I chose the article "Forty Years Later, the Golden Record Goes Vinyl" by Marina Koren as my supplemental text. The article focuses on the Voyager Golden Record, which is an actual golden record that was launched into space in 1977 with Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. Voyager 1 is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth. Both spacecrafts have left the solar system.

The record itself contains "popular songs, sounds from nature, photographs, spoken greetings in dozens of human languages and one whale language" and most importantly directions on how to find planet Earth, and its target audience is an intelligent alien civilization that is capable deciphering the message on the record.

The content of the record was not intended for public consumption; the copies that remained on Earth were distributed mostly to NASA facilities. However, recently Ozma Records has put the Golden Record on vinyl for the first time. David Pescovitz and Timothy Daly, the co-founders of Ozma Records were surprised by the lack of a vinyl version of the Golden Record in these digital days. The two paired up with Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer, to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the project. Originally, the group planned on raising $200,000 to make 2,000 sets, however, the internet responded with $1.3 million. Due to such a turnout, 10,000 special edition copies were made for those who backed the Kickstarter project. A different edition is now sold on the Ozma Records website.

Pescovitz and his collaborators did not have much trouble finding the original tape recordings of the Golden Record; all they had to do is contact Sony and visit their studio to listen to the tapes. The hard part was obtaining permission to use copyrighted material. The difficulty was in "tracking down the owners of some of the more obscure content, like melodies by indigenous groups". It came to the point where Pescovitz "was calling Papua New Guinea at 2 o’clock in the morning, and working with amazing ethnomusicologists around the world to try to track down as much information as possible, to find out about who these people were, what the music was, who collected it and when".

Koren, Marina. “Forty Years Later, the Golden Record Goes Vinyl.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Aug. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/voyager-golden-record-vinyl/538035/.

The authors of the textbook establish this idea in the very beginning of the chapter which they will follow throughout the chapter. Personally, I disagree with this idea because for me internet memes are images in the first place and text in the second place. When deciding if a meme is worth looking at, I first look at the image it portrays and only after I pay attention to the text, and if the text is too long, I will most likely not consider reading it. Only if I am looking at a news article or at a book, or other multimodal media that has the purpose of conveying information, I regard it as text first and other modes second.

While it is true that conscious mode choices can greatly enhance the end result, sometimes conscious effort may hide under the disguise of nonsensical randomness. Let's examine the case of millennial internet humor, which could be classified as neo-Dadaism. To ordinary people, the internet creations of so-called millennials would make absolutely no sense. Even in the analysis of neo-Dadaism in an article posted on Medium, Megan Hoins fails to expose the true core of this seemingly absurdist movement. People who create such absurdist content do their best to exaggerate things out of proportion, which they define as irony. Many pointless internet memes are created out of sheer desire to convey irony; such irony is not your every day irony but instead is something pointless done on purpose just because it is pointless. If you ever had encountered something that was so bad or so poorly-constructed that it made you laugh, then perhaps you are aware of this phenomenon. To conclude, sometimes it may seem like certain multimodal works had very little conscious effort put into them, when in reality every single decision in the making of such a work was carefully planned to yield a specific result.

retrieved from http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1202553-meme-man

Hoins, Megan. “Neo-Dadaism.” Medium, 23 Feb. 2016, medium.com/@meganhoins/neo-dadaism-absurdist-humor-and-the-millennial-generation-f27a39bcf321.

Personally, I find the visual mode to be the most important and most powerful modes out of all. According to Worldwide Health Organization, 285 million people worldwide are estimated to be visually impaired, which is only 3.8% of the current world population; out of those 285 million people about 86% have low vision, which sometimes cannot be detrimental to every day activities and can be fixed with glasses. When this is taken into consideration, it becomes evident that the vast majority of world population can interpret visual modes without problems. It is indeed true that pictures are worth a thousand words because more information can be packed into a picture than into a paragraph, for example. Just think of all the advertisements or propaganda posters you have encountered: did any of them not incorporate a visual mode?

