Just Something to Look at...

My Sociology teacher showed us this video (or as much as she could before her computer froze, at least) today in class. I thought some of you might find it interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Essay Rough Draft

This is the first draft of my extended essay.

Any comments or corrections you have would be greatly appreciated! And feel free to make them directly on the document (Just make them noticeable, please.)

The areas I'd like specific help with are the conclusion (It's awful and corny. You'll see.), citation (right now I only have each author's name in the text. Should I also include the name of the article or piece of writing I'm referring to?), and most importantly, the overall feel/message of the paper. I'm concerned that I haven't actually said anything...

Thanks for your help!

I found this article through the JSTOR database on UofL's website. After skimming it, it seems to have some good points about how partaking in electronic discussions can help improve critical thinking skills. It points out that an electronic discussion incorporates practice of both traditional writing and in-class discussion. So students actually seem to be getting the best of both worlds.
I hope it may be helpful to someone.

technology can help critical thinking

There It Was.

Well, that wasn't so bad after all. After about a half of a semester, thirteen classes, and nine blog posts, I'm finally comfortable with this whole blogging thing. It really was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be; it's actually been kind of fun. I feel like I've come to develop a stronger and more to-the-point voice through blog writing that I haven't been able to achieve before, at least not when it comes to school assignments. I'm not even that worried about the formal essay we have to write because I feel like all of these posts have served as the warm-up for that one essay. I guess what I mean, more simply, is that I feel well-practiced in writing. And I also feel less intimidated by it. Lately, the process of writing doesn't seem to be as heavy or pressing as it used to be. Sure, I still pause between sentences to contemplate what I want to say, but I've found that writing, through a blog particularly, has helped me sort through my ideas as I write them. It truly is a form of "writing out loud." (I'm almost positive I got that quote right.)

To reflect on the class and assignments as a whole, I'd say I've been pleasantly surprised with everything we've been reading, writing, and discussing. Because of the articles we read by Sullivan, Carr, Hedges, and Thompson, I feel, in a way, like I'm one step ahead of my peers when it comes to the Internet. It's hard to explain, but before I had never really considered all that the Internet does for us. I mean, immediately it provides us with whatever news, entertainment, and/or information we could ever want, but it also has more long-term, and often hidden, effects. It changes the way we think, read, write, and interact with one another, which I had never slowed down enough to realize before. I guess I'm just excited to have this new outlook. And, even more, to feel like I've got a pretty good grasp of it.

Hedges vs. Thompson

For this latest post, we were assigned to read articles by both Chris Hedges and Clive Thompson, both of which assess the impact the Internet has on society, but both portray largely contrasting ideas.

To preface, I found Hedges' last article so personally upsetting that I almost want to boycott all of his ideas just to spite him. (Cause that'll really break him, I'm sure.) But his most recent article we were assigned to read, "Bad Days for Newsrooms - and Democracy," actually had some ideas that were not completely fabricated and seemed to me to be pretty legitimate. Reluctantly, I'd even say I agree with some of them...

The whole idea of his text is that news reporting, particularly from newspapers and television news networks, is dying and being replaced by a lesser, Internet-based form of journalism. To Hedges, newspapers "keep citizens engaged with their cultural, civic and political life," or they're supposed to at least. Lately though, he argues, news reporting is not presenting "real news," but instead "another form of mindless amusement and entertainment." I'm not sure I completely agree with this, but then again, I'm not exactly sure what he means by this statement either. Of course, all things in society evolve, news reporting is no exception. Today's methods of reporting are not the same as they were 20 or even 10 years ago, but I think the news is still educating us on the important and greater issues at hand, and more importantly, is being heard by a wider audience. Hedges attributes this change in reporting to the Internet, saying it "defies the purpose of reporting." He claims that people who go to the Internet for their news, gravitate toward sites that will confirm their own beliefs, thus learning only one side of the story. "Facts for many bloggers," he points out, "are interchangeable with opinions." These, to me, are all very good points. I think that news is losing some of its raw legitimacy. Rather than simply presenting society with the facts and letting us form our own opinions, news seems to come with a built-in kind of decoder and biased undertone. It's good when journalists get to share their ideas, and even better when an audience questions and debates those ideas, but as we know, this last step does not always happen. To say it again, it's easy for people to confuse opinions with facts. And who can blame them with the opinions are appealing and easy to understand?

The other article we read, "Clive Thompson on the New Literacy," is much more approving of the Internet and its effects on society, particularly the effects on our writing and reading skills. Based on the studies of Stanford University's writing and rhetoric professor, Andrea Lunsford, Thompson offers that "young people today write far more than any generation before" and are "remarkably adept...[at] assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across." (Finally, some respect!) It was very refreshing to read Thompson's article and know that not everyone looks at the Internet as the doom of the American people, or views today's youth as stupid and incapable. We are living in the "Information Age" and are sharing information and ideas more than ever, to wider audiences than ever before. I think both Hedges and Thompson would agree that this is a good thing we're doing and something we should continue doing. We just need to remember to think responsibly.

