I chose the article "Forty Years Later, the Golden Record Goes Vinyl" by Marina Koren as my supplemental text. The article focuses on the Voyager Golden Record, which is an actual golden record that was launched into space in 1977 with Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. Voyager 1 is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth. Both spacecrafts have left the solar system.

The record itself contains "popular songs, sounds from nature, photographs, spoken greetings in dozens of human languages and one whale language" and most importantly directions on how to find planet Earth, and its target audience is an intelligent alien civilization that is capable deciphering the message on the record.

The content of the record was not intended for public consumption; the copies that remained on Earth were distributed mostly to NASA facilities. However, recently Ozma Records has put the Golden Record on vinyl for the first time. David Pescovitz and Timothy Daly, the co-founders of Ozma Records were surprised by the lack of a vinyl version of the Golden Record in these digital days. The two paired up with Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer, to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the project. Originally, the group planned on raising $200,000 to make 2,000 sets, however, the internet responded with $1.3 million. Due to such a turnout, 10,000 special edition copies were made for those who backed the Kickstarter project. A different edition is now sold on the Ozma Records website.

Pescovitz and his collaborators did not have much trouble finding the original tape recordings of the Golden Record; all they had to do is contact Sony and visit their studio to listen to the tapes. The hard part was obtaining permission to use copyrighted material. The difficulty was in "tracking down the owners of some of the more obscure content, like melodies by indigenous groups". It came to the point where Pescovitz "was calling Papua New Guinea at 2 o’clock in the morning, and working with amazing ethnomusicologists around the world to try to track down as much information as possible, to find out about who these people were, what the music was, who collected it and when".

Koren, Marina. “Forty Years Later, the Golden Record Goes Vinyl.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 25 Aug. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/voyager-golden-record-vinyl/538035/.

The authors of the textbook establish this idea in the very beginning of the chapter which they will follow throughout the chapter. Personally, I disagree with this idea because for me internet memes are images in the first place and text in the second place. When deciding if a meme is worth looking at, I first look at the image it portrays and only after I pay attention to the text, and if the text is too long, I will most likely not consider reading it. Only if I am looking at a news article or at a book, or other multimodal media that has the purpose of conveying information, I regard it as text first and other modes second.

While it is true that conscious mode choices can greatly enhance the end result, sometimes conscious effort may hide under the disguise of nonsensical randomness. Let's examine the case of millennial internet humor, which could be classified as neo-Dadaism. To ordinary people, the internet creations of so-called millennials would make absolutely no sense. Even in the analysis of neo-Dadaism in an article posted on Medium, Megan Hoins fails to expose the true core of this seemingly absurdist movement. People who create such absurdist content do their best to exaggerate things out of proportion, which they define as irony. Many pointless internet memes are created out of sheer desire to convey irony; such irony is not your every day irony but instead is something pointless done on purpose just because it is pointless. If you ever had encountered something that was so bad or so poorly-constructed that it made you laugh, then perhaps you are aware of this phenomenon. To conclude, sometimes it may seem like certain multimodal works had very little conscious effort put into them, when in reality every single decision in the making of such a work was carefully planned to yield a specific result.

retrieved from http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1202553-meme-man

Hoins, Megan. “Neo-Dadaism.” Medium, 23 Feb. 2016, medium.com/@meganhoins/neo-dadaism-absurdist-humor-and-the-millennial-generation-f27a39bcf321.

Personally, I find the visual mode to be the most important and most powerful modes out of all. According to Worldwide Health Organization, 285 million people worldwide are estimated to be visually impaired, which is only 3.8% of the current world population; out of those 285 million people about 86% have low vision, which sometimes cannot be detrimental to every day activities and can be fixed with glasses. When this is taken into consideration, it becomes evident that the vast majority of world population can interpret visual modes without problems. It is indeed true that pictures are worth a thousand words because more information can be packed into a picture than into a paragraph, for example. Just think of all the advertisements or propaganda posters you have encountered: did any of them not incorporate a visual mode?

The Golden Records that were sent into space contain a great amount of visual information on them. It is unclear whether the instructions on how to use the record and how to find our solar system are carved into the record, but if they are not, then it would be more difficult for an alien civilization that does not have eyes to make sense of the record and potentially locate our planet.

image acquired from https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/record-created-for-extraterrestrials-now-available-for-everyone/

image acquired from https://creativecommons.org/2014/11/08/the-voyager-golden-record/

“Visual Impairment and Blindness.” World Health Organization, www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs282/en/.

