Blog 5, Harris & Sullivan

Harris has what I think is an excellent view of what writing should be. I have often found myself writing summaries of texts that merely scrape the surface of the meaning that the author was attempting to get across. I feel as though some teachers have led me to believe that every text has a specific meaning or thesis behind it. Harris, on the other hand, notes that reading and writing should be more dynamic than that. The reader needs to work with the text in a sense, yet at the same time look beyond it.  Using the writer’s idea, the reader can then formulate his or her own ideas or opinions of the topic. I pictured this as the reader having a mental discussion with the text. This is what I like about this perspective of reading and writing; it leaves much more room for the audience to make their own interpretation and in the end it creates better discussion

            Sullivan and Harris share similar views on writing. Both authors refer to writing as a conversation that should not strictly follow one main idea. But we should also note that they both see the conversation in a different way. Sullivan explains how blogging contains raw feeling and emotion, but this type of conversation is informal and sometimes shallow. Whereas Harris explains how formal text can lead to many complex thoughts, therefore one must follow certain steps to divulge these ideas and formulate opinions of their own. 

Blog # 4

It was not surprising to me that all the Internet logs I looked at had some form of interaction with Facebook.  This really made me think of how many people use this website. It is astounding how many people use Facebook, nearly 800 million! If you really think about it, if you live in the United States and own a computer, you probably also have a Facebook. This social networking site has revolutionized communication. You can essentially know a person’s relationship status, political views, and occupation without talking to them for years or even knowing whom they are. 
           While reading these blogs, I found it intriguing how often we use Google. Nearly every blog mentioned a search conducted in Google. The simplicity and instant gratification that comes with Google is probably the reason why so many of us in our generation use it everyday. But is this simplicity and instant gratification good for us? I’m not so sure. In a sense it makes infinitely smarter because we are able to answer any question just by typing it into the Google Search bar. But this too may be the reason why it makes us less intelligent. By simply looking up the answer to a question, we are eliminating all contexts to that answer. In a textbook, however, you gain the knowledge of all the context of the answer. In the end it may help you have a better educated opinion of the subject matter.

            

just loggin' my bloggin' (and other internet activity)

Sunday

5:45 am checked weather and snow reports for Beaver Creek and Breckenridge

1:13 pm skimmed through newsfeed on mobile phone

5:02 pm blackboard

5:12 pm youtube- video on population

9:25 pm visited theclymb.com to see of there were any good deals

9:48 pm periodically checked facebook while on stumbleupon

10:05 pm check the weekly forecast for Denver on NOAA (weather.gov) and National Weather Service (weather.com)

Monday

8:15 am checked current weather for Denver

11:10-11:26 am facebook, commented on a status and looked at pictures of a friend from home

11:31 am-12:10 pm blackboardà read article on National Geographic

1:00 pm theclymb.com visiting for same reason as before

1:05 pm NOAA à looked at various maps and forecasts from around the country

1:20 pm googleàfound website to calculate my ecological footprint. Apparently if everyone in the world lived like me, we would need 4.5 Earth’s worth of natural resources (and that’s below average for an American!)

3:30 pm check facebook newsfeed for only a few minutes

5-5:50 pm checked random blogs

6:33 pm went on facebook to watch a friends stand up routine that he asked me to watch, check it out he has few good jokes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUNo0DzuMMs

7:04 pm blackboard

7:09 pm roomate showed me the video “like a bus” on youtube

8:58 pm blackboard

8:59 pm checked newsfeed on facebook and looked at profiles of people I haven’t seen in a while

9:15 pm checked standings on nhl.com

10:08-11pm watched ski and snowboard videos on youtube

Tuesday

7:15 am checked local weather

8:40-9:30 am looked up questions on google to help answer lab questions

3:35-4 pm wrote this blog post

Living in the now? Who needs that when you can write in the now?

Sullivan has an interesting take on blogging, which I love. One aspect of this form of writing that he feels is the most important is the freedom it provides. Instead of sitting there and reviewing your piece several times before you submit it, your thoughts are transferred instantly to the web, available to any reader interested in reading it. Sullivan compared this uninhibited form of writing to taking a narcotic calling it, “intoxicatingly free”.

This liberating sense of writing also comes with risk. Through a blog, your ideas are subject to any form criticism from anyone. When constructing a formal piece of writing, however, one must stick to a main idea and make sure that the facts in this idea are true. The writer must then get approvals from editors and other bosses and does not receive feedback from his intended audience for quite sometime. Blogging has no such filter. The act of putting your most recent ideas into text reveals something personal about writer according to Sullivan. This makes the blogger much more vulnerable as he/she will receive much more brutal and personal attacks on their writing. Although the immediacy of blogging is thrilling, it too reveals an intimate part of the writer.

This is what scares me about blogging, the fact that my personal thoughts and views are now available for anyone to look at and for anyone to comment on. It’s a daring game in a sense, to put yourself out there in a way that makes you feel free, yet at the same time putting yourself in a position that allows virtually anyone to attack your personal views and morals.

Too Easy

Creating this blog was almost too easy. It’s amazing how all you need is five minutes of your time to click a few things and fill in a few blanks to essentially post anything you want. Anyone with minor social networking experience would have found this process just as simple as I did.

 If you think about it, it was not all that long ago that people were getting all of their news from either the newspaper or television. Now people are getting their news from online blogs, journals, articles and social networking sites. This leads one to beg the question, how reliable is the internet today? With all the information available on the web, how much of it are we really able to trust? Of course there are many obvious examples of people posting false information on blogs and so on. But lets say for discussion sake that a college student received a B on a paper about the fundamentals of existentialism. He feels pretty confident about his work and decides to put it on the internet. Maybe he sells it to one of those websites that will sell essays to people who want to buy them, or maybe he creates a blog and posts his essay. Either way that essay is now available to billions of people and chances are someone down the line will look at it. It could be a high school student studying for a test on existentialism or professor interested in the title of the essay. Although the essay was not totally unreliable, there was probably information in it that you could not trust.

My point is that creating this blog has demonstrated to me how easy it is for someone to get an opinion or information out there. I personally use the internet a great deal for any paper I have, but as more and more people begin using the internet everyday, I feel as though the integrity of the information that out there is decreasing due to its simplicity.