Final post

I think that there have been many memorable things i have learned from this course and that really makes it hard to choose one of them so instead i think i will choose 2. the first is 'America the Illiterate', and the second 'is Google Making us Stupid'. these two readings really surprised me and started to get my interested in the news for the first time. my view on writing really changed because of this class. before i though of writing as being essays, papers, articles, or books. i also though it was always boring but it didn't take long for me to change my mind about that after i started writing these blogs. i don't know if i can answer the last question because i cant tell how my own writing changes. sometimes you can tell that it has changed but i find it difficult to truly know how. i think i'm going to miss these posts after a while and who knows maybe i will decide to continue writing them in the future.

here is the link to access my paper

After much deliberation i decided that i should revise one of my favorite posts, "why i blog" by Andrew Sullivan

After reading “Why I blog” by Andrew Sullivan I started looking for the reasons that he blogs, and I kept coming back to this short little sentence that he wrote and which, I feel, sums up the entire article.

“It [blogging] is, in many ways, writing out loud.”

through this simple quote Andrew Sullivan is able to sum up most, if not all, of blogging. Many times through the article I felt like he was just pointing back to that sentence while outlining individual pieces that fit together to form this little puzzle of a sentence. Now when I compare it to a puzzle I don’t mean that it’s complicated or confusing, but that while it is one sentence, it encompasses many different ideas about blogging in this one, small, simple sentence. So my next order of business is to outline a few other ideas about blogging which Andrew Sullivan wrote in his article and to show how they point to or are connected with this sentence.

There are many things that he says about blogging which can also be said about talking or speaking. One of these is that blogging is “the spontaneous expression of instant thought”, just like during conversation you are not going to spend an hour or more deciding what you are going to say next. this spontaneousness is a big difference from what he says about other public writing, like a newspaper. “If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices.”

Another Idea he puts forth is that unlike most writing, blogging is strongly affected by the public who can respond almost instantly to anything you decide to post, allowing a blog to be more than just words on paper, it becomes a discussion or even an argument.

To wrap this up I want to give you one more thing to think about. “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.” Emphisis on the “writing out loud” part.

countering

Harris says that countering, "is not to nullify but to suggest a different way of thinking. in countering you bring a different set of interests to bear upon a subject, look to notice what others have not. your aim is not to refute what has been said before, to bring the discussion to an end, but to respond to prior views in ways that move the conversation in new directions."

i recently read a story that seems perfect for this. the story mainly deals with global warming and the energy crisis, but the story is also taking another look at the financial crisis and how it may not be all bad.

so far when people talk about the recession they are usually talking about the negative effects. some may even say there are only negative effects. the IEA (international energy agency) though has a more optimistic view.

"the economic crisis having cut into both the amount of energy used around the globe and the carbon dioxide emissions associated with them. According to the IEA, this creates an unprecedented opportunity to start curtailing our reliance on fossil fuels."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/energy-agency-financial-crisis-an-unprecedented-opportunity.ars

Although the recession has had negative effects on our lives in the present, it may be able to greatly improve them in the future. right now demand for fossil fuels has gone down and that opens the market to renewable energy. if we can keep the demand for fossil fuels low and switch over to using mostly renewable energy then we may be able halt global warming.

this story is altering the view of the recession from a unfortunate yet temporary down turn to a unique opportunity to prevent global warming.

harris first described forwarding by relating it to his email program. the <-- was for sending comments back to the sender, but the --> "directs them out to other readers." then he goes on to say that, "a writer forwards a text by taking words, images, or ideas from it and putting them into use in new contexts." he then proceeds to break forwarding down into 4 types, illustrating, authorizing, borrowing, and extending.

Illustrating is for when you are trying to make a point. you go and look for examples where other people have made the same or a similar point. Authorizing is when you use drawl upon the expertise or status of another writer in order to support your writing. borrowing is when you use the terms and ideas of other writers in the process of thinking through your subject. extending is when you take terms or concepts from someone else and use them in a different way the the original user.

it took me a while to realize that there were similarities between the blogs i'm following and the NYTimes. the reason is that they are fundamentally different, one is a blog, the other a newspaper. Because of this it was hard for me to find similarities between them. but once i found a few it made it a lot easier.

since one of my blogs was all about technology i tried to find similarities between the different stories it and the NYTimes had. one thing i found was that there are a lot of stories on google. there's a new one everyday if not just every week.

