"Mashup of Discourses: A Critical Analysis of the Videotext, 'Dream America Movie'"

About the Author

A teacher of writing and multimedia texts for nearly 30 years, Nancy Fox is working on her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in Seattle where she serves as Associate Director of the Expository Writing Program. She holds an M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from San Diego State University, where she initiated the use of visual text construction as a mode of teaching argumentation and rhetorical strategy to first-year composition students. Her abiding interest is in the development of a Critical Discourse Analysis that addresses the complexities of multimodal texts by student composers in particular.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography

Part 2: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a Student Videotext in “The Dream America”

2.1. Analytical Framework for Videotexts: For this particular analysis of a student videotext (O’Halloran’s coinage) in “The Dream America” course, I plan to adapt van Leeuwen’s models for text analysis and CDA[9], repaired with elements from Remix Theory:

1.      Textual Function: i.e., materiality (composition of “remix” with graphics; images; sentences; nouns; noun-clusters);

2.      Interpersonal Function: (the way these texts might enact the social identities of this particular “digital” generation—how they speak to one another and create the discourse of “mashup culture”);

3.      Ideational Function: (ways the student “remixes” do [and, as van Leeuwen remarks in “New Writing,” often do not] enact traditional discourses and community valences, as well as societal narratives in which legitimate action is rewarded).

2.2. The “Dream America” Project: The videotext is the culminating project in my English 131 class in Expository Writing at the University of Washington, and begins with a task on Day One, i.e., “construct a visual from any materials you wish that presents your notion of the Dream America” (see Appendix). This phrase, “the Dream America,” derives from a comment by Andy Warhol I found in the eponymous show of his silkscreens and films at the San Diego Art Museum in 2006. Etched on the wall of the gallery was this statement:

Everybody has their own America, and then they have the pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see. And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem atmospheric because you've pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you've custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one.

In the course that resulted from this encounter with Warhol’s argument, students are introduced to this notion of “Dream America” and asked, on the first day, to construct an initial articulation of their own “fantasy corners,” pieced physically together from materials they select, so they see how argument itself is thus constructed. This initial text serves as the “warp and woof” through which they weave (or from which, unravel) all subsequent changes of mind and information, as they work their way through relevant course material[10]. The final videotext project asks students to revise their first articulation of the “Dream America,” deepened and extended now by class discussions, course readings, and field activities throughout the term. They are to place in complication Warhol’s “fantasy” America that we have “custom-made” and the “real one” we inhabit. This was my initial iteration.

I have, however, through experience in university classrooms of all levels, developed awareness of the “digital natives”[11] who remix visual, linguistic, and musical elements as easily and perhaps unself-consciously as a native English speaker constructs a clause from a noun and a verb, with the other parts of speech woven through these basic elements. It is indeed clear to me, as van Leeuwen himself advises, that “a single text does not provide enough evidence for reconstructing a discourse, although it can be used for methodological demonstration” (“Recontextualization” 146)—however, with only one exception (wherein the student spoke into a camera entirely about himself for the entire video), all videotexts exemplify the diverse forms of materiality, semiotics, and valences discussed in Part One of this paper—academic and “remix” alike. They all cohere with ideas of “Mashup” culture that gives a CDA of these videotexts its depth and significance. As an example of this extensive corpus (approximately 140 artifacts from first-year university students in San Diego and Seattle in two different iterations of this course, the latter portfolio-based and revised for that cohesive purpose) I have selected Caylee’s “Dream America Movie,” designed in the software program Microsoft Moviemaker and posted on the open video-sharing website, YouTube. (The URL’s for the videotext is provided in the analysis.)

2.3. Caylee’s “Dream America Movie”

INTRODUCTION

Caylee’s videotext is 2.35-minute artifact that she labeled “Dream America Movie” and constructed within the software program Microsoft Moviemaker (see Table: My Transcription of Caylee’s Dream America movie). Caylee posted her text on the file-sharing site YouTube where it can be accessed directly (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFDmrtqTTbg&feature=player_embedded)—as well as on the class Catalyst website and in a separate email to me. She presented her videotext in class, with no attendant commentary. However, in her final portfolio, Caylee notes that her purpose was to show “it’s scary living in America,” and she hoped to impress upon her audience of peers that (written in all capital letters) “SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE.”

