Copyright Culture Makes Job Tougher for Documentary Filmmakers

Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi who wrote The Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices have interviewed dozens of documentary filmmakers about the challenges they face. Aufderheide found that some filmmakers are steering away from certain topics such as history and music because clearing copyright on archival materials and music has become cost-prohibitive.

As someone who would like to produce a documentary one day that involves the history of a Dallas neighborhood, the shrinking availability of materials that can be freely used is cause for concern.

Part one of my final project looks at some of the copyright issues a filmmaker might face.
Copyright Concerns for Documentary Filmmakers

Part two remediates the essay on copyright into a video. Click on the image to view the video.
(click HD so that HD is turned off in Vimeo for best viewing)

Part three is a reflection on the remediation of essay into video.
Reflection on Remediation

Big media dig in heels against the future

I suspected this would happen and it has. As I read and learn more about emerging media, my views are changing. I would like to humbly invoke the name Andrew Sullivan and say that I too am evolving as blogger. Last week, I wrote that I hoped it wasn’t too late for newspapers to find their niche in the digital world. But now, I’m not so sure.

In filmmaker Brett Gaylor’s documentary, “RiP: A Remix Manifesto,” Cory Doctorow raises the point that the Internet with its native connectivity and ubiquity is changing the market. That could mean a talented singer won’t become the product of a record company and sold to the masses. Maybe the singer will go straight to the masses, just like the band Radiohead, which dropped its label and offered its CD online and asked fans to pay what they wanted.

I think you could easily apply this to newspapers. What will the market bear for original news content? Some organizations are trying to find out by using pay walls and other strategies to collect from its users. But newspapers, like all of big media, are trying to hold on to their share of the pie, in other words, as Gaylor’s manifesto states, “the past always tries to control the future.”

Print publications are being pulled, kicking and screaming, into the future. As I see it, the recording industry and the motion picture industry are still holding firm in the past, as far as maintaining complete control. I believe one reason for the troubles newspapers are having is that there was already a method in place to appropriate text — simply giving a credit or attribution. For example, “according to the Dallas Morning News…” and that’s good for a few sentences. For purposes of the web, a link is now also provided to the original article.

But when it comes to images and especially music and video, the stakes are higher, at least in part because the recording and movie industries have been so aggressive about protecting their product. Jammie Thomas, the now-famous Minnesota mother who downloaded 24 songs from Napster, is still on the hook for $1.5 million in copyright infringement damages to Capitol Records.

Larry Lessig, Harvard professor and expert on copyright, seemed to lament in his TED talk, the lack of a revolution against big media, but maybe it is happening, slowly, incrementally. Lately, I keep thinking back to the metaphor of the internet rhizome and how this unpredictable, unstoppable method of sharing, connecting,communicating and creating is taking on a life of its own that may one day reshape the past to its ever-changing twists and turns.

AP and nearly 1000 news organizations staking claim to copyright and market share

Nearly one thousand publishers have joined The Associated Press’ News Licensing Group which will launch in July. The agency is loosely modeled after the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or ASCAP.  The News Licensing Group is designed to help news organizations get compensated for material that is republished on websites, phones, tablet computers and other devices. According to The Washington Post, the agency will track and police the use of content from the AP and its member news organizations.

But what does that mean for aggregators and bloggers and how will it work? The issue of “fair use” will likely be at the forefront. Just this week, AP announced that it has hired former ABC News president David Westin to head up the News Licensing Group. Westin told the Wall Street Journal that the goal is to first “figure out what the use is, and then we can have a discussion about what’s fair and what’s not fair.”

The Copyright Act already provides guidelines for fair use but they are open to interpretation. Criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research and parodies are generally protected under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. The law provides for several other considerations when determining fair use such as the “purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes” and “the effect of the use upon the potential market for the copyrighted work.”

AP and other news publishers are trying to stake a bigger claim in the digital market, a claim that some say is rightly theirs since they produce the original content. Neither Westin nor AP CEO Tom Curley would name the members of the group, but one outspoken opponent of online distributors has been News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch. In 2009, he accused Google of stealing journalism and threatened to turn off the flow of content from his news outlets like The Wall Street Journal. The licensing group could be the answer for Murdoch and possibly for other publishers who have been struggling to monetize their print products in a digital world.