one story in particular i want to mention (story about Google in case this next part doesn't give it away) is about china being upset about Google books for some scans of Chinese books. china claims that the scans are in violation of international copyright standards. sometime after i read this story on the NYTimes i found another story on ArsTechnica. this one was about Google books and how it has been battling the publishing industry since it started. at one point it was accused of copyright infringement because it was scanning copyrighted books and putting them online for anyone to view for free. and now Google has a hearing with the European union.

at first glance these stories might not seem to be connected but in fact they are. not only are they both about Google but they also deal with Google books and copyright infringement. the first deals specifically with a case of china objecting to scans made by Google for Google docs. the other is about problems Google has and is having with copyright infringement.

it just goes to show that even though stories might seem not to have a connection that doesn't mean that they don't. in fact you could probably take any two stories and find some kind of connection between them, even if it's just a random comment.

the blog fractal

it speaks for itself. too bad all of it doesn't fit.

so far reading the nytimes has been amazing. i never could have imagined that news would be so. . . interesting. unfortunately at other times it can be creepy like when i read the story about photos on the internet being used to create false profiles. the story is posted here. in this case nothing really bad happened but it could have been much worse. someone could have used photos like that to create a fake Facebook page which could damage your reputation when you try to apply for a job.anyway back on the subject of the nytimes there are tons of things on there that i had absolutely no idea that they even existed. sure there are new stories about things i know, but to find stories on subjects i didn't even know of, wow. i don't even know where to begin. should i look at this one or should i save it for later while i look at that one. there's just too much, its overwhelming.

just a few days ago i was reading a very interesting story about the large Hadron collider. i didn't understand some of what they were talking about but what i can guess what they are saying. apparently some physicists proposed the idea that the higgs bosen (particle they are trying to create in the super collider) might be so contrary to nature that it would ripple backward in time to prevent it's creation. sounds a little crazy to me but, hey, it could be possible.

now back on what i'm supposed to be talking about. I've mostly looked at stories on technology and science because those interest me but if i happen to see an interesting story on a different story i will read it. of course this means that i'm missing out on a lot of the other subjects so i need to balance it out some. i have not noticed a change in any of my other habits, readings, writing, work, thoughts, attitudes, or interactions.

Blogs i'm following

the two blogs i have chosen to follow are Andrew Sullivan's blog, Daily Dish and the second is ars technica (latin for art of technology).

it seems that a lot of people wanted to follow the Daily Dish because i have already seen 3 or 4 people who have it listed as one of their blog choices. the reason i chose it was because i dont really know much about politics and don't want to so i wanted to pick a blog that sounded interesting yet one which had little to do with actual politics.

Ars technica is a blog on technology and mostly posts stories about new technology including new software like windows 7. ars technica is a blog for those who are interested in technology and want to keep up with new things in the world of technology.

news, news, where's the news

my post probably won't have anything to do with my title.

first off i'm glad that i'm not the only one who doesn't go and look for news. second after reading the New York times o the internet i've found that i really like learning more about what's going on, especially when it deals with technology. there are a lot of different ways people get news, some do so passively and others actively. a lot of the time people passively get news from websites like facebook, from tv or from random radio stations. activelly people get news from news sites, from news channels, from radio news stations, and from newspapers. but the source from which everyone receives information is from other people.

i was exploring the internet to find a blog to follow for class when i found an interesting website called ars technica and when looking at the website i found an interesting post about Microsoft demoing 5 new multi-touch mice (the kind you use with a computer not the kind that are alive). i thought it was interesting so im posting a link to it here. I particularly liked the orb mouse because it would be very useful in video games. you should definitely watch the video even if you don't follow the link so i'm putting that here too.

Microsoft Research unveils five mice prototypes from Ars Technica on Vimeo.

what's going on?

Sorry but i don't really have an answer to this question because I've never really wanted to know before. I've never read a newspaper, haven't really sat in front of a TV for at least 4, maybe five, years, except to play video games. if you all remember i got a 0 of 4 on the pop culture section of the "pop"quiz.

Now i'm not a total loss i do know somethings . . . let me think . . . oh, politics. my dad is really interested in politics so i know a few things about whats going on, although i mostly ignored him when he starts talking about it, still, the occasional fact does get through.

Next I don't and probably never will actually listen to radio. if someone turns the radio on in the car they have to capture my attention and then point me toward what is being said or played on the radio for me to hear or remember what it is 10 seconds later, literally 10 seconds is all it takes for me to forget it.