The Golden Records that were sent into space contain a great amount of visual information on them. It is unclear whether the instructions on how to use the record and how to find our solar system are carved into the record, but if they are not, then it would be more difficult for an alien civilization that does not have eyes to make sense of the record and potentially locate our planet.

image acquired from https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/record-created-for-extraterrestrials-now-available-for-everyone/

image acquired from https://creativecommons.org/2014/11/08/the-voyager-golden-record/

“Visual Impairment and Blindness.” World Health Organization, www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs282/en/.

In the golden age of internet videos, I find it difficult to follow written instructions whenever I need to learn how to do something because sometimes they tend to be unclear or even wrong. Instead, I find myself watching YouTube videos that teach me how to do the exact same thing. It is easier to see how to do something you don't know and then repeat it than to read how to do something, play it in your head, and then try to repeat it yourself. In the case of the Voyager Golden Record, we had done our best to instruct an alien civilization how to find planet Earth; we just have to hope that if the record will be received by an intelligent life-form, the life-form will be intelligent enough to make sense of a binary code.

In this digital age the value of a photo has greatly deteriorated because practically anyone now owns a smartphone that can take high resolution photos, and due to social media where thousands of new photos are uploaded every second, our constant encounter with such media makes us appreciate it less. As someone who was a child in the 2000s, I remember being very excited about picking up different encyclopedias from the library and carefully analyzing all the photos, even imagining myself being in them. Nowadays, however, a child would not even bother to open an encyclopedia and instead would prefer to go online and mindlessly scroll through his or her social media in hopes of a faster passing of time.

I was always fascinated by the power of body language since it is an important factor that decides your place in society. The way you sit, stand, or look at people can have a great impact on them. Sometimes it is obvious when people try to have a particular effect on their audience, which in a way diminishes the power of the speaker. One of these people is Mark Zuckerberg; I find it funny watching him converse with other people, because oftentimes it is very obvious that he is trying to look tough. It may be possible that only earthlings are capable of understanding the power of body language, so we should appreciate our ability to understand it.

Not every audience is the same and therefore sometimes one mode may be appropriate for one audience and completely unsuitable for another audience. In the case of the linguistic mode, some people may not speak your language, so your reach would be limited, or it could be possible that your audience is deaf or blind, which would force you to alter your linguistic mode.

When sending a message to an intelligent alien civilization, we can be one hundred percent certain that they are not speaking our langange, however, we can hope that they have the means of deciphering it. Alien civilizations could also not posses the gift of sight and instead rely on echolocation like bats. It is also possible that an alien civilization is not capable of hearing and instead uses telepathy as a way of communicating with its species. Evolution can create wonders in environments we have not explored yet, so encompassing every single mode we are aware of onto a golden record would substantially increase the chances of an alien civilization being able to make sense of our message.

Since a mode is a way of communicating, not all multimodal projects have to contain text. A performance can be comprised of aural, gestural, spatial, and linguistic modes and still be considered a multimodal project.

The authors make an excellent point here. Nowadays with all the technology available, it is almost expected of us to incorporate multimodality into all of our works. If you were to make a PowerPoint and present into to your target audience, you would certainly not present a blank page with text on it because it would most likely not grab your target audience's attention; it would be a good decision to add pictures, animations, and perhaps even sound and video if appropriate to make your work as interesting as possible.

In the case of the Voyager Golden Record, there is surely no better way of describing planet Earth and humanity to an alien civilization other than including every single most important aspect of planet Earth and human achievement, which are naturally multimodal because that is one underlying characteristic of intelligent life.

Personally, I dislike Twitter because of its 144 character limit. My thoughts almost never can be expressed in 144 characters or less, which is the prime reason I do not use Twitter. To circumvent this, it is possible to write out your message, screenshot it and post it as an image, but that undermines the purpose of Twitter, in my opinion.

I do not understand why the authors of this textbook, including millions of other Americans think that FDR's economic policies helped "fix" the Great Depression. The truth is that the economic policies during the Great Depression only prolonged it.

FDR was knew nothing about economics. The tax rates under FDR's presidency were enormously high, reaching a 94% tax rate on the top bracket in 1945. In fact, in 1942 FDR proposed a 100% top tax rate, which is absolutely ridiculous. The ridiculously high top tax rates took away all the incentive from businesses to produce because in the end they would barely make any profit. What America needed during the Great Depression was lower taxes, not crazily high taxes.

