Reflecting on WRIT 1122

Overall, I really enjoyed this class because it gave me a chance to reflect on the news in an informal, yet academic fashion. I appreciated that we covered all sorts of aspects in the news... like the different angles on articles, the role photographs play, ect. Additionally, our textbook really complimented the structure of this class because Harris reveals ways to analyze other peoples' writing and to draw inspiration from it rather than just steal it. I was never really too interested with the news before and now I've definitely started keeping up with it. It's nice to be caught up and engaged with the world around me. It's kind of a bummer that my "10 free articles for the month" ran out on New York Times because I found there were a lot of good stories that were tailored to my interests. However, I've now started going to other websites like the Huffington Post and USA Today to get news. Being "in the know" so-to-speak is also helpful because it makes it a lot easier to engage in conversations with others about the news.

ee2 draft

I remember casually walking up the stairs in my Minnesota home on December 14, 2012 to see my mom crying. On the television there was a little girl being interviewed on CNN; my mom points to it and cries, “Some guy just walking into an elementary school and shot it up this morning. They’ve announced ten-some kids dead. I can’t even imagine… those parents…” That’s the first I heard of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newton, Connecticut. Since its occurrence, the shooting and gun control have been the talk of the country.

Twenty children and six adult staff members died in Newton that day and the shooting has been deemed the second-deadliest shooting in American history. The shooter was quickly identified as Adam Lanza, who first killed his mother at their home then brought a semi-automatic rifle into Sandy Hook Elementary and began firing in hallways and classrooms. Afterwards he committed suicide in the woods behind the school.

Lanza entered the school early in the morning by shooting his way through the locked glass door. The noise provoked both the principle and school psychologist to rush to the scene of the crime, to which they encountered Lanza and were immediately shot to their death. Lanza then entered a classroom full of first graders, shooting all of them multiple times. That classroom was where most of the damage occurred; there was a sole survivor: a six-year-old girl who pretended to be dead as Lanza opened fire on all of her classmates. Lanza then coursed his way through the school, shooting students running for safety and teachers attempting to protect their students. It is undeniable that this one of the most heart-wrenching tragedies the United States has ever seen.

Why Lanza did this is unknown. There are a multitude of criminological theories that could be used to interpret his rationale but none would adequately justify his actions. According to an article published by The Telegraph, a newspaper based out of U.K., entitled, “Connecticut school shooting: troubled life of Adam Lanza, a fiercely intelligent killer,” people who knew him growing up had always described Lanza as a “weird kid,” who was both “reclusive and troubled.” He was also reported to have Asperger’s syndrome and another anti-social personality disorder. This is also known as sociopathy, which is the type of personality disorder that is the most closely linked with violence and criminal behavior. Additionally, “fifty percent of the populations in prisons meet the criteria for this diagnosis.” It was very evident to everyone in Lanza’s life that he had a lot of mental problems and was “deeply disturbed.” Lanza’s Asperger’s created a great difficulty within him to communicate with and feel empathy for others. For Lanza and others on the autistic spectrum, this can cause a lot of frustration, which can lead to aggression, but this diagnosis still does very little in explaining what led him to take a semi-automatic rifle to Sandy Hook on that fateful day.

It was also reported that Lanza’s mother was an avid gun collector and liked to take her children target shooting. According to law enforcement sources, between the years of 2010 and 2012, Nancy Lanza purchased four firearms for her home. Furthermore, the gun used to murder Nancy Lanza was one of her own. Due to this, many people across the blogosphere began to blame Nancy for her own death and the deaths at Sandy Hook, no longer referring to her as a victim. Through these facts we could arrive at a consensus that this deadly fusion of mental issues and accessibility to guns killed twenty-seven people, though in further research of this tragedy, it becomes increasingly complicated.

Lanza owned thousands of dollars worth of violent video games and was deeply immersed in video game culture.  [CONTINUE ON WITH THIS]

What drives any person to open fire on a vulnerable crowd? Within a span of just a few months, there have been a profusion of gun deaths in the United States, and after what happened at Sandy Hook, the citizens and the government have started to fight for gun control more than ever. [GO INTO STUFF ABOUT GUN CONTROL]

Picturing Life After Devastation (se2)

Arahama in Sendai before and after the tsunami 



http://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/japan-quake-2011/

On March 11, 2011, a tsunami devastated Japan, killing nearly 16,000 people. The media reacted quickly to this turmoil, and thousands of stories and images surfaced the internet within a few days. ABC News published a story comprised solely of images that illustrated the disastrous effect the tsunami had on “dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands homes and businesses” in Japan. The story derived it’s inspiration from aerial photos of these areas before and after this devastation. 

