Half Way Point

This essay was written primarily to our class. My essay is tailored this way because I say things such as “The article we read in class.” Only people in our class would understand that because I don’t say in Andrew Sullivan’s article, Why I Blog, which we read in class, I simply reference Sullivan’s article and it’s implied from the knowledge of our class that everyone knows what I'm talking about. The article is also geared more towards young people. I don’t use as formal of a tone as I would if I'm writing a paper on the Supreme Court lifetime tenure like I did earlier in the year. I wrote it in a more relaxed tone because I feel it flows better. Now for the heavy stuff.

The other night I was watching Sportscenter before going to bed and I heard something that caught my ear. Reporters in the studios were talking about how at this weekends upcoming NFL Pro Bowl; players would be allowed to tweet during the game. I'm envisioning the following post from Aaron Rodgers after coming off the field, “Just threw a 46 yard touchdown pass, nice catch Greg. #NFCRULES” To me this exception to allow players to tweet during the game shows the types of writers we are becoming. Our writing isn’t the only thing that has been changing recently. With modern advances in the last ten years of the Internet, we are now relying on it more than ever for a lot of our information. It’s easy to use, and doesn't take long to search. Carr uses a metaphor that I particularly like to describe the way the Internet has changed. He says, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” (1). Overall, I believe that due to the new age of technology, we have become more frequent, but not necessarily better writers, and worse readers for the time being because we have not yet adapted to the way information is intercepted.

            Of the readings we did in class, I feel that two writers in particular had the viewpoint that with the new age of technology our writing is improving and can only get better. These two writers are of course, Andrew Sullivan and Clive Thompson. Andrea Lunsford was featured in Thompson’s article On New Literacy for her research with the writing of freshman Stanford at University. Thompson writes, “The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text” (Thompson 1). Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and any other networking site for that matter lets you instantly post what you thinking, whenever you want. It’s ingenious, these sites have realized that teens want an outlet where they can publicly display what’s on their mind to an audience of their friends and family. Another result she found was:

The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago. The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing (Thompson 1).

She elaborated that because students almost always write to an audience, when they had to write only to the professor they found it boring and useless.

            Rather than using a social networking site to get his thoughts out onto the web, Andrew Sullivan _­takes a different approach, an approach where no friend request need be accepted. He uses a blog as his way of communicating with an audience, and a very large one at that. Blog are a useful tool for anyone who loves to write. Sullivan writes of his experience, “The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant” (Sullivan 3). The alternative he's referring to is print media, because he has been an editor and is currently a writer. I couldn’t agree more with what he said. There is a pretty big difference from his audience of millions of readers and my audience of fourteen class members, but it’s the same feeling of knowing what you just wrote is going to get read by someone. Sullivan compares uses the metaphor of blogging as an extreme sport, and I wish I felt the same way about it as he did. I'm sure when he writes his blog, its not in a word document like mine were, but even in Word you can make mistakes, “And the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.” Sullivan posts very often to his blog, which is part of the extremeness. If you don’t keep posting, people will lose interest. In essence, once you start, you can never stop. Sullivan explains:

You can’t have blogger’s block. You have to express yourself now, while your emotions roil, while your temper flares, while your humor lasts. You can try to hide yourself from real scrutiny, and the exposure it demands, but it’s hard. And that’s what makes blogging as a form stand out: it is rich in personality (Sullivan 5).

Because we can use new technology, our writing can become interesting to anyone who is willing to read it. It’s not hard to find, and it’s not like it’s not there. Technology has made us into instant writers, and I for one am happy because there will always be someone out there who you can relate to, through writing because there is plenty of writing to go around, all it takes it the patience and interest to dive in.

            As positive as Thompson and Sullivan are about writing, there are others that we read in class that don’t feel the same way. Hedges and Carr see the internet as a possible risk, specifically, Hedges, views the Internet as a major roadblock in our intellectual development. He states:

 The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying (Hedges 3).

