In response to prompt 1
Bryant, Kendra Nicole
U21172145
2 March 2008
In response to prompt 1
I really find it hard to find the connection between Ipods and the Flaming Lips in relation to writing studies, or more specifically, rhetoric and composition and sound. After reading Levy’s article, “Podcast,” I got an idea of how podcasting could be used in the classroom as a means of recording lectures and allowing students to play them back later, or how Ipods and podcasting could be used to narrate tours and various events. I also understood that podcasting allows the public, the amateur journalists, to become broadcasters in their own rights, accruing a following that eventually leads to a faithful audience. So, with all of those understandings, I conclude that Ipods relate to rhetoric and composition because podcasting involves an audience that is convinced to listen to a broadcasting, “professional” or amateur, through the art that the podcasters use to convince her/his audience that s/he is worthy of being heard.
As far as the Flaming Lips’ connection to rhetoric and composition and sound, if I am correct in my analysis, after reading “The disturbed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, worlding, and new media culture,” by Thomas Rickert and Michael Salvo, because the Flaming Lips were experimenting with sound, recording songs across four CDs that were meant to be played simultaneously, hosting nontraditional concerts wherein Flaming Lips worked with boom boxes, car stereos and tape players, all with audience participation, they were involved a type of rhetoric, an art that pushed the envelope and encouraged their audience members to be writers of music, just like podcasting allows “average” citizens to be writers of their own broadcasts.
I guess writing in this sense, doesn’t necessarily mean writing with pen and paper, but people engaged in podcasting and creating music with Flaming Lips are authors of an art usually limited to the “professionals” of the genre.