Photos play an important role in the world of media journalism; they give the reader a whole new perspective on a story. Furthermore, they help to engage and inform the reader about the story in a different light. While the usage of photos is not always necessary, when used they are meant to draw in and captivate the reader, allowing them to realize the central message of the article. Images complement the narrative, used to highlight the point of view of the writer. In the tsunami article, however, there is no narrative, except of that in captions. While these captions only reveal the area in which the image is identifying, they are still crucial to the construction of the article because they give the images context. Without them, this article would make no sense. 

This article is unique because it is one of few that actually asks the reader to interact with it to reveal information. The first line of the article instructs you to “hover over each satellite photo to view the devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami.” The article continues to show you before and after photos of 39 distinct areas in Japan, like Sendai Airport, the Fukushima nuclear plant and Iwaki beach, just to name a few, while the images primarily consist of differing coasts, villages and cities. These photos demonstrate the harsh impact the tsunami had on the environment; there were countless shattered homes and businesses. They resemble a dystopic world that the Japanese were forced to suffer through after this occurrence.

With natural disasters, it’s impossible to imagine what that world was like unless you’ve previously experienced a tragedy like that. Everything from the past life of those people washed away that day. When the news cycles to the U.S. the only basis we have to visualize this is the photos people take. There are millions of images of this tsunami to browse through on blogs and news sites, but also on social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All these images allow people outside of Japan to paint a picture in their heads of what it really could’ve been like. Moreover, photographs documenting events like this are monumental in the building and supporting relief foundations for these areas. They trigger empathy and our emotions drive us to wanting to help them. 

In aerial photography, the reader achieves a new sense of the widespread devastation. They don’t realize the detriments this had on specifically one family or one neighborhood, but rather how the entire country was in ruins. They see what once was stretches of farms, homes, the ocean transform into a blackened dystopia. 

Photograph Validity

I thought that Morris’ editorial offered an interpretation of the way we perceive ‘caption-less’ photographs that questions the validity of every photograph I’ve ever seen, especially those from my childhood. There are so many pictures that have sparked memories for me in a way. By this I mean there would be no memory if not for the photograph. I have spent hours sifting through the remnants from my past in photo boxes labeled “Family” or “Bailey” and that’s about the extent of the caption. The rest is left for me to interpret. 

In his editorial, Morris claims, “All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false.” I think this an extremely complex point he is making. In a way, photographs are always true; they are snapshots in time and illustrate exactly how something/someone looked at a given point (disregarding all the photoshopped pictures nowadays.) Photographs are, a lot of time, evidence of a certain event. This all kind of reminds me of the saying that floats around the internet: “Pics or it didn’t happen.” 

However, the point Morris is trying to get across is that without captions, we have no idea what a photograph is even of. Think about baby pictures of yourself. In my opinion, literally every single baby looks the exact same. So how am I supposed to tell that that’s me in a picture? Today, I can take my mom’s word for it. But two hundred years from now, how is anybody going to be able to tell?

Take the iconic image from the Great Depression of the migrant mother as an example. Even the photographer admits to knowing very little about this woman, not even her name. Yet, we view this photograph as describing life during the Depression very accurately. 

Taking an approach

Taking an approach, as defined by Joseph Harris, is combining all his aforementioned techniques (rewriting, forwarding & countering) and writing something with your own unique spin on it. He claims, “When you take on the approach of another writer both your thinking and theirs need to change. Otherwise you are simply applying ideas to examples. To transform is to reshape, not to replace or rebut. The original does not go away but is remade into something new.”

I think Harris’ example of cover songs works well as an analogy. When someone does a cover of a song, their goal isn’t and shouldn’t be to sound exactly like the original singer. If that was the case, why would anyone want to listen to that persons’ song when they could just go and listen to the original? The point of a cover song is to sing someone else’s lyrics but with your own voice, and to make it your own.

The same applies with writing. It’s about using your own words and ideas and using the original as nothing but a source of inspiration. In my writing, I like to take an approach by finding a specific technique I appreciate in another author’s writing and implementing it into my own. 

Additionally, Harris points out the importance in acknowledging your influences. This is just granting credit to those who deserve it. Back to the cover song analogy: you don’t see people putting up a video on YouTube of them singing “Free Bird” and claiming it’s their own. It would be about two seconds before they were called out on it. 