This however, cannot possibly happen from extended Internet use. I mean come on, the ability to think for oneself and to distinguish between truth and lie. Those are human traits. They are hardwired into our brains from the time we are very little. Every time I lied when I was a kid my parents then showed no trust and little respect for me. This quickly taught me to never lie because the feeling of not being trusted by my own family was enough to make me never want to lie again. The Internet cannot take away trait that has been inherently humanistic for hundreds of years; it just can’t happen that quickly. Hannah Arendt was featured in Hedges’s article for saying, “Culture, is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment” (Hedges 3). When I read this, I was a little bit confused. Culture cannot be destroyed; it’s the customs that people do on a regular basis. Meaning, if people decide to shift away from their old customs and more towards their new ones of being entertained, then the culture of that group of people has changed, not been destroyed.  Aimlessly wasting time on the Internet cannot possibly do all of these things because humans are humans, we have the capacity to think at all times, even if at a very basic level.

            Nicholas Carr makes a much less harsh argument towards how the Internet impacts our ability to be better readers. At times, he questions his own thoughts to if something like this can possibly true. I believe he makes some very convincing points about the Internet, however, I believe he doesn’t think that humans will adapt and change to become more efficient readers when using the Internet. To show the massive reach that the Internet has over our lives he states, “The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” (Carr 4). This is true and unfortunate at the same time. The Internet will likely take over print media in most places and many inventions that we knew to be useful will cease to be popular. Having said that, I don’t believe print media will be completely extinct. There will always be people who feel like doing it the old fashioned way. Take the Amish for example, they will still be doing it the old way when most everyone makes the shift over to electronic news. I’d like to wrap up with a rather long but very important quote from Carr, which illustrates the type of readers we currently are. He says:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle (Carr 1).

Our attention spans are shortening, but I think we have the ability to change the way we read. We are the type readers, and more importantly people, who have the capability to learn new things and always find interest in topics. We will never become the “Pancake people” that Carr mentions in his article because people are always curious and will pursue their interests deeply.

            Literary critics fear that the new age of technology, and advances in the Internet virtually absorbing all media sources are changing the way we read and write. Many cannot agree if it for better or worse. I for one think that it is changing people positively because we are exploring new bounds.

Well... That was Easy

In my long illustrious career of nine blog posts (including this one), I’ve realized that it’s easy. You might as well call me the next Andrew Sullivan. It’s been sort of fun getting to write how we want. I can write in the first person, I can put my tone into pieces of writing. The only A I got on a paper junior year was one that I could talk in the first person. Its way easier, you can literally take your thoughts and let them fly out your fingers and onto the computer screen. The most challenging part of blogging thus far has been the length aspect. A 250-word post is by no means long, but for a blog it seems like a hurdle roughly two feet off the ground: its not hard to get over, but you still have to pick your knee up.

The most surprising thing is directly related to length and the nature of blogging. The nature of blogging is that you pretty much dump your thoughts out into a website. What I found surprising is that once you find something thought provoking in an article, you blink and then look down to the bottom of your word document and you’ve already written 500 words, and you just got started. The saying “Time flies when you’re having fun” applies to blogging I guess. Its more like “Words fly when your blogging.” Its actually nice because for the majority of my academic papers in high school I made the periods larger by about two font sizes on a 4 page paper and got a solid quarter page more. Don’t worry I don’t do that here, this is the big leagues, college actually impacts the rest of our lives.

My attitude of reading on the web has changed a lot since reading all the articles that basically rip on American society for doing it. From now on, I’m making a conscious effort to waste paper. Just kidding. But actually, I’m going to try to stop reading off my computer and pick up an article that I have to read for class. I’m going to keep reading books and the newspaper, and trust me if I ever have a kid he or she (don’t want to be sexist) will never learn to read off a Kindle. My attitudes of writing on the web haven’t really changed much because I’m typing this in a Word document with spell check only to copy and paste it over to blogger. It feels like a journal entry. It’s much better than some shit paper that I never wanted to write in the first place.

Pardon me Clive.. Will you pass the Grey Poupon?