Curley said one of the main missions of the News Licensing Group will be to “create a united front for news organizations to negotiate with big Internet companies, the emerging distributors of news content.” Westin portrays the licensing group as “helping” large online distributors of news, such as Google, saying it will allow them to easily license the content they need from a large number of news providers.

The last time AP negotiated with Google over copyright licensing, things didn’t go so well for AP. In 2009, AP threatened to give its content to Bing first, then to Google. Bing didn’t bite and Google turned off the AP faucet for a month. Google was no worse for the loss. The two sides then quickly reached a short-term deal.  This time, AP has brought along hundreds of other content generators to the bargaining table, but I’m still skeptical that AP’s version of ASCAP will have much leverage. There are thousands and thousands of content providers now and while they may not have the resources of an organization like AP, they can likely fill the need for content. It seems to me that print journalism may have already missed the deadline for the digital age, but I hope I’m wrong.

Video for the masses

"Talking Twin Babies" Click photo to watch

So I arrived late to the Internet party in a lot of ways–just got a Twitter account, just started blogging, and just started the highly addictive online activity of seeking out and watching viral videos. I’ve avoided YouTube, for the most part, because I suspected it could be time-consuming, and it is. First, you start with “David After Dentist” and that leads to twin boys babbling at each other, babies laughing at their parents blowing their noses or tearing paper, and Rebecca Black trying to figure out whether to sit in the front seat or the back seat.

"Nobody Believes Fred" Click photo to watch

Next thing you know, you’re even sampling “Fred,” the teen with a voice so annoying it makes you want to curl up into a ball and die. I may have some catching up to do on YouTube but the idea of video that gets everyone talking isn’t new.

Before becoming a web content writer, I produced television newscasts. Consultants and managers were always pushing the idea of the “water cooler moment” in a newscast. As a producer, I tried to find a piece of video that was memorable. It could be hard news, but more than likely, it was the video at the end of the newscast called a kicker. The kicker would be something lighthearted or wacky like the 10-year old Yo Yo champ performing his tricks or pigs swimming in a pool. Back then, viewers might talk about the video the next day around the water cooler at work, hence “water cooler moment.” And that was usually the extent of going viral.

Just as the Internet brought publishing to the masses, it has also democratized the creation and distribution of video and that has led to millions of water cooler moments. Jean Burgess says, “it is necessary to see videos as mediators of ideas that are taken up in practice within social networks, not as discrete texts that are produced in one place and then are later consumed somewhere else by isolated individuals or unwitting masses.” Which is exactly what a television newscast kicker was–a discrete text consumed by the unwitting masses. Now you can access videos 24/7 , talk about them online, share them on Facebook, Twitter and e-mail. The participation has grown from being just a viewer to making comments, sharing, and creating video responses.

"Chocolate Rain" Click photo to watch

The Internet has also opened the door to amateurs who would have little chance of getting on television but, as it turns out, can be the most appealing and widely viewed on the Internet. “Chocolate Rain” would have never made it into a newscast. For television, Tay Zonday would have been considered a guy with odd mannerisms singing a repetitive song in a shockingly deep voice. But on YouTube, Tay Zonday is a star. According to Jean Burgess, “It is arguably the combination of oddness and earnest amateurism that made “Chocolate Rain” such a massive YouTube hit.” And yes, he’s made it to television, not because his song was great, but because Chocolate Rain has 65 million views on YouTube as of today. Now that’s democracy.

Burgess, Jean (2008) ‘All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?’ Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture.

A question of credibility

In 2002, when weblogs started to proliferate, Rebecca Blood wrote up a list of ethics that she believed bloggers should follow. She also noted that “Any weblogger who expects to be accorded the privileges and protections of a professional journalist will need to go further than these principles.” Nine years later, there are millions of blogs and some have blurred the line thoroughly between journalism and what Andrew Sullivan describes as “the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism.”

One blog that has been known to play fast and loose with the facts is TechCrunch. The blog, founded by Michael Arrington, got a big scoop in 2006 and “TechCrunch was no longer relegated to simply providing opinion about breaking news; it became a complete news outlet in its own right,” according to the About section of the site.

