Christian’s English Blog

Painted Pony Vintage is a small independently owned company that originated in the heartland of America, the midwest, and even more specifically Wisconsin. It is ran and owned by Thomas Borges, or more casually known as Tom. I took it upon myself to figure out what was going on with this successful little company. I found out that things have been shaken up quite a bit for Thomas and his business — in relation to whats going on in the world. He said that he is has seen a decrease in sales and overall business productivity. I wanted to figure what his main issues were — there was one that was more apparent to the current situation and another that may exist long after COVID clears up. The first problem is that Thomas is having a hard time finding clothes and knick knacks for his business, and the second problem is that the articles he does find are downright stinky. Neither of those issues surprised me, but I was willing to help.

First and foremost I wanted to address Thomas’s business and try to promote is as much as possible. With that being said, I am writing this blog post, posting this to facebook, promoting on instagram, telling my friends about the business, telling my friends to tell their friends about the business, and even making a promotional video that will be uploaded to youtube. But, I wanted to get his good name out there first and use some theories based on economic context and rhetoric to understand what could help Thomas. I wanted to discuss the theories of Lanham, Zelizer, Bourdieu, Brandt, Gregg and do a rhetorical analysis and examine the occasions of the context.

Lanham is theorist who addresses the attention economy and this little business does indeed work its way into the economy; and the attention economy at that as well. The stuff that Thomas is dealing with is all of his merchandise; his clothing, collectibles, and knick knacks that he finds. That transcends into the fluff. The items Thomas are purchasing are items that the broad majority of people have turned their backs on. They are old items that they part ways with and give away. Then Thomas comes in, he does the dirty work of finding these old pieces and turning them into profit. Therefore, in this attention economy, people who are turning a blind eye to these items and not giving them attention only give people like Thomas a nice paycheck.

Another rhetorician I want to examine is Zelizer. Zelizer likes to examine the rhetoric of not only the situation, but the people at play in the rhetorical situation. With that being said, I will be taking a look into the rhetorical situation that is, “Tom and Painted Pony Vintage”. Thomas is a laid back dude that at the same time likes getting stuff done. I cant imagine what being locked up in quarantine is doing to him. Back to the rhetorical situation — Thomas isn’t trying to be persuasive or push any boundaries. He is trying to be genuine and give the people what they want. If any questions that were raised interpreting this situation some may include, “What effects do weekends of constant picking and scavenging have on your life?”, or the opposite now, “What effects of days of constantly being at home have on your business and your life?” The rhetorical situation is unique not only due to what type of person Thomas is, but the fact that he is not trying to push anyone’s buttons and rather button you up into some vintage clothing.

Bourdieu identifies different types of capital pertaining to economics and rhetoric. These three forms are Social, Cultural, and Economic Capital. In that order, I’ll go down the list of identifying the forms of capital Thomas has. To start, I would say Thomas has a lot of social capital, or in other words, he has a lot of connections. Ranging from the north east coast, all the way to sunny Los Angeles. He has made road trips across the country several times meeting with different people in the same field as him all while promoting his own brand. With his charismatic demeanor it is safe to say that Thomas has secured a lot of social capital. Onward in addressing his cultural capital. Thomas is a unique individual with a unique company. He is not located anywhere, meaning he doesn’t have his own shop or franchise that he runs, but simply a more personable business owner. He does have a space in Wisconsin that he rents out with some of his clothing and knick knacks, but thats about it. (https://www.instagram.com/localsonly_collective). Naturally he uses a website to list his items (https://www.etsy.com/shop/PaintedPonyVntg). He does all of his own promotions and mails the items he sells himself. All of those speak on behalf of his cultural capital, that tells you what type of person he is. A person that is independently working hard to succeed at his craft. Furthermore, the culture revolving his business is that of what you may call, “vintage” or in layman’s terms, old. To conclude, the economic capital Thomas has is the very fact that at the end of the day, he is running a business. He is doing the work of finding items that people turn a blind-eye to and making them more accessible for people.

Deborah Brandt’s work revolves around the knowledge that goes into the economy. She addresses the notions of growing a knowledge-based economy and how writing is at the heart of that economy. Knowledge is a pivotal tool for successfully selling and marketing items. Brandt describes knowledge being the wealth obtained from this sort of economy. Now, tying this to Thomas. Thomas is very knowledgable about the products he is selling. He only buys stuff that he knows meets his criteria. Once he has selected items that he knows fit what he’s looking for, even more knowledge go into them. Thomas finds the history of the items and even finds images from where they have been in history. By exploring these realms of understanding his purchases, Thomas is gaining a sense of knowledgable wealth. This wealth allows him to understand what his product is. This entity of knowledge-based wealth transcends into actual wealth by Thomas being able to effectively sell his products.