Table

Transcription of Caylee’s “Dream America Movie”

(Fox_image_1)

(Fox_image_2)

TEXTUAL FUNCTION

Materiality: Caylee constructed her “Dream America Movie” entirely by recombining semiotic content already extant on internet sources. The material consists of the following elements:

1.      moving visual imagery derived from YouTube, with one of two direct references to 131 course material, i.e., a clip from Michael Moore’s documentary, “Bowling for Columbine”;

2.      still photography from news sources and Microsoft clipart;

3.      spoken verbal commentary in the forms of voiceover (inserted from YouTube) of the introduction to “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin, newscaster narration, clips from news conferences of former President Bush and current Vice President Biden, and, in one of two direct references to 131 course material, a clip from Morgan Spurlock’s TV documentary, “Minimum Wage”;

4.      written verbal content in the forms of title (her only self-created addition to the videotext), news channel logos (ABC; Fox News; CNN), news captions and scrolling banners, signs in the hands of individuals in visuals or propped on objects in visual); a combination of complete sentences in the narration, voiceover, and signs; and one-line clauses and phrases in the news banners and captions;

5.      streaming music throughout (Carmina Burana’s “O Fortuna”) inserted from YouTube (http://vodpod.com/watch/3134307-carmina-burana-o-fortuna).

Language of Visual Design: According to van Leeuwen, this “language” refers to both creative and normative patterns apparent in the texts that specifically call for data about new uses of color in composition and constraints that are codified in digital programs students use (“New Forms” 132). “Dream America Movie” was constructed on the software program Microsoft Moviemaker, included as part of the standard “bundle” of programs Microsoft installs with its operating system. As the document opens to a screen of “editing” functions, Moviemaker provides a closed selection of templates for verbal, visual, and musical content, which are manipulated through a “storyboard” feature at the bottom of the screen. Text-makers may insert verbal material within the range permitted by the text box on the slide, and may select the specific colors and fonts that already are contained on the user’s computer. Verbal material may be delivered into the image through a variety of avenues, i.e., popping up in a jagged text “balloon” that approximates an explosion (standardized in red that cannot be altered); scrolling left to right, or right to left, downward, upward; jumping out from the visual image; static. Textmakers may insert both moving and still images from internet sources as well as their own digital cameras. Sounds (such as horns, bells, applause, etc.) may be inserted from the Moviemaker program. Music from digital sources may glide over the verbal and visual slides, but may not itself be cut or sampled and must run, unless truncated or “faded” at the end, in its entirety. All projects are subject to the “glitches” in this program, which may position an irremovable sound icon in the slide, or present the music inexactly.

“American Dream Movie” was posted on YouTube, a free file-sharing site that limits its participants’ projects to 10 minutes. The videotext is framed by the white ground of this site, which in “standard view” (as the text is selected) cannot be altered; however, the audience may “click” on the “full screen” icon, which erases the YouTube site information and instructions, and adjust the sound volume. In “standard view,” the YouTube logo (“You” in black sans serifon the white screen, “Tube” in white sans serif on a red video screen) and search window are displayed on the upper left (reader’s view), as is the title “Dream America Movie,” Caylee’s user name (created by her as a YouTube participant), and an invitation subscribe to the community. On the upper right is the entry point to “Sign In” and “Create an Account.” Below the videotext is, on the left, Caylee’s description of her film and an open area where viewers with YouTube accounts may comment. On the right is a long panel of opening shots, in color, from 20 YouTube texts, not necessarily related to Caylee’s film (for example, Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”; “Speaking French”).