I mentioned TV before so now i move to print. now print could be a number of things from books to advertising on cereal boxes. so for now i'm going to stick to books, magazines, and articles. first books. i read a lot of books when i get the time to but most if not all of them are fiction and i would be very surprised if i learned any up to date information from those. then articles, I've actually read a few recently due to homework assignments for a grand total of five, the first four about nanotechnology for my thesis, and the last on literacy for this English class. and magazines i actually have 2 subscriptions, although they haven't bothered to sent me any for a while now. one is popular science so i know a little of whats going on in the world of technology and the other is Nintendo power so i also know about new video games.

And last but definitely not least, the internet. i could say i don't get any information from the internet but i could say its almost all worthless after a minute. all those Facebook updates could count as news but a lot of them stop being up to date about five seconds after being written, for others maybe a minute, and for the select few that manage to endure a week at most if not just a day.

my essay on literacy

Here is where i will keep my final copy of my essay. this may change many times but it will be the most up to date copy of my essay.

here is the link for my paper. you can edit it but i suggest red for things that should be removed,

blue for things that need to be added, and yellow for things that don't fit or need to be connected.

here is an article on literacy

Becoming Literate in the Information Age: Cultural Ecologies and the Literacies of Technology

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B5figeeHCeuLMTQ0NmQ4OGQtZjMzNy00OWJlLTg0ZWEtMTI4MDEyMjg3ZjI2&hl=en

Note this has nothing to do with any of the blogs.

one thing I've been interested in for a while is called Nanotechnology. So i wrote my senior thesis on Nanotechnology and now i want to share it with you. please comment.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AZfigeeHCeuLZGZuY3hqaHNfMGRoOHg1aGZx&hl=en

this link should take you to the paper in Google docs. if it doesn't post a comment about it and i will try to fix it. hope you like it

The Fall That Comes Before The Rise

The first thing I should mention is that for my entire life I have only read a newspaper maybe once or twice and that one or two times was for school. That probably says something about our generation or just me.

This time may, in fact, be a bad time for newsrooms but that doesn’t mean it always will. I completely agree with Chris Hedges when he says, “The Internet will not save newspapers.” This period of time is nothing but a turning point for newsrooms from physical papers to online data streams. The internet is not saving newspapers, it is replacing them. Once they have solidified themselves as the place to go for news then the big sponsors will follow.

In his work Bad Days For Newsrooms Chris Hedges says, “A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment…”

First of all just because something is on the internet doesn’t mean it’s false, neither does the fact that something is in a newspaper make it true. Now it is true that that news and entertainment is being mixed together in the giant bowl called the internet, but I believe that sometimes that can make you absorb information better. I have personally learned anything’s from the internet. Some has been almost useless in everyday life or even school for that matter, while some has actually helped me on tests and in the class room.

One last thing I want to mention is that many people over the 17 years of my life have told me that the best job is one you enjoy doing. Why can that not be applied to the internet. That you learn the most when you enjoy doing it. When I enjoy doing something I remember more about it. When trying to learn something in class I have to pay specific attention to what I’m trying to learn and then go home (or to my dorm) and study to lock it in my head. With videogames, which I really enjoy doing, I can hear or see something once and remember it 2 years later. Until now I found it weird that I could remember almost everything about a videogame, almost enough to recreate it, while I couldn’t even remember a short math equation.

For ten whole minutes after reading America the Illiterate I sat here in front of my computer, surprised and embarrassed that the country in which I lived had over 90 million people who couldn’t read at a sixth grade level. It was like someone had plunged a knife into my heart. This was such a blow to me because I personally love reading, as I’m sure you can tell from my last post.

I felt deeply upset when I was reading Nicolas Carr’s “is Google making us stupid” because I realized how much I have lost, but that doesn’t even compare to this. Millions of people unable to enjoy literature, it was just incomprehensible to me. I know I’m rambling on again and basically saying the same thing over and over again, it just had such a profound effect on me.

Well now I have to get back to actual work, and I’m going to skip right to the last question about the connections between Hedges’s column and Carr’s article. Now what I’ve noticed is actually less of a connection and more of a relation. Carr’s article is warning us about the internet and its effects on our brains. Meanwhile Hedges’s column shows how we have already been affected.

“There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year.”