In response to Melissa Gregg and diving into the workplace, Thomas’s workplace is very interesting. Traditionally, Gregg argues that the workplace has lost its authenticity, particularly speaking about an office job. Thomas’s job is far from an office job. He is out and about, and isn’t confined to the restraints of an employer nor the code of the office. She also does talk about the management of emotions within the work place. I can only imagine the emotions going through Thomas’s mind trying to run a business with what is going on right now. He said it is tough, but he is coping by going on with his day-to-day tasks. On top of that, Gregg argues that people are different at home versus work. That is not the case for Thomas, he stays grounded in reality while working and once he arrives home. He is a genuine person who takes traits from his own life and incorporating them into his own business.

With all of that being assessed, we have learned about Thomas and Painted Pony Vintage. We have a more thorough understanding of what he goes through and how he operates. To address the problems, I have two plans: 1) For those of you at home reading this, go through your old items that you don’t need anymore and put them aside for the one and only Painted Pony Vintage 2) In addressing the reoccurring stench of clothing Thomas’s runs into, we simply make his clothes smell more at home, by giving them a ‘homey’ feeling; that feeling being a sense of feeling warm and safe, and what better way than to reminiscing to the times you spent at Grandma’s house as a child, eating nice warm bowls of soup. — The plan: make Thomas’s smelly clothing more at home by washing and dunking them in Chicken Broth. I went this route because it is so outrageous, and it would create a lot of publicity and promotion for Thomas. There is an entire video dedicated to our process of getting to know Thomas, addressing his problems, and creating a business plan to fix his problems. With that being said, you can help in a variety of ways! You can do the first step by setting aside your clothing and old knick knacks you don’t want anymore, you could purchase your very own chicken-dunked clothing, and or visit his social media page and give him a follow or a few likes, and last but not least, by simply spreading the word of Thomas and Painted Pony Vintage.

What does it mean to write for a living? Call Center Service

Step 1: What were the themes?

a. Poor work environment: quality and work environment.

b. The theme of Mediation is very present

c. Templates

Step 2:

The labor conditions were not adequate; kind of scary.

I can relate to Dani.

Step 3:

The lack of attention based off of computers.

Research Question:

How has your job as an educator affected your ability to convey your message to a specific audience through your writing?

What do you want to know about the job/career/industry in question?

How did you acquire this job?

What type of education did you get?

Where did you go to college?

What is your normal day like?

What are the benefits of being an educator?

What is more prosperous, educating or selling copies of your book?

Have the the course concepts prompted you to think of the economics of writing in a particular way? If so, how do these concepts shape the research question you are bringing to this project?

I am drawn to Lanham, where is the focus being drawn to in education now, and what stuff in the modern day classroom is being emphasized.

I am also interested in what types of genres, processes, and the amount of time that has going to into their writing?

Do they have to write their lesson plans?

Writing to students?

Writing to parents?

But also, writing in their leisure time? Is the attention different there?

What are the best methods to answering this question? Who do you need to talk to? How do you know this is the right person to interview? What documents do you need to collect? What situations do you need to observe?

I am going to conduct interviews and observe to find answers to these questions.

I am going to talk to two educators. One being a former high school teacher, and then another being a current professor. I am so drawn to them because they use writing every single day for their practice. Not only in the classroom, but both have written books of their own as well.

I believe there are both the right people to interview because they are both renowned at their craft. They are both credited and educated.

Proposal Summary

Writing is evident everywhere in our economy. Our economy relies on the pen-in-hand workers who transcribe their thoughts and education on to paper. Well, wherever they may be writing now (paper, laptops. etc.). I am specifically drawn to the career choice of being an educator, and would like to fully understand how writing affects this job and its economy. For my own knowledge, I will be researching how has the job as an educator affected your ability to convey your message to a specific audience through your writing? I would interview, observe, and do some extensive research to figure out how teachers and educators alike are using their writing. With that being said, I am interested in how they address the different genres of writing. Whether it be for the curriculum or simply emailing students. What processes go into determining what they can send or publish? Another interesting aspect to address if how they write in school, has changed how they write and act in the real world.

I would use Langham and see where the attention of the classroom has been shifted to. What is the stuff and fluff in a classroom? On top of that I would like to look into the genres of writing teachers do and determine what the exigence of their work is.

I have two people in mind who I have already contacted and gotten consent from to interview. The high school teacher I would interview would also allow for me to observe the classroom for an hour or so.

Overall, I want to get to the root of writing and which direction it is going from an educators perspective.