But becoming a “news outlet” apparently hasn’t changed Arrington’s approach to blogging. In 2009, Arrington decided to go with a story that he admits was thinly sourced. The site published a story about a rumor that Apple was negotiating  to buy Twitter. When asked why he went with the unfounded story, Arrington told the New York Times,  “I don’t ever want to lose the rawness of blogging.” In this case, rawness equated to wrongness.  “Getting it right is expensive,” he told the New York Times. “Getting it first is cheap.” Yet, Arrington has said he aspires to compete with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Being the NYT takes a lot of cash to pay a lot of reporters who have experience in sourcing stories. Of course, it’s well known that newspapers are struggling and it can be in large part attributed to all the free and cheap information available on the web. The question becomes, if it’s free and it was produced at no cost, such as in the case of the Huffington Post bloggers, what is its value? I am not suggesting that paying someone makes them a journalist. I am suggesting that organizations such as TechCrunch need to pay decent salaries to people who know how to do research, who know how to track down sources and gather information, and who have committed themselves to writing about the truth.

As a former broadcast journalist, I believe in due diligence before putting something out there.  If a blog is an opinion blog, then it should be clearly stated. If you are presenting something as fact, then have the goods to back it up. The Twitter story got TechCrunch a lot of hits and probably didn’t put even a tiny dent in the site’s credibility. Currently, there is not much incentive for bloggers and even mainstream news websites to do much digging for good stories. It will be the public that decides what level of reporting will draw an audience.

Facebook Alternative Promises to Protect User Privacy

The anti-Facebook?

Does the above screen grab look somewhat familiar? The still-in-development social networking site called Diaspora looks quite similar to Facebook, even though Disapora has already been dubbed the anti-Facebook. The big difference between the sites, provided the open source startup by four NYU students can make it to beta, will be how users’ privacy is handled. In a January 2010 speech,  Facebook creator and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private.”  That is the opposite of what the creators of Diaspora have planned–Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy say their social network platform will “put individuals in control of their data.”

Four NYU students who are building a Facebook alternative

The Diaspora dudes describe it this way: “We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network.” (Click on the photo for a video of the guys describing Diaspora.)

Zuckerberg and Facebook have frequently been criticized for how the very popular website treats users’ privacy. Nicholas Carr says Zuckerberg has a “self-serving cavalier attitude” toward other people’s privacy. Facebook rolled out new privacy controls in May 2010, but that hasn’t stanched the complaints from Facebook users. (More than two million users belong to a group on Facebook called “Millions Against Facebook’s Privacy Policies and Layout Redesign.” )

Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and chairman of Software Freedom Law Center said in a talk last February titled “Freedom in the Cloud” that “as more and more of our lives and identities become digitized, the convenience of putting all of our information in the hands of companies on the cloud is training us to casually sacrifice our privacy and fragment our online identities.”

The creators of Diaspora want to create an alternative to centralized services–an alternative that will allow the user to be in control. Everything that the user uploads will be signed and encryted. On its website, Diaspora says, “You maintain ownership of everything you share on Diaspora, giving you full control over how it’s distributed.”

Once it’s built, Diaspora needs just one more thing to be successful–a mass migration of Facebook users to its more private platform. Whether people make the switch as they did from MySpace to Facebook will depend on how much they are concerned about privacy or how much they even know the extent to which their private information is “out there.” As Moglen said, we are trained now to give away our information and our identities with the ease of a click. I know that I am guilty, and I don’t know if I will take the time to check out Diaspora, although I did sign up to receive an invitation to join. It will be interesting to watch if Zuckerberg’s stance on privacy will be the undoing of his creation. I’ll be watching, stalker-like, on my Facebook news feed.

True or False: PolitiFact.com’s Images Undermine Its Text

Since 2008, the newspaper industry has been in a steep decline–a national recession, declining print advertising revenues, and the migration of readers to online news sources have all contributed. Newspapers have been scrambling ever since to find ways to survive and, in most cases, that usually means establishing an online presence.