Repairing Schools: It Starts With Our Youth (Short Essay #1)

Last week, David Kirp wrote an article for the New York Times called, “The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools,” which aimed to reveal the key to a first-rate education in broken schools. He shows this by exploring the progression of a small public school in Union City, NJ, and how they went from a place where “the schools were once so wretched that state officials almost seized control of them” to a place where 75% of the kids are going off to college after graduation, and many to top universities. He listed several steps that led to this advancement -- starting in pre-kindergarden, transforming teaching methods, making the shift from a test-taking mindset to more of a thinking mindset, and the list goes further than that. It seems Kirp’s article is aimed towards people higher up in the schooling system, such as superintendents and principles, though I plan on getting my message out to teachers in lower and elementary schools.

I took an immediate liking to this article because I recognize the need for change in schools, but I think this change is especially necessary for younger kids. Kirp is without a doubt accurate in his assertions, though to create better schools, the best way to do it is emphasizing on a couple key structural changes that can be goals rather than giving schools ten or fifteen changes that are massively difficult to implement. 

The first step to better schools is honing a safer and more open-minded learning and social environment. Kids are spending nearly a third of their waking hours in school, so it should feel like a second home to them. In order to achieve this, the teachers in the school need to be more adamant on eliminating bullying and imposing a love of learning in kids. It’s about teaching to respect one another both inside and out of the classroom. We need to teach kids that laughing or scoffing at another kid’s question is damaging, and that kind of behavior can’t be tolerated. We need to completely eradicate words like “gay” and “retard” used in a derogatory sense from these kids’ vocabulary. Above all else, showing kids it’s safe and cool to be smart and to love going to school and learning new things is what’s going to change not only our schools, but ultimately our entire country. 

The second step in this equation is maintaining creativity and divergent thinking in youth. Kirp touched on this a bit in his article when expressing the necessity for both cognitive and non-cognitive (thinking and feeling) lesson plans. This is absolutely true. In the long run, the purpose of school is to prepare kids for life in the real world, not a test. The first twelve years of education, therefore, shouldn’t be seen as nothing but a prerequisite to standardized tests, but rather a process we can use to explore the different strengths and weaknesses in every child’s brain. We can do this by implementing more creative exercises in the classroom and encouraging divergent thinking. Creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas and divergent thinking includes conceiving multiple solutions or outcomes to a given problem. When you ask a kid what two plus two is, the only way to be correct is by saying it’s four. But then ask that same kid how to get the answer four by doing a math problem and there are innumerable possibilities that they could devise. It could be 2+2, 1+3, 1x4, -9239+9243, and so forth.

The point is, most of the kids in elementary and middle school now are just going through the motions of day-to-day life, just waiting for Friday to roll around again, especially those enrolled in broken schools. But this is the next generation we’re talking about; it’s not only their future we’re changing but also our own. Kirp says there’s a lot that needs to be done, and there is, but these steps are the first that need to be taken. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/the-secret-to-fixing-bad-schools.html?pagewanted=1

The idea of countering

When I was working on the high school newspaper, one big thing we always encouraged the younger writers to do is highlight different angles of all the stories in the news. It was never about disputing the original article, but rather exploring another side to it. That’s kind of how Joseph Harris defined countering. He claims, “to counter is not to nullify but to suggest a different way of thinking.” To find an example of countering, it’s perhaps the easiest to immediately turn to the editorial section on a credible news site. 

Facebook and journalism have become somewhat of a cliched pair at this point. Facebook has become one of those view things that you can talk about and almost everyone knows what you’re talking about. There’s so many articles and posts about Facebook all over the web and most of them are pretty boring to read because we’ve seen them all before. 

But, while surfing the online paper for the Star Tribune (the main newspaper for my home, Minneapolis), I read an editorial on why there’s suddenly a decline in Facebook usage and I found it pretty interesting. It’s called, “The trouble with Facebook is the people,” and it’s about how we’re not using Facebook as often because we’re realizing that people are just boring. I’ve read tons of articles and blog posts on the topic of Facebook but I only really enjoy reading one if it is something unique. That’s the whole idea of countering: to put a fresh spin on a hackneyed story.  

The idea of forwarding

Joseph Harris describes the idea of forwarding as “taking words, images, or ideas from [the text] and putting them to use in new contexts.” It’s responding to someone else’s work and putting your own spin on it -- which is something we are all constantly doing. There are very few literary works in this day and age that are truly original, and Harris argues that there are four core ways in which we respond to text: by illustrating, authorizing, borrowing and extending. 

