Olive’s Blog

For my project I am going to interview my professional mentor, Sarah Miner who is a product developer for Sub Zero. I am going to ask Sarah how she uses writing for her job and if she has to write differently depending on who she is talking to. I would also like to talk to Sarah about how her knowledge and input is valued within her place of work and if it differs from her male peers. 

If I can find a professional male that does the same job, I would like to interview him as well and compare their answers to better draw a conclusion about women in the workplace. Sourcing this information may be difficult because I don’t know any product developers on a personal level but I would like to make some sort of comparison between men and women in the workplace. 

I plan on referencing Lanham’s Fluff and Stuff, Gregg’s On Friday Night Drinks, and Brandt’s Writing for a Living. All of these readings are relatable to my topic because they cover the new economy (which includes a huge female workforce), workplace etiquette and how the written work is used to make money. Lanham’s Fluff and Stuff, will help me explore writing as a new form of the economy and help me build a case for the way writing can influence money. Gregg’s On Friday Night Drinks is going to help me form arguments for workplace etiquette as well as workplace descrimination and the way workplace dynamics impact the actual work being done. Brandt’s Writing for a Living will overall help me strengthen the dynamics of writing in the workplace and how the written word is used for business in different ways. 

I want to see what challenges working women face within the workplace. More importantly, I want to know what women are doing to combat unfair workplace biases and other challenges within the workplace. My first priority will be to identify a list of challenges women face and then identify the creative solutions created to solve these issues. I have feeling several of the problems will be ongoing.

Questions:

What is your official job title?

What are your responsibilities?

How do you use writing in your day to day work?

What form does your writing take?

What kind of education do you have?

Do you feel like your writing skills give you an advantage or a disadvantage in the workplace?

Do you feel that your writing differs, stylistically or otherwise, because of your gender?

Do you deliberately try to hide your gender when writing in a professional setting?

Why might women be at a disadvantage in the workplace?

What kind of advantages do women have in the workplace?

In a perfect world, I would love to write poetry. Ideally, I’d be able to write poems and make public art installations to “publish” the poems. U don’t know if this counts for the Brandt article but I suppose I would also have to write grants to have money to create this art, be able to write emails asking for permission to create in public spaces and even write the poetry itself. It’s a big dream but it includes lots of different forms of writing that are not writing poems themselves.

In the article, Writing for a Living by Deborah Brandt, we are introduced to the “knowledge economy”. Brandt argues that in an age where we have to pay to go to school in order to making a living, we are participating in the knowledge economy. The ability to read and write play a large role in the success of students, thus also being a deciding factor in their professional success. Using academic skills such as writing are used in the knowledge economy by workers in order to make their wages. Knowledge is able to increase efficiency and productivity because it helps workers develop new and faster methods to do their jobs.

Most use writing as a form of communication either with their coworkers or with their target demographic or audience. Other specialized work includes written records, data entry, written reports, and other specialized informatics.

I used to work in a grocery store with a pretty big and extensive “wellness and beauty” section. A lot of the other women I worked with were constantly passive aggressive. One incident stands out the most because the morning group had left me 8 orders to check in, stock and store away by myself. When I didn’t get all of my tasks done at the end of my shift I was greeted with a group email, meticulously outlining the exact procedures that need to be preformed each night. Parts were bolded, and italicized and although the email did not address me directly, I knew it was about me based on the last shift I had worked.

My analysis can be rhetorical because it will contain an argument and will have an audience. My genre will hopefully reach the parents of young kids that are viewing the content on YouTube to hopefully spark a conversation or alert parents to what their kids are watching and what kind of messages are being portrayed by their children’s favorite vloggers.

I need to work out my ideas a bit more.

Plan:

My main goal for this project is to analyze three rhetorical aspects of the specific internet phenomena: vlogging. I plan on delivering my analysis in the form of a podcast because I think it will be the best fit for my own personal learning and presentation style. First, I will need to establish a baseline for anyone listening by speaking briefly about YouTube and how this occupation even came to be. Next I am going to mention a couple of famous Vloggers and give a small description of what they talk about, who their audience is, what their message is (if any) and what kind of motives they may have behind their message. I am going to talk a bit about the extremes and dangers of internet vlogging as well as what it takes to claim internet fame.

