Extra Credit Blog

Around Christmas time, I found a book on sale for four bucks at Borders. It was called "American Nerd: The Story of My People." With a title like that, how could I not buy it? I've been reading it off and on this semester, mostly during my hour long break before this class, and I've found it very interesting. The book is broken into three parts: "a history of the nerd," "among the nerds," and "my credentials." The first section, of course, looks at where the word came from. It also gives a brief explanation of how the United States grew to be so infatuated with sports and manliness. In the chapter "the rise of phys ed," it's interesting to me that our own state, Ohio, was the first to establish phys ed requirements in public schools, in 1892. Part two of the book, "among the nerds," provides glimpses into different groups of people that might be considered nerdy, from debate club to D&D. There is also an interesting chapter on Asperger's syndrome. The final section is the author Benjamin Nugent's "credentials," extending upon the few chapters through out the book where he discussed his own experiences with D&D and bullying. This book relates very much so to what we've discussed throughout this semester about identity. Even the title: "The Story of My People." It's about HIS people and understanding why they are the way they are and how they identify with one another.

Concerns for Our Final Project

While I'm mostly confident that my interviewees are conversational young people who will give me a fair amount to work off of, I'm concerned about the need for academic resources for this paper. This isn't the first time I've tried to address online media like blogs in a paper, and I'm not sure there is a lot of serious information to be found. When I think "academic" resources, I think statistics or other research. I was wondering if an essay, similar to the one's we've read in class, or even one of the ones we have read in class, count for this requirement? I was also wondering if we had to cite our interviewees on our work cited page. Seeing how some of my interviewees are people I met online, I wouldn't be sure how to do that - some don't provide full names on their profiles and I'm communicating through online messages. Also, would you like to have a physical copy of my paper and work cited page, or will grading off the web page suffice?

In-Class "Something Instead of Nothing"

1. We recently discussed the irony that we can't really point out what is "cool." This relates to identity, in that we can't always recognize others' or our own identity. We can be interpreted in different ways. Klosterman spoke on this in this essay because we can express ourselves and our identity in interviews, but not always honestly. People can lie to make themselves more interesting, or their answers could be unintentionaly skewed by the question or circumstance.


2. Klosterman's overarching research question is why people respond in interviews.


3. He shows in this essay that there are many reasons why people answer questions and there are different circumstances. This is adequate because there probably isn't one definite answer.


4. We believe that people's responses will always be a little skewed by bias in an attempt to make themselves sound better. Therefore, it is hard to trust an interviewee to tell the whole truth.


5. We disagree because a totally reasonable person could still have a great idea worth sharing or a product to sell and an interivew is a good way, if not in some cases the only way, to accomplish that.

Why Do People Talk?

I enjoyed reading what Ira Glass had to say about interviewing, and talking in general. She talked about how it's such a rare thing in our lives to have someone genuinely listen to what we have to say. Klosterman describes Glass as amicable and sincere, and she describes herself as legitimately curious about what people have to say. It seems this interest and sincerity would certainly help a person to open up to Glass in an interview. It's like when someone speaks to us excitedly and that excitement is contagious, the interviewee would respond to Glass with the same sincerity. Also, being genuinely interested in what a person has to say would help an interviewer because I think people would be more apt to respond simply because it is such a rare thing to have someone wholly listen to you. In class, or even out with friends, we don't hang on our professors', acquaintences', or friends' every word. In class or conversation, we get the gist of the physics lesson or the story about our friend's cat, enough for us to get by. In an interview, we are looking for interesting things for our paper or article; looking for direct quotes to add character and reliability; we really have to listen. This gives the speaker control and they may like that, as well, giving them another reason to respond.

Cool Hunters and The Simpsons

In Gladwell's article, he pointed out the paradox of cool - as cool becomes known or mainstream, it becomes uncool. For this reason, what is "cool" at any given time can be hard to name. This irony is portrayed in The Simpson's episode when the parents ask the kids if they're cool. The kids insist their parents aren't cool, and even though their mother says she doesn't care about being cool - her indifference still isn't cool. So what is? They don't really know, either.