I believe Harris’ email metaphor explains the idea of forwarding best. With emails, you can either “reply” or “forward” and he goes on to contend that anyone with email has seen one take up a life of its own.

Forwarding is not about stealing others ideas but rather adding to the discussion. It sort of reminds me of the Billy Joel song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” 

The lyrics read: 

We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world’s been turning

Like “the fire,” no one know who sparked the conversation about literary texts or when it even happened, but we’re all adding to the discussion and will continue to do so until we die. But even then, the conversation will live on.  

The other day, my roommate told me about this new iPhone app called “Lulu” and told me I should download it. After downloading it, I realized how ridiculous it was (it’s basically an app that lets you rate and review guys) so I decided to do a bit of internet research to see if any people were enraged about it. There was an article on the Huffington Post called, “Lulu App Lets Women Review Men Like Restaurants.” The article uses a few examples of what other people were saying about it on other websites like BuzzFeed and Slate. The article reads, “Chong told BuzzFeed Shift that she sees the app as ‘a place you can talk about the good and the bad’... Slate’s Amanda Hess found the app creepy and bordering on harassment.” As you can see, people use articles to write other articles all the time. It can only add to the discussion. 

The New York Times

I had never really spent much time reading the New York Times before this course, but now that it has become a regular thing for me, I feel like I have a way better sense of awareness with the world. All throughout high school, I worked on the newspaper, but even then, I didn’t really care about the news. I stopped writing stories for it regularly when I became the editor my sophomore year. I only wrote stories when we needed to fill space or if a certain topic needed to be written about. I viewed the news somewhat disdainfully because it seemed like such a chore. I wasn’t reading about things in the news that interested me at all. It got to a point that I wasn’t even reading my own paper anymore; I would just spellcheck for typos and fix design errors then send it to press. 

I loved doing the newspaper in high school and at times I definitely miss it, but now I feel like I don’t have an obligation to be “in the know” so to speak and that I can actually enjoy the stories I choose to engage myself with. I love art and design so I usually find myself reading those types of stories, along with stories in the science and health section because I’m always astounded by the scientific and medical marvels that are uncovered each day. Additionally, just in scanning the titles on the front page I feel I’ve gained more knowledge in current events. It doesn’t even take reading articles to know what’s happening anymore. 

Kids these days and the news

In reading my classmates blog posts about where they get the news, I found that most of them, like myself, are getting their news primarily from social media websites. Most of them conveyed they used social media as a starting off point, in that they hear about something for the first time on Facebook or Twitter and then turn to Google for more information. Additionally, even those that don’t use social media, all of my classmates admitted that a computer is the tool that fuels their way to knowing the news. 

We have a few exchange students from China in our class as well, and I found it interesting that they use the New York Times not only to keep themselves updated on the news but also to help with learning English as well. Aside from the exchange students, though, most students claimed they use the New York Times as one of their primary news sources. This makes sense because the New York Times is designed to be tailored to the news interests of almost everyone. They have stories about sports, health, politics, style and pretty much everything in between. 

I’m sure Hedges and Carr would argue that this new technologically-driven way of getting the news from social media is detrimental to the advancement of our society. I would agree with that in a sense, too. News that has been posted about or tweeted about by my friends is often times unreliable because the people posting don’t really have a leg to stand on. They don’t know the truth of the matter but just repost what they hear. However, it’s getting the news out there and making it readily available to people who wouldn’t be reading the New York Times or other credible news sources out there. I believe Sullivan would agree with this. He knows our society is changing and the only way to keep people updated is to change our method of communication.

A Changed World From The Web

The world has been in a constant state of transformation since the beginning of time, but it seems now it is changing more than ever in this technological era. It wasn’t until around the mid-90’s that the internet even came into existence, and now, in 2013, it is nearly impossible to go a day without the help of technology. We can’t get across town without navigation, communicate face-to-face or even deal with the slightest ounce of boredom anymore. While the internet has placed limitations such as these on our society, it’s more important to recognize the ways in which it has cultivated us as well.  Since 2000, the internet has experienced a growth of roughly 153 percent; so this begs the question: how is all this time we’re spending on the web changing our society?