One of those newspapers, the St. Petersburg Times, has carved itself a niche on the Web as the go-to source for the veracity of politicians, lobbyists, pundits, and just about anyone who makes a claim or statement about politics. The paper started a website in 2008 called PolitiFact which leverages the qualifications and skills of its reporters and editors by having them fact-check political statements and claims, and then assembling the findings on the PolitiFact website.

PolitiFact’s stated mission is to “help you find the truth in politics.” One message that the PolitiFact site tries to sends immediately to visitors is that its content is nonpartisan. Its logo is half blue and half red indicating both major political parties are represented. Also, on the upper right of the homepage is the GOP Pledge-O-Meter and the Obameter right below so you know both Republicans and Democrats are being tracked. Perusing the statements that have been fact-checked shows that no one in the public sphere is immune from scrutiny, although President Barack Obama seems to be the public figure whose words are most watched.

The first time I looked at the PolitiFact homepage, my eyes went straight to the graphics. They jump out at you no matter where you are on the page because they are colorful, somewhat cartoonish, and subtly humorous.  The name of the site, a hybrid of the words politics and fact, seems serious but the graphics threw me off at first. I wondered if this website could be a parody of politics, like the Stephen Colbert Report on Comedy Central. After reading some of the text surrounding the graphics, it was clear that PolitiFact is serious about ferreting out the truth, but the hybridity of the space seemed at odds, at least on first glance.

The homepage is somewhat busy but well-laid out. There is a main article in the top left as with most media sites. On the right, your eye will likely be drawn to the disembodied head of President Barack Obama. In the graphic on the right, you can see that the Obama head is part of the Obameter–a word that’s an awkward mashing of Obama and meter. This is PolitiFact’s way of  keeping track of all the promises Obama made on the campaign trail in 2008.

If it is a broken promise, you get a grimacing, floating Obama head. The colored bar on the graphic indicates amount of progress just as you might see when waiting for something to download on a website. PolitiFact relies heavily on the affordance of a meter as a way to indicate how true or false a statement is found to be or whether promises are kept.

The Pants on Fire graphic indicates that PolitiFact has confirmed that a statement was an outrageous lie. The Pants on Fire graphic brings to mind the childhood saying about liars. It’s lighthearted and just about everyone knows what it means, so it works in terms of transparency. I also like the licking flames that seem to call to mind a certain place down below where liars may end up. Overall, I think the graphics lend a sense of fun to the site and are immediately recognizable by the audience, but I wonder if they don’t undermine PolitiFact’s credibility. One metaphor that popped into my head was a game show. I could hear a loud buzzer going off if a statement was found to be false, and then sirens if it was deemed a pants-on-fire type of lie. Maybe Bob Barker would appear as a pop-up saying into his long, thin microphone, “that statement is True!” But that didn’t stop me from reading the text. There have been lots of things politicians have said that I’ve wondered about, and once I started reading the content, the graphics became more useful than distracting because they were so easy to “read.” (And I forgot about Bob.)

The Truth-O-Meter graphics indicate whether a statement was true, mostly true, half-true, barely true or false. There are three elements of the Truth-O-Meter graphics that tell you immediately what they mean. First, there is the text such as “barely true.” There is also the needle like you would find on a gas gauge, as well as the colored light.  Red is for false, green is for true and there are colors in between for barely true, half true and mostly true. They are square-shaped and have a slightly raised edge giving them the affordance of buttons. Clicking them leads to a full article on the statement in question. In most cases, there is also a photo of the person who made the statement with his or her name underneath and underlined.  The underline is easily recognized as indicating a link and if you click on the name, you will get a listing of all the statements made by that person and whether they turned out to be true or false or somewhere in between. Clicking on the photo doesn’t get you anywhere and it seems that would be an easy thing for PolitiFact to fix. The photos are easier to click because they’re bigger than a thin line.

The site also offers articles related to the big issues such as the GOP’s promise to repeal health care. But these articles are not remediated newspaper stories. They are original to the site. I think it’s fair to say that the research and fact-checking efforts of reporters and editors are remediated on PolitiFact. As a former journalist, I find the fact-checking impressive. There are critics of the site from both sides of the aisle who cry foul when their side is found to be lying or tweaking the truth. And there will always be some people who don’t trust journalists.