In the golden age of internet videos, I find it difficult to follow written instructions whenever I need to learn how to do something because sometimes they tend to be unclear or even wrong. Instead, I find myself watching YouTube videos that teach me how to do the exact same thing. It is easier to see how to do something you don't know and then repeat it than to read how to do something, play it in your head, and then try to repeat it yourself. In the case of the Voyager Golden Record, we had done our best to instruct an alien civilization how to find planet Earth; we just have to hope that if the record will be received by an intelligent life-form, the life-form will be intelligent enough to make sense of a binary code.

In this digital age the value of a photo has greatly deteriorated because practically anyone now owns a smartphone that can take high resolution photos, and due to social media where thousands of new photos are uploaded every second, our constant encounter with such media makes us appreciate it less. As someone who was a child in the 2000s, I remember being very excited about picking up different encyclopedias from the library and carefully analyzing all the photos, even imagining myself being in them. Nowadays, however, a child would not even bother to open an encyclopedia and instead would prefer to go online and mindlessly scroll through his or her social media in hopes of a faster passing of time.

I was always fascinated by the power of body language since it is an important factor that decides your place in society. The way you sit, stand, or look at people can have a great impact on them. Sometimes it is obvious when people try to have a particular effect on their audience, which in a way diminishes the power of the speaker. One of these people is Mark Zuckerberg; I find it funny watching him converse with other people, because oftentimes it is very obvious that he is trying to look tough. It may be possible that only earthlings are capable of understanding the power of body language, so we should appreciate our ability to understand it.

Not every audience is the same and therefore sometimes one mode may be appropriate for one audience and completely unsuitable for another audience. In the case of the linguistic mode, some people may not speak your language, so your reach would be limited, or it could be possible that your audience is deaf or blind, which would force you to alter your linguistic mode.

When sending a message to an intelligent alien civilization, we can be one hundred percent certain that they are not speaking our langange, however, we can hope that they have the means of deciphering it. Alien civilizations could also not posses the gift of sight and instead rely on echolocation like bats. It is also possible that an alien civilization is not capable of hearing and instead uses telepathy as a way of communicating with its species. Evolution can create wonders in environments we have not explored yet, so encompassing every single mode we are aware of onto a golden record would substantially increase the chances of an alien civilization being able to make sense of our message.

Since a mode is a way of communicating, not all multimodal projects have to contain text. A performance can be comprised of aural, gestural, spatial, and linguistic modes and still be considered a multimodal project.

The authors make an excellent point here. Nowadays with all the technology available, it is almost expected of us to incorporate multimodality into all of our works. If you were to make a PowerPoint and present into to your target audience, you would certainly not present a blank page with text on it because it would most likely not grab your target audience's attention; it would be a good decision to add pictures, animations, and perhaps even sound and video if appropriate to make your work as interesting as possible.

In the case of the Voyager Golden Record, there is surely no better way of describing planet Earth and humanity to an alien civilization other than including every single most important aspect of planet Earth and human achievement, which are naturally multimodal because that is one underlying characteristic of intelligent life.

Personally, I dislike Twitter because of its 144 character limit. My thoughts almost never can be expressed in 144 characters or less, which is the prime reason I do not use Twitter. To circumvent this, it is possible to write out your message, screenshot it and post it as an image, but that undermines the purpose of Twitter, in my opinion.

I do not understand why the authors of this textbook, including millions of other Americans think that FDR's economic policies helped "fix" the Great Depression. The truth is that the economic policies during the Great Depression only prolonged it.

FDR was knew nothing about economics. The tax rates under FDR's presidency were enormously high, reaching a 94% tax rate on the top bracket in 1945. In fact, in 1942 FDR proposed a 100% top tax rate, which is absolutely ridiculous. The ridiculously high top tax rates took away all the incentive from businesses to produce because in the end they would barely make any profit. What America needed during the Great Depression was lower taxes, not crazily high taxes.

Creator, Chloris. “FDR's Proposed Marginal Tax Rate Was 100%.” Daily Kos, 23 Feb. 2013, www.dailykos.com/stories/2013/2/24/1189512/-FDR-s-Proposed-Marginal-Tax-Rate-Was-100.

“Taxation History of the United States.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Sept. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United_States.