The Blogora: The Rhetoric Society of America

 

Micro-documentary: "Entropy, Delivery, Karma"


Submitted by Jim Brown on May 20, 2009 - 11:30am


Check out this experiment in "micro-documentary" by UT graduate student Will Burdette. Will discusses the work of Fritz Blaw in terms of Lave and Wenger's Situated Learning. Blaw is Austin's human poster filter. Burdette explains:

Blaw has spent 20 years delivering posters around Austin, Texas. His business, Motorblade, exists atop a network of bulletin boards in coffee shops, restaurants, and other venues. As in any other network, expert navigation of the bulletin boards requires specialized knowledge, rhetorical savvy, and an understanding of the complexity of the laws (written and unwritten, judicial and social) that govern the network. In the case of the bulletin board network, there are written laws that make them necessary; postering on public property like light poles or electricity poles is illegal. But there are also unwritten social laws that suggest optimal placement of posters and fliers: don't monopolize space; put adult-oriented material at or above an adult's eye level, and put kid-oriented material at a kid's eye level; printed material with large fonts can be put higher, whereas business cards should be lower. Once articulated, these "laws" may seem like common sense. But this common sense may not be initially obvious to the casual observer of a coffee shop bulletin board, where it looks like chaos reigns.