Nicholas Carr, in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that the internet is “chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” I don’t dispute this at all; nor his assertion that he expects to “take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”

 There is an infinite amount of data that is constantly at our disposal; so we skim the details and move on if our attention isn’t grasped. We’ve turned into small children wandering the aisles of a Toys R Us, going from toy to toy, engaging with it for a second, discovering its usage then moving onto the next one. There are so many toys out there; some of them attract us, others we never even come across. It’s impossible to not find a toy you like, but there’s no one toy that’s universally satisfying. Carr notes research used to entail digging through library periodicals, but now is just a Google search and a quick click of a few hyperlinks. He presents this pessimistically, but I don’t think it’s such a bad thing; rather, it is just the way the world is changing. The internet has introduced innumerable advantages to society, and a shortened attention span is a small price to pay. We’ve become so accustomed to getting information fast, so it only makes sense attentiveness has slipped. It’s not as if we’ve lost the ability to focus, either. When something truly fascinates me or I need to get something done, I gain this near supernatural ability to hyper-focus my way through it. 

Chris Hedges wrote the article, “America the Illiterate,” in which he asserts the internet is the fountainhead for illiteracy in America, and his argument is supported by several staggering statistics. Just to list a few:

“Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate.

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.

Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.”

There’s no way to look at those statistics and dispute their severity. But, I ask you to take a step back from the cold hard facts. Consider life during the Enlightenment: an era known specifically for intellectualism, and still only the wealthy people could read. Literacy rates were abysmal, but that was primarily due to the lack of accessibility. Nowadays, the internet makes all the information in the world wildly accessible. It doesn’t necessarily matter who you are or how much money you have: if you can find your way to a computer then you can learn anything you want. Moreover, while 42 million people is a seemingly outrageous amount, compared our population, which is over 315 million people, 42 million people only represent 1.3% of our nation. 

Literacy isn’t exactly measurable, either. The CIA World Factbook describes literacy in the United States as “age fifteen and over can read and write.” That may be the most ambiguously defined term I’ve ever heard. If a fifteen year old can only read Dr. Seuss and has the vocabulary of a Kindergardener, is he literate? By that definition, because he can read “Green Eggs and Ham” and write a short story about a cat going to the store, he is. Perhaps what we, as a collective society, need to do is redefine literacy. With the world changing as fast as it is, it only makes sense to change definitions as well.

In an editorial on our “semi-literate youth,” Andrea Lunsford gives us a valid warning on turning a blind eye to compelling alternate narratives. Maybe eighty percent of families didn’t buy a book last year because they’re reading eBooks instead, or because most of their reading is done online. People are quick to invalidate internet reading because there is an unregulated flow of information, creating a potential for inaccuracy. This is true, but that’s why it’s important to take everything you read on the internet must be taken with a grain of salt. So when you read that Morgan Freeman has been announced dead (again) or that Obama is a Muslim terrorist, don’t forget to consider the source. 

However, this unregulated flow of information epitomizes our constitutional right to free speech and has been instrumental in calling attention to certain newsworthy aspects of our world that otherwise would’ve been quieted. With the internet, the voices we hear aren’t just those of published writers now, but of anyone who feels their voice should be heard. Like with WikiLeaks, an organization designed specifically to release secret information, news leaks and classified media from anonymous sources.

The blogosphere fully encapsulates this right we have as Americans to say whatever the hell we want. Andrew Sullivan, in an article entitled “Why I Blog,” defines blogs as “the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism.” He continues on with the notion of blogging as facts and news emerge, which creates multiple angles to news stories almost instantaneously after they occur. Blogging has given our society the gift of expression in the most public way imaginable, making our ideas, recipes, photographs, ect. accessible to any person in the world who has the inclination to search for it. It’s given everyone a chance to put themselves out there if they dare.

“A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. 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” (Sullivan).   

With blogging and extreme sports alike, while there is inevitably going to be a higher propensity for accidents and error, there is also a higher propensity for something crazy or amazing to happen. Ideas emerge in the blogosphere because there’s no one taking a red pen to your raw observations. 

The internet is changing the way we think and view the world, but that isn’t to say this change is ruinous to our society. In fact, I love the internet and believe it has been the gateway to this golden age we now live in; it’s created an entirely new world of opportunities that is, quite literally, at our fingertips. Reflect on the transformation of professional worlds through this age with the creation of email, accessibility of professional journals, blogs and research, along with programs like Google Drive, which makes it possible to share and collectively work on documents, slideshows and more. It’s now possible to pay our bills from the comfort of our own home, which also grants us instant gratification without the anxiety concerning lateness hovering over our heads. The world of modern medicine, too, has changed drastically. It’s become possible to share research online instantly and has also created a more level playing field between patients and doctors due to websites like WebMD and others like it. 