I don’t believe there is any perfect source of the truth, but PolitiFact does a thorough and credible job of sorting fact from fiction in politics. The reporters and editors who run the site make an effort to play fair as evidenced by the appearance of the site and the content that is pretty evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. President Obama gets a lot of scrutiny but he is the president, after all, and has a bigger stage than most.

Finally, the graphics that can at first be misleading, are in the end what makes the site work so well. They are clear and easy to understand and let the visitor know quickly that this site is about measuring the truth. The graphics also help to break up what would be large chunks of text that most Web visitors would probably find too daunting. So in that sense, the buttons and meters communicate information quickly and keep a visitor’s eyes moving around the page. PolitiFact has found a way to not only bring the unique skills of its reporters and editors to the Web in a purposeful way, but also made what could be dry content much more palatable to Web users. In establishing PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times may have also found a way to survive the dying days of newspapers.

Give Tweets a Chance

Twitter Trend Graphic, Courtesy: Mashable

If Facebook can feel like being back in high school, then Twitter is the real world. At least that’s what I’ve gathered from the readings this week. I have been on Facebook for a couple of years but have never given Twitter much of a chance. And the reason is, that I didn’t understand the point of 140-character posts, hashtags and bit.ly URLs.  And like the New York Time’s David Carr, I didn’t want another “Web-borne intrusion” in my life.

I can see now what I’ve been missing. Sure, forty percent of tweets may be “pointless babble” as Pear Analytics found in 2009, but a look at last week’s Twitter trends reveals there is a lot more going on than trivial Tweets about daily drudgery. The number one trending topic was the Japan earthquake and tsunami with the top hashtag #prayforjapan. On Facebook this week, hardly any of my friends even talked about it. I’m not suggesting that they didn’t care, it just didn’t come up much, and I was actively looking to connect with others about the devastation in Japan. Facebook has for me become more of an RSS feed from websites I “like” and a place to reconnect with old friends who may or may not have the same interests I do.

Twitter seems to be more centered around topics (this is new for me, so please bear with my elementary assessment here.) Carr, as a journalist has found a way to get the most out of Twitter: “By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.” Carefully choosing who and what you follow could also cut down on the useless Tweets. As a web content writer and former journalist, I can see how Carr’s approach would be useful, but there’s also something bigger about Twitter that I’ve been missing out on.

While I’ve been writing this blog, the tweets with #prayforjapan have been racking up by the hundreds. Jessica Faye Carter calls Twitter “a hub for intercultural engagement” and the news coming out of Japan and Libya this week highlighted how Twitter brings many cultures to the same table. Here are some of the tweets for #prayforjapan:

Just went out with a sign that said HONK FOR JAPAN! I got 25 honks♥ #prayforjapan

J’ai une amie qui a un ami japonais qui cherche toujours sa petite amie… #PrayForJapan Je prie pour eux tous

ちょっと着込んで、近所にお月様の捜索してきます(￣^￣)ゞ　ちゃんと祈りたいから^^* #PrayforJapan

It’s a conversation and a connection I was looking for this past week. My use of connection is different from Mark Sample’s when he says Twitter is not about connection. I’m not talking about making friends necessarily. My meaning is that just by reading posts about Japan, it lets me know that there are many others having the same feelings that I am. Sometimes, that’s enough.

The Book as Web Design

You can’t plug it in, you can’t use a mouse to navigate, and you can’t click on links. But you can read the text, look at images, and touch this 3-D representation of multimedia. Artist Brian Dettmer has taken the old-fashioned book and turned it into art and maybe something more.

Dettmer is known as a book surgeon. He uses a surgeon’s tools to carve out books and create a new visual rhetoric. Dettmer doesn’t move pages around or add anything to the book sculptures. He uses his tools to remove pieces of the book and fashion a new message. Dettmer has said in interviews that he would like his work to be a symbol of the importance of a physical record of history.

“I’d like to open a conversation to think about the book’s current role in media culture, its history, and its future. Everything is turning digital, and information is more accessible than ever, yet it’s more formless and fragile at the same time. We are at a pivotal point in our history and the way we are recording it is frightening and exciting at the same time,” Dettmer told My Modern Met.