Creator, Chloris. “FDR's Proposed Marginal Tax Rate Was 100%.” Daily Kos, 23 Feb. 2013, www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/2/24/1189512/-FDR-s-Proposed-Marginal-Tax-Rate-Was-100.

“Taxation History of the United States.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Sept. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United_States.

Kenneth Haltman is a professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, and Translation and his Ph.D from Yale University in American Studies.

Some of his honors are "Thomas J. Watson, Fulbright-Hayes, Andrew W. Mellon, and Henry C. Luce Foundation fellowships; research awards from Winterthur, the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; Senior Research fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Frick Art Reference Library; a Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship in the History of American Art at the JFK Center for North American Studies at Freie Universität-Berlin; and, most recently, a Distinguished Visiting Lectureship at the University of Western Australia".

At the University of Oklahoma Haltman has taught "introductory and advanced courses in American Art History and the Art of the American West, Undergraduate Methods, Graduate Methods, and a suite of rotating seminars in Visual Analysis, Material Cultural, and Critical Issues in Recent Art History at the core of the graduate curriculum".

Haltman's other publications are "Looking Close and Seeing Far: Samuel Seymour, Titian Ramsay Peale, and the Art of the Long Expedition, 1818-1823 (Penn State University Press, 2008), Butterflies of North America: Titian Peale’s Lost Manuscript (Abrams, with the American Museum of Natural History, 2015)".

Haltman has also translated French publications such as L’Évolution du goût aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections; Earth and Reveries of Will; Fragments of a Poetics of Fire.

“Kenneth Haltman, Ph.D.” University of Oklahoma , www.ou.edu/finearts/visual-arts/programs/bachelor_of_art_in_art_history/kenneth_haltman.html.

I chose the article "The Secret to Good Writing: It's About Objects, Not Ideas" by John Maguire as my supplemental text. Maguire claims that students nowadays cannot write clearly and convey their ideas efficiently and he defends this claim throughout the entire article. Though Maguire states that a couple of decades ago students were generally better writers, he does not mention when the writing skills of the general population of students went downhill.

Maguire identifies over-abstraction as the cause for this phenomenon. He believes that students oftentimes focus on and emphasize abstract ideas they do not fully understand, perhaps due to their age and inexperience in life, in their writing, which results in vagueness and desperate repetition.

Maguire creates the impression that teachers who are obsessed with ideas, and not concrete things, are the main contributors to the poor writing skills of today's students. To better the writing abilities of students, Maguire suggests that students should focus on physical objects - specifically "things you can drop on your foot". He claims that this is something both skilled and unskilled writers can do and that eventually students will get a good grasp on more abstract ideas, since all abstract ideas derive from physical objects.

Maguire, John. “The Secret to Good Writing: It's About Objects, Not Ideas.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 2 Oct. 2012, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-secret-to-good-writing-its-about-objects-not-ideas/263113/.

The speculation process appears to be the most subjective part of the Prownian analysis since every single person will experience a given object in their own unique way. This is what separates one person's analysis of a material object from another's. The next step of the Prownian analysis, which is research, allows writers to consult other people's works on the selected object, so they can see other people's interpretation of the object and convince themselves that their work truly brings something new to the table.

related to teaching or education

Pedagogic (n.d.) In Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pedagogic

Many people who enjoy reading, including me, would agree with this point. Though Haltman and Maguire reach out to different audiences, both of them would agree that over-description is an existing phenomenon and that it is desired to avoid it.

Personally, I could not agree more with this point because I detest complexity in writing that is done on purpose. I do agree that sometimes it is necessary to describe something in depth, be it for personal or philosophical reasons perhaps, but doing it all the time creates unnecessary confusion and makes me lose interest in the subject of matter. I do recognize the fact that some people naturally tend to over-describe objects and events and that they cannot do anything about it, however, I simply cannot stand them and I do my best to distance myself from them. On the contrary, there are people who despise those who rarely go in depth when it comes to objects and events. Those people might enjoy the works of writers like Henry David Thoreau and Jack London, but I, however, do not.