Cool Hunting

"Coolhunting is not about the articulation of a coherent philosophy of cool. It's just a collection of spontaneous observations and predictions that differ from one moment to the next and from one coolhunter to the next."

For this reason, among others, cool hunting isn't all that reliable. Clearly, cool isn't the same to everyone, everywhere. While there are magazines and websites for alternative rock, there's the same for hip-hop, for pop music, for country. With these come different styles and products. Baysie was looking for a different "cool" with Converse than with Reebok. The kids in the shoe store in New York where she realized she should move one sneaker to the boys' section could careless what type of shoe Kurt Cobain was wearing when he died. Location determines cool, too. As DeeDee said that Texas is behind New York in "cool," she would probably say that the kids in the village where I'm from are even behind the nearby cities, but it seems to me that Texas should have a different idea of cool from New York and villages from cities.

One good observation that Gladwell made was the paradox that as the cool hunter's find cool, it changes. As band's become mainstream, many people who never heard of them think they're a cool new band while many of their original fans turn their backs for selling out. Before Twilight made it big, the kids who read vampire novels like Ann Rice's were considered "goth" and mocked by the "cool" kids. The popular social networking sites have changed with time, from Myspace, to Facebook, to Twitter. Soon people will be updating on a new site and leave their Facebooks to be forgotten as they have their Myspace accounts. Cool hunters will pick up on this, followed by advertisers, news and radio stations, and then the cool will move on once again.

Powerpoint

I both agree and disagree with Tufte because Powerpoint can be both good and bad. I think that Powerpoint presentations can be used correctly, in correct settings to add to a lecture or project. I am very slow at taking notes and understanding material; if my professors did not put much of their lecture on slides for the class, I might not be able to follow at all. However, Tufte makes a very good point in saying that:

Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. (...) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days (...).

I sat in on a friend's writing class at Akron U my junior year of high school. The day I went, the students were presenting short research projects of idealistic vacations. These students did worse on these projects than the videos fellow students and I were making for our Applied Communications course at my high school. The slides had very little material and no citations. However, the students did include a lot of photos, and even some effects between slides. I was astonished at how little effort was actually put into the projects and I think that this level of work is what Tufte is afraid of.

In-Class Google Questions

1. When Carr says that his mind is changing, one thing that is changing is his ability to focus on books or long articles. The internet allows us to browse and get the gist of information with out sitting and reading entire essays or books.

2. Carr cites research and hyperlinks as benefits of the internet. As a journalist, search engines put research and information at his finger tips and, unlike footnotes in books that just point in the direction of related sources, links do the job for him, shooting him across the web.

3. Carr illustrates his statement that media can shape the process of thought as well as supply the stuff of thought in his expectation of information in other media to be presented in a quick and clear stream, as it is on the web. This explains why he has become impatient with reading whole books.

4. It would seem that Carr is concerned that Google's omnipresence is making us stupid. He shows much interest in the way in which it changes our thought process and the way we skim and get the gist of information.

Changing How We Read and Write

The scene is a junior high classroom, the year - 2006. Seated beside one another, girls attempt to pass notes with out being noticed; casually reaching down, grabbing the folded paper, stuffing it inside a notebook and checking their surroundings before unfolding it to read. Inside, what would you find? Besides smudged cursive and gossip - textspeak was also a common sight. My friends often used "lol" or "haha" in notes. Emoticons were making their way from our instant message conversations at night, to our notes during class.

Being junior high girls, of course, it isn't all that shocking that silly things like smiley faces made their way into our notes - but it's sometimes hard to imagine writing to someone with humor and not including an "lol" or "haha," as so often was seen on Myspace at the time, and is seen today on Facebook. The way we communicated was immediately changed with the introduction of textspeak into our lives. This is a similar phenomena to that which Carr is speaking of in his article, however, I'm not sure we should judge it so harshly.