The point is, our society has undergone numerous changes, some bad but so many more good. The voices heard are that of millions, thanks to social networking and the blogosphere, and all these voices are accessible to essentially the entire population. Maybe the web has limited us in a few ways, like decreasing our capacity for concentration and making us near dependent on our phones and computers, but in the end, the advantages outweigh it all. 

Works Cited

Sullivan, Andrew. "Why I Blog." The Atlantic Nov. 2008

Lunsford, Andrea. “Our Semi-Literate Youth? Not So Fast.”

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Hedges, Chris. “America the Illiterate.”

"World Internet Users Statistics Usage and World PopulationStats." Internet World Stats - Usage and Population Statistics. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Feb. 2013. <http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.h

"education -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia." Britannica Online Encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Feb. 2013. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/

"National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) - 120 Years of Literacy." National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Home Page, a part of the U.S. Department of Education. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Feb. 2013. <http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp>.

Social Media Wildfire

When something big happens in the world, sad to say, I usually hear about it on Facebook or Twitter. Seldom do I hear about something for the first time because I hear about it on the news or read about in the paper. The problem with Twitter being a news source is that the posts about newsworthy topics are almost always opinionated. However, I guess that’s true with newspaper and news sites as well. It’s nearly impossible in this day and age to hear any news from an unbiased point of view. With Twitter, though, it’s usually biased in an uneducated way. People tweet things in fits of fury and without learning the facts.

A good example of this is what happened with the whole Joseph Kony fiasco. A YouTube video gone viral and several trending hashtags like #STOPKONY and #KONY2012 resulted in a social media explosion. Social media causes certain news topics to spread like wildfire, and it’s because people are so quick to retweet or lazily form an opinion. There was a CNN study that proves social media (like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Myspace) is the number one way to spread news and is accountable for half of news sharing that is done online.

I asked a friend how he heard about news, he told me about how he gets pop notifications from CNN and NY Times on his phone. It’s crazy to think how much the times have changed. Now, you can program your cell phone to literally alert you when something newsworthy comes about, whereas before it took waiting each day for a new newspaper to be released. Now, the news comes to you and it’s getting harder and harder to stay out of the loop. 

A Changed Perspective on Blogs

While the whole concept of blogging seems tailored to my interests, this is the first blog I’ve ever stuck with. I can only assume this is due to the fact it is required of me for class, but no matter. The most challenging aspect of blogs in general for me is keeping it up to date. It always seems like there are hundreds of things I’d rather be doing in my limited free time than writing in a blog. But, writing in a blog is all about “vomit-writing”, or, in other words, just getting your thoughts out on a page. I journal all the time, but vomit-writing in a public fashion makes me nervous in a way. When I put writing out into the world, I want it to be refined and something I’m proud of. Letting go of all that is a huge challenge for me. 

My attitude towards blogs has absolutely changed. I’ve begun to appreciate them in a different manner, whereas before, I didn’t even give them the time of day. I used to view blogs in the same way I view whiny Facebook statuses, judging them for being too personal in such a public setting. I often hear the remark, “It’s Facebook, not your diary.” But blogging is a completely different world. In my opinion, the best facet of the blogosphere is the versatility. People can post about anything and everything, and the voices we hear on the internet aren’t just limited to those of published writers. 

ESSAY #1 (draft)

The world has been in a constant state of transformation since the beginning of time, but it seems now it is changing more than ever in this technological era. It wasn’t until around the mid-90’s that the internet even came into existence, and now, in 2013, it is nearly impossible to go a day without the help of technology. We can’t get across town without navigation, communicate face-to-face or even deal with the slightest ounce of boredom anymore. Since 2000, the internet has experienced a growth of roughly 153 percent; so this begs the question: what is this increased usage doing to our brains?

Nicholas Carr, in his article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” argues that the internet is “chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” I don’t dispute this at all; nor his assertion that he expects to “take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” There is an infinite amount of data that is constantly at our disposal; so we skim the details and move on if our attention isn’t grasped. We’ve turned into small children wandering the aisles of a Toys R Us, going from toy to toy, engaging with it for a second, discovering its usage then moving onto the next one. Carr notes that research used to entail digging through library periodicals, but now is just a Google search and a quick click of a few hyperlinks. Chris Hedges wrote the article, “America the Illiterate,” in which he asserts the internet is the fountainhead for illiteracy in America, and his argument is supported by several staggering statistics. Just to list a few:

“Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate.

