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.