If this continues much longer our country will be controlled by the illiterate who make choices based on pictures which when you look at it is just like what happens in the movie Idiocracy. (sorry no links)

how the internet is ruining my life and my ability to think

I’m not trying to sound smart but I actually noticed that the internet has changed howwe read or, at least, how I read. When I was a kid I could pick up a book and in under a minute be so deeply immersed in the book that I didn’t know what was happening around me. My mom actually had to come out of the kitchen and almost literally shake me awake when she wanted to tell me something. People could be sitting right next to me and I would be totally oblivious.

But now everything has changed. I used to read almost every day. I would sit there and read book after book without stop unless I was told to or I had to do something. Now I almost never read books unless it’s a new one in a series I really like, and even then it takes me almost 20 minutes to immerse myself in it and it’s nowhere near as deep as it used to be.

“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.”

Just so you know I didn’t even see this paragraph until after I wrote everything before it. But it is really similar to what’s been happening to me. I think the problem is that with the internet you can jump to something else anytime you want. This hasn’t just changed how I read. One example is videogames. At one time I could play a single videogame several times before I stopped, but now I don’t even play it more than once because I already know what is going to happen. None of it is new and because of that it doesn’t interest me anymore.

The internet has changed me, no longer do I look for something good I can read/play several times, now I look for something new, something different, and even then after such a short time they lose their appeal, because they are no longer mysterious, no longer interesting.

if anyone else has had a similar expirience i would love it if you posted a comment about how the internet has or hasnt changed you.

rewriting rewriting (I had to do that)

I’m sorry to say that I really don’t/didn’t want to write this particular blog. I don’t know what it was about the book rewriting but it made me feel a little depressed. Now on to the book itself. As of the time I am writing this sentence, (portraying time in something which many people see at different times is really hard since when I say as of now it can seem to the reader to be as of now as compared to the time they are reading it instead of the time I am writing it.) I have just finished the introduction. And one interesting (to a degree) point of his that I can still remember was about the history and use of the word interesting. How over time the meaning of the word evolved, yet it can still be interpreted as any or all of those meanings. One important part of that was the 3 different ways he mentions to think about a person’s writing/rewriting. “(1) How does the writer add interest or value to what has been said before? (2) What is her interest in this issue, what perspective is she speaking for? And (3) How is her style in writing of interest or note?”

Oh and just to mention I actually had to read Don Quixote de la Mancha in Spanish and then translate the novel into English. And for those who haven’t read it, it is a very interesting and funny book and you should read it.

a blog thats supposed to be about similarities and differences in internet reading and writing habits

Since I’m writing this blog after everyone else it’s hard to think of something to say that someone else hasn’t said already. In light of that I’m going to look deeper into some of the interesting ideas others have come up with. One is obviously the massive use of face book, where I want to say why I think that it’s something all of us use. Then I also remember something about how the internet is not making us smarter but is instead making us, well, dumber.

Now before I start on this you first need some background information. I went to school at Covington Latin in Covington KY. It’s a small school and I was in a graduating class of 40. Now it’s embarrassing to say that even in junior year I didn’t really know anyone in my class to well. The problem was that I had trouble remembering people’s names and that made me feel awkward whenever I was talking to them. Now I don’t feel that I’m very social because I can never think of anything to talk to people about so I pretty much keep to myself unless someone starts a conversation or asks me to go do something.

Now I didn’t start face book until senior year, I can remember why but I think it’s was because of some bad things I heard about it. Anyway when I joined face book I started friending everyone in my class who I could remember and because of that I found it easier to remember everyone’s names. So if you want me to remember you then friend me on face book with a little note about how or from where/what I know you but you don’t have to it just takes a hell of a lot longer the other way.

Anyway that’s the main reason I use face book but I also use it to stay connected to all my highschool friends since almost all of them go to different schools now. Plus I use it to communicate to different people on campus. So I feel that people use face book because it helps them stay connected to their friends and family

Now on to the next subject which was about the internet in general. Now I’m not sure if this is true so correct me if I’m wrong, but I remember hearing that the internet was originally invented for the transfer and exchange of knowledge and information. As I’m sure you can tell the internet has changed a lot since then. Sure it’s still used to exchange knowledge but it’s also used for entertainment. Now it’s used for everything from homework to watching videos and playing games. One thing I wanted to say is that the abundant source of information the internet provides prevents us from learning.