   Hedges and Carr address literacy as a problem. Specifically, Carr argues that Google and the evolution of the Internet are making us dumber because they are changing the way we interpret information. Thompson’s argument is the unsurprising positive side that I never thought I’d hear. I mean seriously, all we’ve been talking about is how the Internet can make us dumber. Seeing that the new age of Internet is actually making our writing better, well that’s nice to hear. It wasn’t surprising to see that we “Write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.” My grandma actually sent me this ridiculous email of this women’s story where she said, I was born before the Internet, I was born before cell phones and many other revolutionary inventions of out time. The last line of the email says in big bold red font. THIS WOMAN IS ONLY 59 YEARS OLD. It’s hard for people of our generation to realize how much has happened while we were in our toddler years. I remember when I was on winter break this year my dad told me that in the book he was reading it said that Steve Jobs was born at the perfect year for him to be at a perfect age to completely revolutionize the computer age. I thought back to the saying “Timing is everything.” It also made me think of what will come. Thompson also compliments our generation for being able to write to an audience. He says, “The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing.” I liked that this was included in the article because it shows that the way are writing it changing. Similar to the way we are thinking is changing. Sound familiar?

Camriea Hte Treatlieli.. Wait thats dyslexia not illiteracy

      Well, that was dense. I saw a three page article and was pumped it was only going to take me ten minutes to read it. Needless to say, it was pretty thick. Chris Hedges really knows how to pack it in. He describes America as separated into two different societies. He doesn’t separate America by race or gender, but rather the ability to read or not. He describes the one part of America that can read as the minority, and characterizes them by the fact that they “Function in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.” The other as “Dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.” The second part of America described by him is what he would consider illiterate. The first, clearly being literate. One part of these definitions which I could confusing was that he thinks only the literate can separate illusion from truth. In my political science class last fall, we learned that people who aren’t able to read and keep up with politics like many people try to do work on something called a “gut feeling”. For example the time we are in right now, many people aren’t keeping up with everything in the debates because they are too lazy to pick up a paper or they aren’t able to read the paper, but they evaluate presidential candidates on personal attributes such as height, smile, tone, and the overall way in which he presents himself. This is not always helpful however studies in my class showed that more often than not the people who could not read pick the same person as those who could, but for very different reasons.

     This article was somewhat similar to the one that Nicholas Carr wrote, except that he didn’t talk about the part of America that couldn’t read. He merely talked about the part of America that could and if they kept up with their current habits of surfing the web like they do, they may switch sides or come much closer to not being able to read.

    One of my favorite parts of this article came at the very end. I mentioned something like it in my last post because Carr’s article also touched upon it. In Carr’s article he talked about the Internet absorbing other media sources only for them to never resurface again. Hedges says, “The core values of our open society, the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense indicate something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to understand historical facts, to separate truth from lies, to advocate for change and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable, are dying.” These two ideas relate because as time goes on, more and more gets lost. I hope that there is not a grim future ahead of us without print media and the ability to think analytically. 

Remeber when...

Is Google making us stupid? Short answer: yes. Long answer: Sort of. Ok, I really don’t have any evidence or even ideas on how to support that, but Nicholas Carr does. Although he may seem pretty skeptic at times, I think he’s earned that right. His research all sounds valid and he argues that extended time spent using the Internet will eventually affect cognition. He’s arguing that the new ago of technology and the explosion of the Internet is changing the way humans think. He uses the example of a research paper taking days to compile all the data, whereas now those days spent in the stacks are turned into minutes at the computer thanks to a friendly search engine called Google. Another metaphor he used that I found interesting was “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski” when he was referring the fact that his mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it.