"America the Illiterate"

My initial reaction to the article by Chris Hedges was this: outrage.

Although I just read Harris's advice to "form the habit of questioning your first responses," I don't see any way around it this time. Sorry, but I'm sticking with outrage.

I will however, try my best to be both generous and skeptical (mostly skeptical, I'll admit) of the text he provides. I'll start by being generous. Of course, I have to recognize the validity of the statistics that he provides - however sad and depressing they may be - and realize the truth behind them. For example, Hedges writes that "nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate" and that number continues to grow. He then adds that "eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book," and that nearly half of all college graduates and a third of all high school graduates, never read a book after they finish school. These are some scary pieces of information. Perhaps I'm having such a hard time appreciating this article because I don't want to accept these basic facts. I don't know. Either way, I don't like what he's writing.

I can also understand his frustration with the American people. I especially agree with his idea of Americans having this contrived sense of superiority. He says: "We ask to be indulged and entertained by cliches, stereotypes and mythic narratives that tell us we can be whomever we want to be, that we live in the greatest country on Earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities and that our glorious future is preordained, either because of our attributes as Americans or because we are blessed by God or both." This kind of societal uppity that we have developed as a people really upsets me too. It's definitely my least favorite thing about America.

Well, now comes the skeptical part. I want to start by saying I do not at all appreciate the message of this text. To me, it seems completely hopeless and backward. He himself is the bully - the "elitist" - that he describes in his text. He is the literate, well-educated one, but he's not doing anything to help those who aren't. He says we live in two Americas, which are basically, from my understanding of his argument, one made up of those who are fortunate and have been taught how to think, and one made up those who are not so lucky and simply scrape by with their limited knowledge. But don't you think he's worsening this divide by allowing it to continue? Sure, his text addresses the issue. That's a start. But surely he realizes the only people who will read his text are those living in his same, literate America.

Yes, literacy is an issue that needs to be dealt with, but in a much different way than Hedges goes about doing. I'm just not really sure what he even hoped to achieve through wiriting this article. Did he want to scare people? To frustrate them more? To make them feel either superior or inferior, depending on which "world" they belong to? Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see the point in doing any of these things. I don't like being told that my country "lives in a state of permanent amnesia" and "exists in a non-reality-based belief system." I don't like being told that all we understand are "images and slogans," and that "we do not seek or want honesty." There is no evidence to these ideas. They are Hedges' opinions, and while he is entitled to his opinions, I disagree. Maybe I’m naïve, but I highly doubt that anyone makes the conscious effort to avoid literacy skills, to avoid knowledge, to avoid truth. People are good and desire to do good things, but Hedges' text does not offer much encouragement.

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

I sure hope not.

Though that is the question Nicholas Carr asks and attempts to answer in his article for the Atlantic Monthly, which he wrote a little over a year ago. (And to think, Twitter, the quick and to-the-point social networking site, wasn't even around a year ago...What does this say about Carr's ideas??) I'm not sure Carr ever reaches a clear answer to his question, but he does provide plenty of information that both confirms and denies reason to be worried. He spends most of the article noting how people's attention spans have shortened, and their ability to think deeply and critically has weakened. He even gave a few examples of intellectual writers and readers who have changed their once laborious habits into new, significantly condensed forms. Forms, Carr argues, that replicate those produced by the Internet. "Media," he says "are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought." It is only natural then, for people to think like a computer "thinks" - quickly, precisely, and factually. This is fine, except that it "leaves little place for the fuzziness of contemplation." Put simply, we are beginning to think less like humans and more like machines. We are losing our tendency to question. How horrifying is that? And what's more, the people working for Google seem to have made it their main goal in life to harness artificial intelligence and create an artificial brain that may even be smarter than the typical human brain. (!)

While the romantic in me does not like this one bit, my realistic side knows that the Internet is not a bad thing. Sure, it may be changing our way of thinking, but we are still thinking. The very fact that there is such advanced technology is because we (people, in general) have been able to think about and then create it. And no, I don’t think Google is making us stupid. (Spoiled and slightly lazy? Yes. But not stupid.) It provides us with more information than we could ever need or want, all we have to do is press a few keys and click a few buttons. It really is a pretty ideal system. The only thing that would be stupid would be to not take advantage of it.

To further this argument, most (if not all) of my English 105 classmates reported that they visited Google, along with numerous other websites, and none of us are stupid. In fact, we are still capable of carrying on intelligent discussions and thoughtfully reading, ingesting, translating, and rewriting information placed before us.