Since the introduction to American Artifacts will serve as a guide for most, if not all, of our writings this semester, it is important to come back to these ideas every time a material object is brought up. Practically any material object may spark at least some of these thoughts in our heads, and this list will definitely not let us get lost.

Maguire would surely not want unskilled writers to focus on these abstract ideas since this could result in a murky and repetitive writing. Personally, I have encountered such writing before and I support Maguire on this one. I also believe that a general philosophy course should be a prerequisite for a writing class, since philosophy analyzes and studies these abstract values.

In other words, Haltman suggests that we go beyond the object itself and analyze the abstract values that it could signify. Maguire, on the other hand, suggests that unskilled writers should avoid any kind of abstraction and focus only on the physical object. Haltman and Maguire appeal to different audiences and both of them are correct if that is taken into consideration.

These physical descriptions are exactly what Maguire would encourage his students to focus on when dealing with material objects. Haltman, on the other hand, suggests that the writer must utilize both abstractions and concrete adjectives and nouns, implying that the writer must find a balance between abstraction and concrete description.

• to permeate or influence as if by dyeing

Imbue (n.d.) In Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imbue

That is how a writer should interpret material culture. While American Artifacts focuses solely on writing, it is important to note that there are other ways of interpreting material culture. A historian would completely disregard this statement and analyze material culture in his own way, while a scientist would do something completely different. Personally, I think that utilizing all approaches to material culture would yield the best results possible.

While this statement is true, the interpretation of material culture can be subjective. Different people find different meanings and values in the same objects. If one decides to focus on the object itself, like Maguire suggests, then such ambiguity would be greatly diminished.

This is crucial to remember when analyzing the AIDS quilt. Normally, one would only describe a couple of remarks about a picture, usually something that stands out to the viewer, but for an "evolved" description one must focus on every single detail in that particular picture. In other words, for the best possible description of a material object one must explain it in such a way that even a blind person could comprehend what the object looks and feels like.

Since self-consciousness comes with age, it could be concluded that older people tend to be better at describing material culture than younger people because they would be able to form stronger bonds with the object they would describe. Maguire needs to take this point into consideration when analyzing the cause of poor writing skills among students these days. Personally, I think a couple of decades ago students produced better writing because they were more intellectually mature compared to students nowadays.

Haltman is correct here. A weak description is oftentimes full of ambiguity, which makes it lose its value as a description. A good description, on the other hand, allows the reader or listener to interpret the object described in his own way.

"Try to avoid foreclosing interpretive possibilities by narrowing your focus too far. For now, simply explain the direction (or directions) in which you find yourself headed, the sort of research you anticipate undertaking, and the research problems the endeavor poses."

Haltman, just like Maguire, recognizes that one can sink in over-abstraction, which is undesirable.

This point is also emphasized in Maguire's "The Secret to Good Writing: It's About Objects, Not Ideas". Maguire identifies the importance of this skill in writing and claims that students these days do not bring concrete examples in their writings.

This is not only the key to good description, but also the foundation of good writing in general. Without a rich vocabulary one would, in certain contexts, sound like a clueless child, whereas a writer who posses an expanded vocabulary would make the reader think the writer is a mature adult. This point would certainly be emphasized by Maguire since he suggests to his unskilled in writing students that they focus solely on the physical objects when writing. For someone with a not so rich vocabulary, a thesaurus would be a great tool for writing better descriptions.

This statement highlights the importance of daydreaming when writing about material culture. Maguire needs to take this into consideration when looking for the cause of poor writing skills among students these days.

A study has shown that daydreaming plays a crucial role in boosting creativity and that technology such as smartphones, computers and television distracts us to the point where daydreaming becomes impossible, thus diminishing our creativity. Nowadays in most Western countries technology is so prevalent that you cannot even hide from it. Most young people nowadays spend most of their free time looking at their smartphones or playing video games on computers, whereas more than two decades ago youngsters spent most of their time outside. The effect of technology on the writing skills of 21st century students is not to be ignored.

Katie. “Is Technology Killing Creativity?” Hello Rindle, 3 Oct. 2016, hello.rindle.com/is-technology-killing-creativity/.