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.

Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.”

Upon reading those for the first time, I was dumbfounded, and quite frankly, sad for our society. There’s no way to look at those statistics and dispute their severity. But, I ask you to take a step back from the cold hard facts. Consider life during the Enlightenment: an era known specifically for intellectualism, and still only the wealthy people could read. Literacy rates were abysmal, but that was primarily due to the lack of accessibility. Nowadays, the internet makes all the information in the world wildly accessible. It doesn’t necessarily matter who you are or how much money you have: if you can find your way to a computer then you can learn anything you want. 

The internet is changing the way we think and view the world, but that isn’t to say this change is ruinous to our society. In an editorial on our “semi-literate youth,” Andrea Lunsford gives us a valid warning on turning a blind eye to compelling alternate narratives. Maybe eighty percent of families didn’t buy a book last year because they’re using e-readers instead, or because most of their reading is done online. People are quick to invalidate internet reading because there is an unregulated flow of information, creating a potential for inaccuracy. This is true, but that’s why it’s important to take everything you read on the internet must be taken with a grain of salt. So when you read that Morgan Freeman has been announced dead (again) or that Obama is a Muslim terrorist, don’t forget to consider the source. 

Read this if you're literate

I consider myself a literate human being. I consider most of the people I come into contact with literate human beings. So what does this mean? 

There are a multitude of factors that have come to define literacy. Being able to read and comprehend what you’re reading might be the first thing that comes to mind. I can read most things, but what about when words like katabatic and scintillation start being thrown around? I find myself stumped, but that doesn’t make me illiterate. 

I guess what I took from “Literacy in Three Metaphors” is that literacy is contextual; it all depends on who you are, how old you are, where you’re from, ect. One point of Scribner’s I found especially compelling was “at one time, ability to write one’s name was a hallmark of literacy; today in some parts of the world, the ability to memorize a sacred text remains the modal literacy act. Literacy has neither a static nor a universal essence.” 

I felt like I was really on the same page as Lunsford in her editorial on literacy and youth. Writing is such an intrinsic aspect of my life; I can’t go a day without doing it. While I do enjoy to write, it’s not like I love it so much I can’t live without it--but in thinking about all the texts, emails, papers, notes, statuses, tweets... that’s all writing. And Lunsford points out that texting and social networking, while seemingly detrimental to our writing practices (as Carr and Hedges argued), are actually helping us develop a “repertoire of writing styles, tones and formats, along with a range of abilities.” Moreover, we know that a text we send to our best friend has to be constructed in a different fashion than a formal email to one of our professors. The technological age is improving our writing because it’s making it increasingly impossible to escape from it. 

@m3r!ca iz dum

I once read that people with ADHD tend to be more drawn to internet addiction because the internet moves as quickly as their minds do. And as a person with ADHD, I can completely attest to that. I’m not exactly sure what constitutes as an internet ‘addiction’, but I turn to the internet for information on almost everything. It could be argued that availability of information on the internet makes it easier for people to do more research faster. But, it’s making us all lazier; without having the burden of digging for information, we’re less likely to retain any of it. 

I don’t think Google is making us stupid, though. I do believe that it’s morphing the way we view the world. When a random notion or question pops into our head, all we have to do is pull out our cell phone and search for the answer. The internet is creating a society in which we all have a pithy, short-lived grasp on a multitude of subjects rather than a deep understanding in one. Carr says it best when he claims “[his] mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” We don’t have to search for information anymore, it comes to us. Before, it took a lengthy visit to a library to only get a fraction of the information that’s now at your fingertips when you’re sitting in bed. 

The statistics in “America the Illiterate” were shocking: nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate and barely literate, and 80% of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book. There were more, too, but they all described the same sad scene: that America is full of idiots. I think this can partially be attributed to websites like Twitter and AIM, where tweens find it more convenient (or something) to typ3 lik dis. Personally, text lingo is one of my biggest pet peeves. I can’t even begin to understand why the convenience of writing “ur” over “your” outweighs the concern of being considered an idiot after typing like that. 

From these two articles, I gathered that the stereotype of Americans being stupid and lazy is now statistically accurate. 

Defining Reading & Writing

Reading is following the writing of others with your eyes; it's mental engagement with text.

Writing is putting your thoughts on a page, manipulating your vocabulary to tell the vision in your head.

The definition of reading and writing together is English class.