The Internet is a powerful tool that has almost endless options. Carr notes that it’s making other technologies obsolete. He says, “It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV” and that does not sit easy with me. Call me old fashioned, but I like listening to the radio, walking down to the end of my driveway in a bathrobe to pick up the Sunday paper, and talking to my grandma on the phone while she’s in Florida for the winter. Our class is an example of this; we spend so much time on Facebook that it has become our postal service and outlet for what’s going on in our social lives. What happened to calling your best friend to see what you missed while you were on vacation. I hope the Internet stops taking away what some would consider outdated technology because it’s all a part of history. Its a part of who I am, a part of who I was growing up, I had an old typewriter in my house that was given to my brother and I by our dads friend. I remember lying on my bonus room floor with my dad sounding out words to learn how to read. I can’t imagine trying to teach a kid how to read off of a kindle or a computer screen. The feeling I got when turning the page after comprehending it was better than anything else I had experienced in my short life. Taking that experience away from a kid would be like taking the marshmallows out of Lucky Charms, it’d just be a bowl of oddly shaped cheerios. The physicality of objects is what has made up our media sources for decades, changing that just wouldn’t seem right.

            What’s next if the Internet takes over media outlets? Artificial Intelligence. Yea, the super computers like mentioned in this article, I,Robot, and Eagle Eye. Isn’t that scary? Computers shouldn’t be able to think, let alone think what us humans are thinking. Google is trying to develop some sort of supercomputer that accomplishes all this however there are two fatal flaws in my eyes that were stated in the article. In Google’s world, “There’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.” This would create the assumption that “The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” Well all I can say to that is, if the brain is an outdated computer, does that mean that we as a race are outdated as well? To close I’d like to readdress the question in case anyone is lost. Is Google making us Stupid? Not yet.

Connecting the Dots

It’s all starting to make sense. The definitions of reading and writing, the class discussions about what go into each of these. Keeping up with the news because it fits right into the cookie cutter mold of someone writing, and another reading. Nice job, we noticed. Personally, I find this book almost a little awkward. The “Intertexts” and “Projects” is where we come to a fork in the road. When you encounter one of these, when do you read it? It’s like the author is derailing our train of thought by putting these everywhere on the page. Oh well, ill either ignore them or figure something out that satisfies. On to the meat and potatoes of this post, and probably the most boring part as well. Our author Joseph Harris, defines reading and writing in many ways. He gives a very by the book definition of writing as a “Social practice: the use of certain tools (paper, pen, computer) in a well-defined context (the academy) to achieve a certain end of make a particular product (a critical essay)” He then explains why he chose to name each chapter the way he did and the meaning behind it.

            After the dictionary definition already given in this book, I was hoping for some sort of bigger picture. And then it happened. “A writer forwards the views of another when he or she takes terms and concepts from one text and applies them to a reader of other texts or situations.” Take a few seconds, let it sit in, that’s basically unit 1 in a nutshell. And in the first 6 pages even better. We didn’t even have to wait till the very end of the book to be pissed off like we were in high school after reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

At least we're all consistent

Class web-breakdown: Facebook – 50%, Stumbleupon – 20%, DU related tasks (Blackboard, WebCentral, emails from the school) – 10%, Music – 10%, Various news sites (CNN, Yahoo, ESPN, etc.) – 5%, Other (Netflix, College Humor, Skype, etc.) – 5%.

The worst part you ask? I’m no better than the rest. My internet habits generally fall into the same categories. We are all helplessly addicted to Facebook, so much so that it has become a knee-jerk reaction for some of us to log on the instant we open our internet browsers. Many even stated that since they made their log on the weekend that Facebook took up a lesser part of their internet use than if they made their log during the week. We don’t even need a computer to access it anymore, it’s literally at the end of our fingertips wherever we go, provided you have some sort of smartphone. It has become the plus one of everything we do on the internet. For instance, “Oh I think I’ll read the news today, right after I check my facebook.” Or, “I think I’ll listen to music, while I check my facebook.” I’m even doing it right now. I’ll write my blog post, while my facebook is open just incase someone needs something (they never do). We have all turned into procrastinators who will find any reason to check facebook. It’s strangely addicting, but at the same time incredibly helpful. It’s instant communication with our friends everywhere, and honestly, its damn useful. We all use it to write to our friends, or read what they are saying. The emotional cliché status is just a cry for help, all that people can do it “like” it or try to give a heartfelt response that will be read without the intended tone. Or the “I’M GOING TO WRITE SOMETHING IN ALL CAPS TO MAKE MYSELF SOUND MORE EXCITED THAN I ACTUALLY AM.” See right there what I did? I bet you thought I had something important to say. Facebook statuses are turning into the go-to place to say something important. Its sort of disturbing that if someone is excited about something, say getting accepted into college, that they will turn to facebook to tell everyone rather than calling or texting their friends and family. There are other uses for the internet though. Most of us turn there to read our news because we can find out what’s going on in Wichita or Chicago, while we sit at our computer in Colorado. The internet has the capability to be one of the most distracting tools ever invented and at the same time, if used right, accomplishes everything we need to do.