For the second part of my podcast I’m going to talk about Logan Paul and the video he posted a number of years ago about visiting a Japanese suicide forest. This is going to be my main artifact in my podcast. The video itself has since been taken down from YouTube due to its graphic nature but copies of the video are still available on other websites. That’s the double-edged sword of the internet: nothing truly disappears from the internet. In the video, which was a part of a series of vlogs in Japan made by Paul and a group of his friends, Paul tells his viewers that he hopes he and his “squad” find someone contemplating suicide and that they are able to talk them out of it. His statement is a somewhat weak attempt to establish his views about suicide to his fans. However his demographic on YouTube is primarily young children. Later in the video, he and his friends come across the body of a deceased individual. Paul blurs out the face of the dead man but still includes the footage in his video. This begs several questions. Why is Paul choosing to talk about such an adult subject (suicide) when his audience is primarily young children? Why did Logan Paul deem it okay to film a person who has commited suicide in a country he is visiting? What does Paul’s video say about internet fame and what one has to do if they want to become internet famous? I am going to argue that vlogging can be a bad influence in the lives of young viewers and the amount of power internet celebrities have over their fans should be considered before they post any kind of influential content. 

Analyzing Vlogging: A new age way to make money living your life….or so they say.

What to establish-

• What is a Vlog?
• How do you make money vlogging?
• Who can vlog?
• How do you build a successful following?
• What are the pros of vlogging?
• What are the cons/downfalls?
• What are the extremes?
• What is the situation?-Internet advancement created this job
• Who is the intended audience?

I actually have a very personal connection to this article. The older brother of one of my friends used to attend a private for profit college in Madison called ITT Tech, which was a technical college for sound production, video editing and other useful technical skills. Before my friend’s brother could finish his education, ITT Tech when bankrupt and her brother lost all of the money he had spent on tuition and all of the time/credits he acquired at the technical college.

Much like the students talked about in this article, my friend and her brother come from a lower middle class family that depended on her brother being able to receive a degree at an institution they could afford. I followed a similar route but I attended a public technical college before transferring to UW Madison. As McMillan Cottom says in her article, many students attending technical colleges rely on affordable tuition because they may not qualify to take out loans. For profit technically colleges worry more about the money than the people attending the college. The experience with my friend’s brother and the article prove that for-profit colleges “turn inequality into profit” (page 30)

Bourdieu believes that economics and the societal impact economics has is due to the production and movement of capital. He sees it as a type of game, a kind of win/lose situation. The players are people within an economic system and some players have an advantage due to higher economic influence or status. In order to maximize profits, one must be self interested according to Bourdieu. Any economic exchanges that you do that don’t get paid for are considered self “disinterested”. He also argues there are three types of capital: economic capital, cultural capital and social capital. Economic capital are goods and services that provide money to oneself or society. Cultural capital is something that is produced by a culture such as pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, etc. Social capital is the power or influence one has over others. Arguably, all three types of capital can be inherited, passed down from generation to generation. This is the easiest way to gain capital because you did not have to work to generate any of it.

Others can also “inherit” or appropriate cultural capital. People are often able to purchase cultural artifacts, no matter their ethnic heritage. This can be a problem because the lines of cultural artifact and valuable capital blur into one. The greater the importance of the artifact, the higher the price however, it begs a question: can one really put a dollar amount to the cultural importance an item has to a community?

Done in class by Olive L., Kara C., Sam E. and Matthew R.

Wolf of Wall Street: The director/writers of the film are making commentary on American greed and how it changes the way people interact with people, places and things. Often we assume that money is always a positive influence but the Wolf of Wall Street illustrates the ugly side of money. You can also dissect the WOWS from the main character’s point of view and what kind of rhetorical voice he has throughout the film.

The questions we thought to ask of a media (text, film, art, music) are: Who is the speaker? Who is the audience? What does the speaker want from the audience? What does the audience want from the speaker?

In her article, Payments and Social Ties, Viviana Zelizer explores three different kinds of payments: gifts, entitlements and compensation. Although she argues that these are the main forms of monetary payment, they can also be used in a social or sexual context as well. Zelizer uses the example of spouses to explain her theory. Spouses may exchange favors such as childcare, housekeeping or sex for a shared salary from their spouse. This is seen specifically in relationships where one spouse stays at home while the other works. However, monetary and sexual exchanges can become easily muddied. Another example provided by Zelizer included a college professor who purchased gifts for some of his female students. According to the professor, he saw the exchange as an act of inviting these women to be a part of his family whereas the female students took this exchange as an inappropriate attempt at courtship.

Compensation is often viewed as a direct exchange of money for a good or service. Some examples being paying children for doing chores or paying the plumber for fixing your sink. Entitlement has a person believing they have rights to a certain amount of money or action. This may translate to a man expecting sex after he pays for his date’s meal at a restaurant. A gift is seen as a person offering a good or service without expecting any kind of good or service in return. This might be holding the door for the person behind you or loading the dishwasher without being asked.