Jim Ridolfo and Martine Courant Rife’s text has been by far
the most interesting to me thus far. It is highly applicable in our everyday
lives, especially with technology on the rise these days. Working for a
newspaper, copyright infringement and laws is something that I am always on the
lookout for. There is a designated page with photos we are allowed to use
because we have rights to them, and a set of stock photos we can also use.
Aside from those, anything else needs to be given the appropriate accreditation,
which did not happen in the case of Michigan State University’s student,
Maggie.
Maggie’s snowball fight photograph was used on MSU’s website
repeatedly, and was remediated to fit several different parts of the website,
including a prospective student recruitment section, when in reality Maggie was
part of a protest.
Maggie was less than pleased about this and said, “the
university didn’t contact me. Nobody ever got my name. Nobody ever asked
anything. The reporters I don’t think even got it but the university officials
definitely didn’t. They didn’t get my name or the name of the other person in
the picture, and I was like the main person, focal point of the picture.”
The question now is, should they have gotten that
information? At my job, when we send freelance photographers to take pictures
of an event, we rarely ever ask for the students’ names, unless they are, for
example, the SGA President. And those photos stay on file if not forever, then
for a really long time. We’ve never had a problem with people being upset about
their photo being featured, so I am not sure how that would be handled, but in
Maggie’s case, here is what comes into play:
-According to Ridolfo’s text and a study by him and Danielle
Nicole DeVoss, today’s digital delivery is different because new elements are
very “readily available to mix, mash and merge” (Ridolfo 229).
-Composing in the digital age is completely different from
traditional practices of composing.
-“Rhetorical velocity: strategic concept of delivery in which
a rhetor theorizes the possibilities for the recomposition of a text based on
how they anticipate how the text might later be used” (Ridolfo 229).
The concept of rhetorical velocity offers another lens to
look at Maggie’s case from. Though her
argument is understandable, with today’s “rhetorical velocity” the desire to manipulate
everything that is digitally available is impossible. Also, how wrong is it to
use an image for something other than its original purpose? Sure, Maggie was
protesting, and the image shows otherwise, but as long as the content is not
offensive or derogatory, is there really an issue, and if there is, should an
attempt even be made to stop it? Remediation will occur, websites will use
photos and mold them to fit their own platforms, and rhetorical velocity is at
full velocity.
