Posting Assignment #4 (due Sunday 10/24, 11:59 P.M.) History in the Making (President Obama at the U of M)

'Real' things will happen when President Obama speaks on Saturday.  Secret-service men will walk the crowds with earphones.  Roads will be blocked.  Cameras will be positioned and roll.  Protesters will protest.  Fights may break out.  It may rain. The President will say things—carefully choosing words, topics, inflections, tones of voice, body movements and so on. Then the various media—formal and informal—will begin to represent what happened.

History will be made.

Our job is to examine how history is made; specifically: to examine how these events are represented, and what the particular representations do—what we called the 'politics and poetics' of history.  How do media (and others) construct the images (pictures, text, video, sound (both the voiceover commentary and any 'real' sounds that are recorded), words and so on). And why do these representations matter?

Analyze the most interesting representation of President Obama's visit that you can find.  Show how the structure(s) of the representations (the poetics) construct the event in particular events—how they select, arrange, shade, inflect, relate and so on.  Explain what the representation does—to advance the interests of some groups and suppress others (the politics). If you can include actual representations in your post, do it (media images and your own, if you have them).

Newspaper and TV representations are obvious choices.  Bloggers, of course.  The infotainment programming on Fox, MPR or 100.3 TALK.  If you attend, the staging of the event might be readable as a representation (it is, but it's trickier to read).  If you go, you can contrast what you saw with what's reported.  Contrasting two accounts may help give you a good hook.

And think about 'representation' widely; we're looking at the construction of a worldview here, and many, many kinds of representation are active.