I think someone already said this but the internet which abounds which one word or one sentence answers to almost all of life’s questions leaves out the context of the answer and even sometimes provides us with the wrong one. It makes me think of the commercial for bing.com about search overload. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSkaTcjDIMk&feature=channel_page&FORM=MFEHPG&PUBL=YOUTUBE&CREA=userid1743yt0ce15e23d8bc89f0b517eafebc103d65

Searching the internet can provide you with a wide range of information but you have to be careful when looking for something because the answers you find might not be the right ones..

Unfortunately when I try to think write about my internet reading and writing habits, I come up blank. And because of that, this blog will be about me figuring out why I don’t read or write on the internet. This of course excludes the writing of my blogs, and the short chats I have on facebook with my friends.

I guess that the main reason I don’t read or write anything on the internet is because I never even thought about the possibility until now. To me “blog” was a word without meaning; all I knew was that it was something to do over the internet, which I learned from various commercials, like the Twix commercial. Which I found on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJ2SegGWyc.

If I had looked up what a blog was, I probably would have gotten an impression about blogs similar to those which quite a few people wrote about in their first blog post. Like Hannah’s blog where she puts out the idea that blogs can’t always be trusted.

“I could sit here and make up some sort of ridiculous story about how ice cream trucks will brain wash America one child at a time, and post it as a blog. But I don’t consider that to really be a blog. I consider that to be the ranting of an insane person published in a place where millions of people could theoretically see it.” http://hannahsenglishclassblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/english-blog-1-blog-about-blogging.html

This construed view of blogging would have kept me away not only from it but from other forms of internet reading and writing.

Oh and for the few things I did on the internet over the entire weekend can fit right here.

Friday.

10:00-10:10 facebook

Off internet

Saturday.

10:30-10:45 facebook

Off internet

Sunday.

Forgot to get on Facebook

Monday.

3:00-3:30 Ulink and black board for homework

my view on "why i blog" by Andrew Sullivan

After reading “Why I blog” by Andrew Sullivan (which was longer than I expected) I started looking for the reasons that Andrew Sullivan blogs, and I kept coming back to this short little sentence that he wrote and which, I feel, sums up the entire article. “It [blogging] is, in many ways, writing out loud.” Many times through the article I felt like he was just pointing back to that sentence while outlining individual pieces that fit together to form this little puzzle of a sentence. Now when I compare it to a puzzle I don’t mean that it’s complicated or confusing, but that while it is one sentence, it encompasses many different ideas about blogging in this one, small, simple sentence. So my next order of business is to outline a few other ideas about blogging which Andrew Sullivan wrote in his article and to show how they point to or are connected with this sentence.

There are many things that he says about blogging which can also be said about talking or speaking. One of these is that blogging is “the spontaneous expression of instant thought”, a big difference from what he says about other public writing, like a newspaper. “If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices.”

Another Idea he puts forth is that unlike most writing, blogging is strongly affected by the public who can respond almost instantly to anything you decide to post, allowing a blog to be more than just words on paper, it becomes a discussion or even an argument.

To wrap this up I want to give you one more thing to think about. “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.” Emphisis on the “writing out loud” part.

I’ve heard the word blog many times but I’m still not sure exactly what it means. Is a blog the web page, or is it my actual words posted on said page? In light of that thought I would have to say that the most difficult part of writing a blog is figuring out what I should be writing about. The next difficult thing was to force myself to sit down and get started when I would rather be doing anything else, well, almost anything. The next problem was a name; the simplest yet most difficult part of creating a blog. Name. That was my challenge. I guess I was over thinking something as simple and elementary as a name. Since I am a detailed oriented, direction driven, logical kind of person I struggled to be free and open on this newly created blog. I sat and I tried to come up with anything…anything that would help me get started. So here I go. My first blog; a blank screen waiting for my words, my thoughts…. my ramblings. I guess my first thoughts on creating a blog was how I was one of the last of my friends to create a facebook page. I guess it was a privacy thing. I just wasn’t sure about having my photo and daily activities posted on the web for anyone to see. I eventually started a facebook page so I could make an initial connection with my soon to be college roommate, and to stay connected to my high school friends and select family members. I’m still not getting used to the idea of putting myself out there on the web for the world to see. I’ll have to get back to you on how my opinion has changed since I didn’t really have an opinion on blogs before. I guess with this new blog I wait and hope someone finds my ramblings interesting, inspiring, or at least amusing.