For this week’s blog post, I want to write about how the usage of images in Maus is an additional layer that provides meaning in addition to words. Unlike the other texts we have read so far in class, Maus has been the only one that has broken away from the word-only method of telling a story. Now, instead of only needing to look at what is written, Maus asks us to analyze not only words, but also the details that are drawn in the images. How a character is drawn and what details are included shows us elements that we can use to further our understanding of what we are being told.

The particular scene that I want to focus on is a scene at the beginning of the first chapter in the first book. Here, Artie has come to see his father Vladek in order to ask him to recall his story of surviving through Auschwitz. After a short scene where Spiegelman sets up the strain between Vladek and his wife Mala, along with giving us information about people backgrounds, Vladek goes with Artie to a room where Vladek starts pedaling, because it is “good for [his] heart” (13). After that, Artie begins asking his father about the events of his life in the Holocaust because he wants to draw a book about it (13).  The aspect of the scene that was particularly interesting was how the middle panels were drawn. As Vladek pedals, his whole body is situated in the foreground of the panels, and is much larger than Artie. His body extends outwards onto the panels above it, so that it appears that Vladek’s body is actually located in more than one panel. This gives him the sense of being massive, dominating the space he is in.

I interpreted this as the size of Vladek in these panels is an indication of how important he is to the story, not just Vladek himself as the person, but also what he represents to the story that Spiegelman is trying to tell, namely, the events of Poland, the war, and Auschwitz. We can see in the panel where Vladek is pedaling that there are a series of numbers that have been tattooed onto his arm: “175113” (13), which are the numbers given to Jewish prisoners at the concentration camps. The inclusion of this details is not something that is trivial, as it must have been deliberately placed there to show Vladek’s connection to the Holocaust; the numbers have been literally burned onto him as a living reminder of the events he has been through. This, in connection to how much space he takes up in the panels and his position in the foreground represents how crucial Vladek is to the telling of the story.

The comic form allows Spiegelman to use two different mediums in order to tell his story. As readers, the use of images offers us a new perspective in looking at the texts we study and how we gain information from what we read. Not only do we need to consider what is written, but we now also need to consider what we identify in this spacial environment of images and how that affects the narrative, knowledge and experience.

(This is a repost of the post I did on January 17, 2014 that I accidentally posted on the class blog but never posted on my own)

Compared to some of my friends, I was never an avid user of popular social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook. Of course, I possess a Facebook account, but I use it as essentially a fancy chat room that I chat with my friends on, with only the occasional snarky comment serving as a status update. But I have spent a lot of time browsing and posting on internet forums, which gets to the topic that I want to write about: anonymity on the internet and how it affects a person.

Unlike other forms of social media, like ones we looked at in class, Facebook encourages a person to showcase their identity. People are encouraged to post constant updates about themselves, so that a person essentially “creates” their identity on Facebook, based on what the website deems as important. What I’m interested in looking at is the opposite that happens on internet forums where people are guaranteed anonymity.

In Tim Adams’ article “How the internet created an age of rage“, he calls the process that occurs on social media sites that grant anonymity deindividuation. Adams states this:

“Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it’s why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don’t like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it. The implications of those liberties, of the ubiquity of anonymity and the language of the crowd, are only beginning to be felt.”

People that are granted the ability to remain faceless will be willing break rules that they normally would not consider, simply because the consequences cannot be traced back to them.

In class, we looked at two social media websites that allowed anonymity: Six Word Memoirs and Post Secret. What I found interesting in those two websites were the things that people were able to admit because they were anonymous. On Post Secret there are some secrets that I cannot imagine anyone admitting unless they were sure no one knew it was them, such as this, or this. It was interesting to see how these particular sites were able to allow people to talk about things that they would not be able to otherwise. But I also think that this is allowed only because of a “deindividuation” that Adams talks about in his article. We can tell that posting anonymously allows people to forgo consequences, which causes a lot of raging to occur on the internet, but also allows for people to talk about or admit things that they normally would not.