter asks him if he has to go and he replies by saying, "I guess they could do without me for a while."

The whole point of this music video is to explain to families that things like this don't just happen in a day. “Families never crumble in a day”. Sometimes it takes months and even years before you notice that things are slowly changing and most of the time it is not for the better-in this family's case. Everyone knows that marriages aren't perfect, they take a lot of work, and this is one example of the many outcomes of marriages if you don’t put enough love and time into your marriage to make it work. This music video doesn't have to just apply to married couples, it can teach students about the consequences of their choices. That one bad choice can affect everyone around you. That drinking to much can cause problems for your body. And that people should be careful who they hang out with. Hopefully the people who have viewed this music video will influenced by it and take the choices that they make in life and be able to look farther down life’s road to see how it will affect them in the long run. But we can never push the rewind button on “Your Life” tape, the only thing we can realistically do is accept the consequences and be more careful in how we go about making our choices.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QASREBVDsLk&ob=av3e

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Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Standing Ovation”! The title of this blog refers to the audience of active readers we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), we encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?

As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike).We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…J).

Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! We are really excited see how far we can take this together!