Since Caylee’s verbal, visual, and musical content is constructed by means of “sampling” and “remixing” or “repurposing” clips (which are, as noted, frequently clips of clips posted on YouTube), her color choice is codified not only by the Moviemaker program in its available color palette which, along with fonts, is a closed system, but also the clips she selects from web sources and may not enter to edit or even perform such standardized image-editing practices as cropping or greyscaling. However, Caylee was able to manipulate within these constraints and select, for the sake of her America-themed project, clips that represent the red-white-and-blue color scheme that represents “America” symbolically. The red-white-and-blue motif is consistent throughout her video text, from the American flags waving  as the opening and closing moves of her text as well as a device of cohesion throughout the video; to the close-up of flag detail that serves as interruption between the iconography of America that opens the videotext, and the news clips and photographs that follow; to the clothing of the newscasters (blue jackets, red tie or red sweater, white shirt); to the capital letters in blue, “FITNESS,” on an enormous white fitness center; to the blue and red numbers on a stock exchange board;  and finally to the red lettering on the final sign, propped in a photograph on a garbage can, “The American Dream Is Over.”

INTERPERSONAL FUNCTION

The fascination of the interpersonal function of this videotext is the way such an artifact enters the field of CDA, i.e., how it enacts the social identity of Caylee as member of her particular “digital” generation, defined as “digital natives” in a recent study by Harvard’s John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, who describe this particular cohort as a unique one:

These kids are different. They study, work, write, and interact with each other in ways that are very different from the ways that (analog generations) did growing up. They read blogs rather than newspapers. They often meet each other online before they meet in person … They get their music online—often for free, illegally—rather than buying it in record stores. They’re more likely to send an instant message (IM) than to pick up the telephone to arrange a date later in the afternoon. (2)

Rather than viewing these activities as neutral behaviors, however, Palfrey and Gasser affirm comments by other observers of this young digital society, such as Goodstein of Ypulse.com, noted earlier, who connects this online activity with the creation of a “subculture.” Coffey of ABC, noted earlier as well, investigates “digital natives” who engage in this set of practices daily (and specifically, in his case, with downloaded music) and refers to them as “Mashup Culture.”

Palfrey and Gasser accord with these early views and assert that members of this generational group are “connected to one another by a common culture (wherein) major aspects of their lives—social interactions, friendships, civic activities—are mediated by digital technologies” (2). To reinforce the picture thus limned—of a generation whose literacy is materially and substantively different from previous eras—Palfrey and Gasser note that the ways this generation engages in identity-formation are multimodal themselves in that there is no apparent distinction between online “real world” identity for these folk: rather, “they just have an identity with representations in two, three, or more spaces” and thus have created a “24/7 network that blends the human with the technical in ways we haven’t experienced before” (4). Studies in Remix Theory extend these pioneering descriptions of new media in the hands of a new generation taken seriously in its construction of multimodal languages that are constitutive of a discourse also entirely new—and so complex that O’Halloran notes there is no way as yet to archive or catalogue it (“Multimodal Analysis Lab”). Remix Theory, as defined by Eduardo Navasse in his pioneering work in Media History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California at San Diego, identifies this culture as one that has transformed “sampling”—a relatively simple recombining of two or more songs to create a new iteration while sustaining the individual integrity of each element—to an “art” that draws from a seemingly limitless store of semiotic materials (visual; verbal; spoken; musical; other remixes) in multiple genres and repurposes that content for specific audiences and exigencies.

Caylee’s “Dream America Movie” illustrates these features of “remix” and “mashup culture” in its sampling of material from still images, television newscasts, documentary films, recorded music, and recorded voice designed to present a rhetorical narrative, without the assistance of a narrative voice or captions to denote meaning, in seven distinct “chapters” with 48 visual and three aural “moves.” Her videotext is entirely composed of material drawn from digital sources which represent the semiotic environment of a societal group which has grown up in a state of “digital immersion” and “only know a world that is digital” (Palfrey and Gasser 4).  The result is a clearly apparent multi-modal form of literacy, wherein the remix may be understood as a unified text that relates a complex and multi-layered story that not only addresses the prompt in Caylee’s “Dream America,” but also enacts her identity as member of a network in new media that has marked this discourse as its own. While former generations of students might have derived their projects from material in libraries (identified in an age of online resources as “brick and mortar”), Caylee’s sources are digital and web-based, a mode of communication with which her audience is entirely familiar and whose ability to “read” her project was not questioned by her. It might be said that she constructed a new method of speaking their common “video-language” and her audience understood the medium and the message (which, with a nod to Marshall McLuhan, clearly coincide in this discourse).