Recruitment Script:

Hello ______________.

Hello there, I am writing to you on behalf of inquiring some knowledge about your field of work. It is for a research paper in an English class of mine. The class is called “Money and Writing”, and we are tasked with finding answers to a proposed research question. My question more or less revolves around writing and the education atmosphere. I was wondering if by chance, I could potentially interview you, or observe what a day in the life of an educator is like.

Thanks,

Christian Borges

Date and Setting: Possibly early 2010’s at a ceremony of some sort outside. I think it is at some sort of school.

Environment in detail: I see teenagers or young adults in a line. I can’t smell anything in this because its a video. There is a lot of flags as well.

People are doing: They are walking around, in a line, get cheered at while music plays in the background.

Judgements: I don’t know what is going on. But i can say there is some interesting power dynamics at play. Most of the kids don’t want to be doing this, but I think they are doing it in accordance to their school. It is some sort of initiation

Reflection: I would have to say this is a graduation ceremony and these high schoolers are being initiated into adults.

Abstract: Social media platforms generate huge profits from free user data. Twitter and other social media sites benefit additionally from the labour of volunteer community managers whose efforts to moderate misogyny and sexism online are often unwanted, punished, and viewed as censorship, uncivil behaviour, or themselves forms of sexism. Hashtag movements like #ThisTweetCalledMyBack reveal a growing labour consciousness on the part of these volunteers and an awareness of their role as an emergent formation within this ‘new economy’ (Nakamura)

Important Quotes/Claims

“I am specifically interested in the hidden and often-stigmatised and dangerous labour performed by women of colour, queer and trans people, and racial minorities who call out, educate, protest, and design around toxic social environments in digital media. Social media platforms benefit from the crowd-sourced labour of internet users who, with varying degrees of gentleness or force, intervene in racist and sexist discourse online. This labour is uncompensated by wages, paid instead by affective currencies such as ‘likes’, followers, and occasionally, acknowledgement or praise from the industry.”

Cheap female labour is the engine that powers the internet. Some of this labour occurs in the fabrication laboratories and electronic assembly plants in East Asia where almost all of the world’s chips and digital devices are produced. Women of colour are the majority of this workforce, as has been the case since the industry’s early days.

Over a thousand indigenous Navajo worked at a state of the art plant on the reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico producing chips from 1965-1975, receiving less than U.S. minimum wage.

Alley were expected to add their cheap or free labour to their paid labour by talking up their companies at key social events and trade shows, thereby blurring the line between paid work and play. She terms this ‘venture labour’ – workers willingly took up this burden because firstly, it didn’t seem like a burden; self-interest was at the core of the motivation for contributing this kind of digital labour. As she writes, ‘there is clearly a great degree of work involved in building and maintaining these regional economies, and this work is disproportionately done after hours by people who have the time, ability, and social capital to navigate such events (p160).’

They may all be labouring in the digital economy, but just as they are gendered and racialised differently, they are rewarded differently and under different conditions. David Hesmondhalgh says as much when he asks, ‘are we really meant to see creating code or writing about favourite shows online as ‘exploited’ in the same way as those who endure appalling conditions and pay in Indonesian sweatshops?’5 Many of the ‘venture labourers’ that Neff writes about were white, male, and from middle class backgrounds, giving them a leg-up in the fend-for yourself-economy of software development work, while the mostly-female Asian assembly workers at Foxconn labour with no jackpot in sight.

These are unpaid and collectively produced passion projects, all of which have received some positive recognition as well as much negative blowback. Though this kind of activity may not fit into traditional definitions of what labour is, some of its practitioners define it this way. A Twitter hashtag called #This Tweet Called My Back, authored by a collective of woman of colour social media activists, makes reference to the iconic woman of colour anthology This Bridge Called My Back because it makes a similar claim: that the labour of educating white men and women about racism and sexism is difficult, valuable, and unappreciated. The fact that this labour occurs via Twitter and Tumblr doesn’t detract from its value or difficulty, according to these authors, who write:We are your unwaged labour in our little corner of the internet that feeds a movement. Hours of teach-ins, hashtags, Twitter chats, video chats and phone calls to create a sustainable narrative and conversation around decolonization and antiblackness. As an online collective of Black, Afro-Indigenous, and NDN women, we have created an entire framework with which to understand gender violence and racial hierarchy in a global and U.S. context.6

Though the act of communicating with the public about racism, sexism, homophobia, and other social justice issues is unpaid, and often results in the poster being harassed, trolled, and threatened on these fora, these authors claim this content adds traffic and value to these platforms by attracting readers and followers. The human labour required to make platforms fun, easy, and safe to use – the provision of free advice, the documentation and dissemination of behaviour and speech that creates unsafe conditions for specific groups, and the openness towards forming new relationships with strangers who want or need them – has been treated in much the same way as reproductive labour, and therefore feminised, devalued, ultimately offshored for pay, and borne by volunteers.