Harris vs. Sullivan

After reading Jacob Harris's introduction, it seems to me that he wants writing to lose its' stigma of being this strict, old-school, academic-based undertaking, to being more of a realisic, appealing, and approachable process, much like the process of blogging. He wants people to realize that writing can be fun and everyone can do it. Specifically, he focuses on the process of working with texts, or reading and then rewriting them in your own words. This is his main concern throughout the first chapter of his book and coincidentally, my main concern as I write this blog post. He urges the reader to question the text at hand and decipher what its' writer is atually trying to do with the text. That is, he wants us to analyze the ideas behind the ideas, if that makes sense. Harris writes that "a text always says both less and more than its writer intends," and so it is our job, as educated readers, to fill in the gaps with our own writings.

This act, essentially, is what blogging does. As Andrew Sullivan mentioned in his article, blogging is a more personal, free-form style of writing that allows someone to think out loud. And further, a blogging community is a perfect place for the sharing and discussing of ideas to ignite our thinking. In many ways, bloggers are the kind of expert academic readers that Harris describes. They analyze texts, turn them into something personal, and get at the core of their message. While I think both Harris and Sullivan would agree that blogging is a form of writing, I am willing to propose that blogging is perhaps writing in its truest form.

A Breakdown of My (Internet) History

Let me start by saying I’m not a huge fan of the image my Internet log creates of me. Although I have recently come to terms with the fact that I am a rather mild human being, it’s not exactly something I want to have advertised. But I’m a good sport and I can take it in stride. I just want it to be known though, that I am not a regular visitor of goldenkey.com, nor do I research study abroad programs on a regular basis. This assignment just happened to have caught me on a bad (or maybe good?) weekend when I was feeling overly productive and slightly pressured by my Mom.

With that being said, all of the other websites I visited can pretty much always be found in my computer’s history. Google is my homepage and I generally use it to find answers to any and all of my questions. That’s probably the site I visit most often. In fact, Google, Facebook, and UofL’s website are probably my top three most visited sites, with youtube coming in a close fourth. I use the Internet as a source of knowledge and entertainment, as I’m sure most people do. I wouldn’t consider myself very adept at “surfing the web” and finding new things to look at and read; I generally stick to what I know or have been told about. What’s surprising to me though is that most of my classmates also only have about a handful of websites that they visit regularly and the rest are just things they look at on the side here and there. This makes me wonder if my generation is really as hooked on technology as everyone claims. I like to think that we’re not.

Internet Useage

These are the notes I took on my Internet useage for 48 hours. Thankfully, there's nothing too embarrassing to share. Take a look:

Friday September 4:
Time Website Visited Activity
9:05 - 9:10 am www.louisville.edu check groupwise email, reply to a classmate's message

9:10 - 9:12 am www.swimplan.com get a workout

9:12 - 9:23 am www.facebook.com check message inbox, respond to wall posts and photo comments

3:00 - 3:10 pm www.facebook.com check message inbox, accept friend request, update status ("eating an apple is the nicest thing you could do for your tastebuds today"

3:10 - 4:05 pm www.louisville.edu check groupwise email
www.youtube.com watch German rap video ("Spass") hyperlinked through Groupwise
www.louisville.edu go to Blackboard and print Astronomy notes, check Psychology link to online assessments, email instructor that link doesn't work
www.youtube.com watch "How to be Emo"
www.louisville.edu email Sociology teacher response to "How to be Emo" youtube video

Saturday, September 5:
Time Website Activity
11:45 - 12:05 pm www.joingoldenkey.org join, fill out form, pay via credit card

12:00 - 1:00 pm www.louisville.edu check GPA (for Golden Key form), check groupwise email, peruse study abroad info

3:00 - 3:10 pm www.google.com search to find song title "Goodbye Stranger" by Supertramp
www.youtube.com listen to "Goodbye Stranger"

4:00 - 4:05 www.mapquest.com get directions to house (to babysit)

Andrew Sullivan

Before this assignment, I had never even heard of Andrew Sullivan, much less read anything he had written, but after reading his text “Why I Blog,” I have decided that his is a voice worth listening to. I have gathered that he is a credible writer with a well-established career and numerous achievements under his belt. What impresses me most though, is that Andrew Sullivan, this middle-aged man (I’m assuming), has surprisingly young ideas. While most people tend to cling to the customs of their own generations, he seems to have taken on today’s revolutionary ideas (at least those relating to writing) – despite how fast-paced and technological infused they are. He recognizes the importance of falling-in with time, of living in the here and now. And “words, of all sorts,” he writes “have never seemed so now.” This, I think, is the most obvious reason why Mr. Sullivan blogs. He simply will not allow himself to remain unchanged, will not deny himself new opportunities for knowledge, and will not avoid the truth.

More simplistically though, I think Andrew Sullivan enjoys the thrill of blogging. I think he likes sitting in front of the computer, typing out his thoughts for the moment, and noticing how those thoughts may completely change by the time he writes his next post. I think he likes the constant feedback from his readers. I think he likes taking the risks and experiencing the fearlessness that come with blogging. And I think he likes the urgency it commands. He writes that “blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive.” I think that analogy just about sums it up.