IDEATIONAL FUNCTION

Van Leeuwen describes the “ideational function” of a text as the ways in which it enacts traditional discourses, or in Foucauldian terms, “ideologies.” A CDA of this “mashup” cultural discourse, then, might reveal community valences as well as societal narratives in which legitimate action is rewarded, and illegitimate action is punished (as framed by van Leeuwen in “Legitimation”). Although a detailed CDA of Caylee’s text is constrained by issues of space, a brief overview of the ways her text presents van Leeuwen’s categories of analysis for Legitimation is instructive. Therefore, the final section of this model will derive its schema directly from van Leeuwen’s framework and focus on selected elements of Caylee’s text in the specific fields of Authorization and Moral Evaluation.

1.      Authorization is defined by van Leeuwen as the way in which a discourse deploys received ideas of authority in terms of tradition, law, and individuals certified in that power position by the community. Caylee’s text presents 13 such images, out of a total of 48 (nearly 1/3 of her videotext). In her “Dream America Movie,” governmental authority is Caucasian, male, and elected (4:2, 5:1, 5:8); self-selected leadership in the economic sphere (5:2, 5:5, 6:7) is centered on Wall Street and is also Caucasian and male. Authority in the form of law-enforcement, emergency services, and military is young male and in uniform (4:3, 4:4, 4:5, 4:6, 6:2). As it relates to media culture, authority is vested in the male and female newscasters, both of whom are Caucasian in similar formal suits (5:3, 5:4). With reference to Barthes’ distinction between the denotative and connotative functions of visual imagery in “Rhetoric of the Image,” these images literally and materially constitute a discourse of power as primarily white and primarily male, but also connote a regime of power as particularized, hegemonic, and hierarchical in structure, male in tone. (Both governmental figures are depicted behind podiums, speaking “down” to the television audience.)  The authority of media news presentation, through which the government information is filtered and all images of news events are broadcast, is presented as neutral and monolithic.

2.      Moral Evaluation is a van Leeuwen term for the ways the discourse might reflect, in Caylee’s case, American ideas of value.

a.       Here, while the red, white, and blue motif is literally constitutive of material elements such as the American flag, clothing on individual actors, and typography on individual screenshots, the colors also are coded as patriotic in American ideology and in fact may be considered a distinctly American ideograph, along with such words as “inalienable rights” and “pursuit of happiness.”

b.      The flag itself is a representation of American ideology as well as a metonym of the American people. Caylee’s use of the flag throughout her videotext demonstrates a cohesion strategy that structures her text but also firmly anchors it to discourses of American values and, and indeed, the American polity as a value in itself (1:1, 1:6, 4:4, 4:5, 4:6, 5:1, 6:2, 7:1).

c.        Race is defined in “Dream America Movie” as black and white. Although black and Caucasian males inhabit an almost equal number of images of violence (four black, five white), white males outnumber black males in government (2-0), economics (3-0), media (1-0), social action (1-0), economic effects (2-0), and law enforcement and military (4-2).  While images of white males represent both elected and self-selected, as well as service, positions, black males are shown exclusively in service or acts of violence. The voiceover is white male: indeed, white male hegemony is unchallenged and depicted as much a part of American material culture as is the flag.

d.      Gender is also delineated in terms of power and representation. One woman, a white newscaster, is shown in a position of authority (5:4), and civic engagement for Equal Marriage Rights is the purview here of white females and one woman of color (whose ethnicity may be biracial). All other depictions of female life in America focus on celebrity defined physically and performatively (3.7 “Snooki” in “Jersey Shore”, and 6:6 Miss California, Carrie Prejean, whose press conference was “viral” on the internet because of its lack of coherence) or victimization either because of physical body image (3:2, 3:3, 3:4, 3:5) or violence (6:3), or potential victim (3:1, the still image of the child that follows immediately after the black youths in the car (2.9). Females whose appearance is other than white are silenced and essentially erased from this videotext. Females are depicted in terms of performance and physical features, including the young white female newsreader—with the exception of women involved in civic action for the sake of gay marriage, who are in Foucauldian terms enacting resistance to power in their discursive challenge to heteronormative marriage law in America.

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[9] Defined in Reading Images and  in his article “Legitimation in Discourse and Community.”