Dettmer’s re-purposing of discarded encyclopedias, reference books and other bound texts, is indeed artful, but it also seems to mimic web design in some ways. The first thing that strikes me about Dettmer’s pieces is that they are layered just as information is on any given Web page. The next similarity is how the images subordinate the text.  In fact, Dettmer illuminates clearly what Gunther Kress says about the changing relationship between text and image as the screen overtakes physical books, “Writing can appear on the screen; but when it does, it is subordinated to the logic of the image; just as image could appear on the page, though subordinated to the logic of writing.” In the above piece depicting animal species, the images are literally in front of the text and while the book was clearly meant in its former life as an educational tool, the words lose their meaning as they become visual images. Another similarity with web design is the ability to view these book sculptures from many different entry points. The art was sculpted from a book but there is no longer a clear beginning and an end. One other striking similarity between these book sculptures and web pages is that the design trumps the author. Kress says, “In the former arrangement, the figure of the author and the mode of writing dominated; in the new arrangement, the designer and the mode of image dominate.” The authors of the books Dettmer uses are irrelevant. While Dettmer may have wanted to emphasize the value of books, he did so in a way that underscores the shift in rhetoric from textual to visual that is being ushered in by the Web. As a lover of books myself, I hope that books will have a place in the future of rhetoric but it’s clear that the flexibility and hypertextuality of the Web has become the dominant method. 

Graphics help college student’s resume go viral

A resume is generally not considered engaging or enticing reading unless you’re looking for a job candidate or you’re the candidate. But just this week, a college student’s resume went viral.

Chris Spurlock is a senior whose resume was shown in a blog post on The Huffington Post. Spurlock says he loves infographics and got carried away one night as he worked on his resume for his job search. After the appearance on HuffPo, the resume started making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter.

What made this colorful, graphic-laden resume something that hundreds of people wanted to see? Using Kevin LaGrandeur’s method of assessing “the persuasive impact of digital images” in “Digital Images and Classical Persuasion” might explain it.

1. Logos: How effectively do digital graphics work together with, or even replace, digital text to create an appeal to reason?

Spurlock’s resume relies more on graphical representation of his education and experience than on textual. He uses digital text to label his graphics and offer detail.  I was able to quickly learn about Spurlock without doing a lot of reading, but his timeline graphic made me slow down somewhat because of all the lines and overlapping jobs. I think the big colorful bubbles need more explanation. The resume explains that the size of the bubbles indicates the number of projects produced but he offers no raw data. I can deduce, for example, that he has worked with Adobe Creative Suite more than Social Media but there is no indicator of actual number of projects. I think this is a hole in the resume and a potential employer might wonder why that wasn’t made clear. But the overarching message of this resume is not so much where Spurlock went to school or did an internship, but what the guy can do. While the resume may not be perfect, I think many potential employers would be convinced that he has talent, creativity and originality.

2. Pathos: How do digital images work in concert with written text, or by themselves, to enhance the emotional appeal of the digital message?

LaGrandeur writes, “When a Web site’s images are especially polished, pleasing, and well arranged, its readers often cannot help but be attentive and even impressed or moved.” Simply put, Spurlock’s graphics are impressive. You just don’t expect this kind of look in a resume. I think the emotional appeal is “wow, how did he do that?” or “that’s so cool.” It was probably the coolness factor that made the resume go viral.

3. Ethos: How effectively do digital images work in concert with written text, or by themselves, to enhance the ethical appeal (credibility) of the makers of digital messages? I believe this resume does a lot for Spurlock’s credibility. Number one, he obviously put a lot of work into it, so you could assume he’s a hard worker. He has obviously studied and practiced to gain these skills and to be able to use them effectively. I think the resume also conveys that Spurlock is enthusiastic about getting a job.

The resume seemed to work for Spurlock. It got him media attention and then widespread publicity on the Web. Taking a closer look, I think the graphics are somewhat overwhelming and as I mentioned, the bubbles need more facts. LaGrandeur writes, “Graphics sometimes lend undue credibility to otherwise weak arguments.” What do you think?  Does this graphical resume give Spurlock more credit than he deserves or does it do a good job of highlighting his talents? Or both? In any case, the resume likely gave Spurlock the edge he needed to land a job right out of college.