Wynona Writer
Prof. Teacher
English 1101
July 26, 2008.
Agency in New Media
Heavy snow fell the night before the inauguration, but thoughts about cancelling the plans were overruled. The election of 1960 had been close, and the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts was eager to gather support for his agenda. He attended Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown that morning before joining President Eisenhower to travel to the Capitol. The Congress had extended the East Front, and the inaugural platform spanned the new addition. The oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Earl Warren (John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address). In front of thousands of people, broadcasted over the radio and on the television, John F. Kennedy gave his inaugural address on Friday, January 20, 1961, from which i got the following text, “To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder”. But would this speech have been as effective if presented in a different way? To find out, I decided to remediate the speech into a drawing, attempting to capture the speech’s overall message through visuals rather than words.
My statue remediation was challenging in the sense that it took me a while to come up with what I wanted to make. I didn’t want to have a statute of John F. Kennedy and then his speech at the bottom. I wanted something simple but with a deep meaning behind it. So I decided to make two bridges. The first one broken and the second one perfectly fine with cars getting to their destination safely. The broken bridge will have one car just sitting there but can’t go anywhere but to turn back because it is broken. The two bridges represent the part that says, “To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends……” The bridges share the same characteristics except one is broken. The broken bridge symbolizes what Kennedy was saying, “Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder”. The other bridge will have cars going to their destinations safely. This symbolizes the part that says, “United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures.” Some people may ask what do two bridges have to do with this statement but when it is given a very deep thought, it will make a lot of sense.
My second remediation has a drawing of an egg just released from the ovary and it waiting for the sperm to fertilize it. The egg will just be there traveling down the fallopian tube and if the egg is not fertilized, it will come down to the uterus and be expelled as blood from the body. This describes the part that says, “Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder” because without the sperm there is little that the egg can do so it dies off because it’s not fertilized. For the second part of the drawing, I’m going to have an egg but this time it’s fertilized by the sperm so together; it will make one fetus and produce life. 1+1=1. That is one egg plus one sperm equals one zygote. This describes the part that says, “United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures” together with the egg and the sperm, there’s a lot that can happen; life. The two uteruses represent the part that says, “To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends” which also have the same characteristics except that one egg was not fertilized. This remediation also took me a long time to come up with because I wanted it to have meaning when people looked at it and read the quote and compared the two. I wanted it to be unique so I came up with this remediation.