Internet Log

Internet Log for 1/9 and until 4:44 on 1/10

6:30-7:00 pm: Caught the tail end of the first half of the Bulls game from nbaliveonline.com

·       Very happy to have found a website where I can watch Chicago basketball out in Colorado

7:19-7:22 pm: Checked my facebook and replyed to an email from my RA

7:22-8:22 pm: 2nd half of the Bulls game

·       Was planning on turning the game off with 2:43 left in the 4th, but Brian Scalabrine came in the game and I had to keep watching

8:30-8:41 pm: Bookbyte.com

·       A website that offers you more money than the DU bookstore to buy back your book and they pay for shipping

11:32-11:44 pm: Checked gmail, blackboard, and went on facebook

2:00-2:07 am: Private Browsing ;) ...

... Just kidding

1/10

12:05-12:10 pm: Checked facebook in class

12:25-12:30 pm: Checked facebook again in the same class as above

2:50-3:00 pm: Read an article from ESPN that MVP point guard Derrick Rose is going to hold President Obama to his promise. The article stated that if the Bulls made the NBA Finals this year, President Obama has promised Derrick Rose that he would be in attendance.

·       On break in my stats class

3:49-time posted: Checked facebook, gmail, Spanish Super site and currently on my blog page.

Why He Blogs

Andrew Sullivan’s article, “Why I Blog,” describes how he came to enjoy blogging so much. It also talks about the joys one can gain from blogging as well as how blogging came to be. Sullivan blogs because of the feeling of impulse he gets when he doesn’t have to submit his work to an editor, but rather a frenzy of active readers waiting to critique every sentence he posts. Blogging is in instant publication of work and Sullivan illustrates on positives and negatives of that. He states in his essay, “Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” Just as I am experiencing the immediate publication of my writing, Sullivan writes what is in his head at whatever time. Sullivan notes that something writers have never been exposed to is having to reveal something about their personal lives. An editor notes that in their articles and removes it. Sullivan again states, “But a blog, unlike a diary, is instantly public. It transforms this most personal and retrospective of forms into a painfully public and immediate one.” Sullivan’s for blogging are all listed in the essay. He embraces the immediate publication aspect of a blog and the adrenaline rush of posting without the say so of an editor. He says in his essay that he was “hooked” from the first few days he used the blogging format. My belief as to why he blogs are directly his words. He explains, “The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation.”

Introduction to Blogging

For someone who has never blogged, created a blog, or even thought about creating a blog, the most challenging part was actually making the site. I’m not saying I have anything against blogs in general, however, some of them can seem a little narcissistic at times. Luckily for everyone in our class we only really talk about our personal lives, specifically our Internet use in posts 3 and 4. The most challenging part is the same as the most surprising part, in different ways though. The most challenging part, for me, was getting over the mental block that I had to create a blog being partially biased against them. And the most surprising part to creating the blog was how easy it was. A few clicks of the mouse and a catchy title and I’m there. My opinion of blogs hasn’t really changed seeing as I created it ten minutes ago but I’m sure it will as I continue to post. Blogs and Facebook are similar in the sense that it is a place to post opinions and have an opportunity to view others. They are different because Facebook is much easier to contact and find others. Blogs and writing have many more connections than blogs and Facebook because a blog is list of writings. When you are blogging, you are writing or typing I guess. You can choose where to publish your writings, whether it is a blog, book, or journal, but the act of blogging and writing are on in the same.