Rewriting

When I was a freshman in high school, I decided to join the newspaper. It was an okay paper; there weren’t a lot of typos, and some of the articles were actually really good. (While most of them were still about school lunch and the “Backpack Policy,” a policy people didn’t care about at all.) My first role on the paper was to write articles, and by the next semester, I was the page editor for A&E. It was then that I realized I had somewhat of a knack for graphic design. Of course my pages in the paper weren’t without flaws; the programs we used took some getting used to. I would never have learned them, though, if not for all the magazines and books I used to breeze through, making mental notes of the little things I liked in all the award-winning pages. From there on out, drawing inspiration from other people’s work became the only way I could get my work done. Not only with the newspaper, but also with writing. 

That’s the first thing that came to my mind when reading the first chunk of Rewriting by Harris. He argues, “Almost all academic essays and books contain within them the visible traces of other texts--in the form of notes, quotations, citations, charts, figures, illustrations, and the like.” If you actually sit down and think about everything you’ve ever read or watched, you’ll notice a minuscule amount of it is original. It’s the same as aspiring to be more like a role model; we’re all constantly tweaking the way we write by taking note of the characteristics of our favorite writing. 

I read this book last year over Spring Break called Room by Emma Donoghue. I thought it was a really cool book; the narrator was this five-year-old boy who’s mother was kidnapped seven years prior. So this kid had never seen the light of day, and he thought everything that was on TV was imaginary and a bunch of other stuff but that’s not really the point. The point is, when I was in a creative writing class and had to write a story about anything, I chose to do what I saw in Room: make the narrator a little kid. My story was nothing like the plot of Room, but I never would’ve written it if I hadn’t read that book. 

So I realize I kind of went on a lot of tangents and failed to touch on a healthy portion of the blog prompt, but I’m good with that.  

Sullivan's "Why I Blog"

Andrew Sullivan’s article, “Why I Blog,” offers a unique perspective to the role of blogs in our society that I had never quite considered. Living in this day and age, it’s hard to believe that illiteracy was once the standard. Even when the printing press came around in the 15th century, the general population couldn’t read the texts being printed. Now, with the presence of blogs in our world, it’s possible to press “post” and have one’s thoughts and opinions be available to anyone with a computer. 

Sullivan also points out that blogging is inherent with journalism, but in a much more immediate sense. Newspapers come out daily, or sometimes even less frequent than that, but with blogging, “we blog now--as news reaches us, as facts emerge.” It’s misguided to deny that newspapers are dying, and the internet and blogs are what’s pulling that trigger. Our society has become so accustomed to immediacy. If something of importance happens in the world, it only takes a matter of minutes for it to spread across the world wide web. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook... with all the reposts, retweets and shares, everyone already knows the news before the newspaper even hits the press. 

I never took a moment to consider the notion that with blogs, you are reading backwards in time. Sullivan states, “They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them.” The idea that the reader knows the end before the writer is so intriguing to me, and that has made me appreciate blogs in a whole new light. 

Creating a blog

I’ve only stumbled across a few blogs that, by my standards, have been deemed worth reading. While technology and writing are both interests for me, I’ve always been hesitant to create a blog because I’ve never thought anyone would care about anything I had to say. 

However, this blog is mandatory. The word mandatory is strapped with so many negative connotations, but I’m viewing this whole blog situation in a more positive sense. I hope I come to appreciate blogs more and come to enjoy writing through a different medium. 

Creating the actual blog was not difficult at all. From a technological standpoint, all it took was a couple clicks of the mouse and a blog was born. Technology and the internet generally comes easier for me, but I wouldn’t doubt my Nana would be able to pull this off (and she’s just getting used to email). 

One surprising aspect of Blogger is that it is owned by Google. Well, maybe “surprising” isn’t the right terminology because it is no surprise that Google literally runs the world. It’s hard to even imagine the true power and influence Google has in this world; it’s possible to get everything you could ever want out of the internet without deviating from Google. They have email, social networking, documents, a search engine, maps, shopping, videos, blogs and countless other functionalities.

Another internet-based company with a wide range of influence is Facebook. There are a lot of commonalities between blogs and Facebook, the first and foremost being you can tell a lot about a person by reading their page. With pictures, videos, statuses, it takes nothing to see what a person looks like, what they like and how they think. Similarly, by reading someone’s blog, you can see what kind of writer they are (which is very revealing in my mind) and what their views are on the world around them. 

I think I’ve gone on long enough to satisfy this assignment, and with lack of a better conclusion, I suppose I’ll just say bye.