The continuum of users performing this labour ranges from social justice content producers who self-identify as such and may even support themselves in this way, to anonymous users on websites like 4chan or Reddit who intervene in misogynist or racist speech or behaviour they see on these sites.

Users who tweet and post responses to misogyny and racism online are in effect venture community managers, and many of them define themselves as workers. Their interventions are intended to create better conditions for women and minority in social media and gaming, and though their reception has not always been warm, their labour mirrors some of the internet’s earliest volunteer community managers and content moderators.

Tiziana Terranova’s classic and generative critique of ‘free labour’ starts out with an iconic story about a platform’s exploitation of free and volunteer digital labour.

Questions:

How many of you use social media? Of you that raised your hands, how many of you pay for subscriptions to any of these medias? For example Youtube premium, Spotify premium or Instagram analytics?

With that being said, should people get paid for the amount of engagement and activity they put into social media?

At what cost should people start charging for their ideas and not allowing people to take advantage of their “free thoughts”?

What are some possibilities to compensate the labor of these people on social media? Should people who freely volunteer their time get to moderate get paid?

Thoughts on the internet forming its own economic entity?

Is this a global or domestic problem?

Brainstorm questions and possible Research Questions

What are the most common forms of writing within the workplace?

What are the most profitable forms of writing in the workplace?

Writing as a hobby versus writing in the workplace? Can they be combined?

What percentage of someone’s day is spent with a pen in hand, or typing on the computer? What effects does that have?

Difference between a hobby and job.

Data Collection Methods…possibilities?…

I think I would observe what workplace i would be interested in first. That would be a classroom setting, see how much of the class time is actually spent writing. I wouldn’t try and come in with any biases, or position on anything. Just observing how that teacher operates.

Possibly a community of people who write for a hobby.

I envision myself being a teacher after graduation. Preferably a high school English teacher. I think Brandt’s ideologies apply directly to this. I will have to have a lot of knowledge not only of the subject I am going to be teaching but knowledge of how to teach as well. I imagine writing will be almost the entirety of this career. Whether giving feedback to students or writing emails back to parents, writing will be involved in every step. I hope the stakes of my writing will be low but with that being said, you never know with how the job market operates now. I think that because once I get the job the job itself pretty much revolves around writing. Without one, you can’t have the other.

What central point are you trying to make in your analysis?

The effects of gambling don’t only effect the gambler, but those around them.

What problem might your analysis mediate or solve?

The problem our analysis might solve are the effects of gambling through game theory, economic systems, and theories of rhetoric and the economy.

Who needs to hear your analysis? 

Anyone. Particularly, anyone who has a gambling addiction or anyone who has been effected by gambling.

With those things in mind, what specific composition choices did you make in this assignment?

The choices we made were based off of our expertises. Sam is a economics major, and I am an english major. We wanted to view the overall picture of what was going on, in terms of setting and those involved. Our project is going with the contemporary art of a podcast, we thought this would be those most practical and accessible for a rhetorical analysis on a movie.

Why did those composition choices achieve your rhetorical goals?

They achieved our goals by using two different disciplines to further analyze our rhetoric. We chose the most applicable theories that could expose this movie for what it is. Our rhetorical analysis dives into Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle while examining economic theories as well.

First and foremost this is some heavy stuff to write about. With that being said, Jia Tolentino frames a rhetorical situation in conveying her message. Her exigence is a call to action. She believes that on the one year anniversary of this movement, its message has been compromised. Which is fair. I believe with anything in the world, there are going to be internet trolls who try and derive a good message. Although, she focuses in on more of the accused, and how they believe that the “#MeToo” movement has caused nothing but issues. This is an interesting way of looking at this; having two sides that fundamentally disagree with something that was supposed to be inherently good. I agree with the cause of the #MeToo movement, but I also think every case addressed should be taken with great caution. This is a very serious topic, and both parties are at risk of losing something here.

Tolentino is framing her rhetoric around the victims, and the reactions of the accused. I think this is a compelling argument and appealing to ethos. Sexual assault should be condoned, it should never happen, period. With that being said, with how impactful these scenarios are, once again I think each case should be examined carefully, and the correct punishment should be dished out to whoever is it fault.

I want to end on that I agree fundamentally that it takes a brave individual to partake in the #MeToo movement.