Shakespeare to Twain to the writers of tomorrow - language is always changing. That is not to say we should be allowed to use "lol"'s in school work, but I don't think it should be so frowned upon that we are shaping our own language - we are not the first to do so, and certainly won't be the last. I do agree with Carr that I feel my attention growing shorter and shorter for books and long articles - including his. The information available at the tip of our fingers on the Internet isn't all bad, though, as he pointed out: "A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after." And, in the same way, writing papers for class has become a lot easier for us students.

"Billy Sim" In-Class Questions

1. One thing that our group agreed was interesting with respect to identity was the idea that everyone is wrong about their own identity. It's an interesting thought that we could interpret ourselves so wrongly as to think that as we sit alone at a party, we are oxtroverts, or as we greet and speak to everyone that we could see ourselves as introverts.

2. This piece's discussion of creating virtual identities relates to Evan Ratcliff's vanishing and creating a new identity in the digital age.

3. Our group agrees that the use of technology is not making children think like computers, but rather making them lazy and to rely on computers.

A "Final Draft" of Who We Are

In high school, our art teacher told us that our work was never really finished, we just stopped at interesting points. I think this echoes to many other fields. Stories ending with some self-realization or happy ending are still cliff hangers, leaving these fictional peoples with lives to live off the page. There is always more to the story in a newspaper or magazine - a back story, plans for the future, the opinions of those not interviewed. We, like the oil paint on our canvas, the characters in our books, or the subjects of our articles, are works in progress, never done, just pausing at interesting times. We are students today, professionals in years to come, later to be parents, grandparents, retirees on cruises or paying with change for our ice cream cones. We are always developing characters, full of depth and life, and there is no "final draft" until death.

Billy Sim

"Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time."

I loved that, in choosing his avatar's personality traits, Klosterman said this, that everyone is wrong about everything. His hypothesis seems pretty accurate, pointing out that many extroverts believe they are introverts, optimists see themselves as cynical, average people call themselves "creative." This relates, I think, to our discussion before about writers. People who are talented writers can feel disappointed by their own work, while others who may not be so talented may see themselves as so; and teenagers with cameras and pictures of trees think they are photographers. Perhaps everybody isn't wrong all the time, but we can certainly have different perceptions and misconceptions about ourselves and others.

"[...] I was doomed to live in my own prison, just like the singer from Creed."

Living in Ohio, where weather destroys the roads each winter, Klosterman's realization that he could never escape road construction is especially relevant. His expression, here, of feeling trapped in a prison reminds me of the Benjamin Franklin quote: Nothing is certain but death and taxes. This is a reality and when it sets in, it is very easy to feel trapped.

Palahniuk’s Slumming

“It's important to be aware. She still wants to make a difference.”

It was easy for me to assume that these characters were very one-dimensional. Inky’s quips about this being the new that – lime is the new pink, insanity is the new sanity, dressing down is the new dressing up – gave the impression that she was only concerned with being in style and going along with the newest trends, no matter how absurd. With this in mind, it seemed very likely that Packer and Evelyn were less concerned with the actual causes they were helping and more with the social gatherings that came with them. Spending their money on banquets, cocktail parties and silent auctions for various charities, perhaps as an excuse to show off their wealth. This assumption can be backed by their turn to social diving as soon as they were introduced to the concept. Evelyn easily gave up her silent auction for teen sex workers to spend the night on the streets, drinking cheap liquor and wrapping herself in a trash bag. Further more, she and Parker choose, out of embarrassment, not to go to the police about the kidnapped girl they witnessed. However, in the end, Evelyn continues to give money to the numerous charities she’s invited to, even though she doesn’t attend. So I’m left wondering - did she value charity before the death of her friend and husband or does she now feel obligated to make a difference because she has truly seen life on the streets and how the other half lives. Not totally surprising of Palahnuik, this is both a disgusting and thought-provoking passage.

Calling yourself a writer

Something that always bothered me in school was the girls I knew who called themselves photographers.They thought they were creative for taking pictures of the sky or a tree, using black and white or sepia. However, having a camera does not make you a photographer. You are not trained, you are not getting paid, you're just aiming and shooting. Kids do it all the time.
I have gone back and forth with whether I would call myself a writer for some time, in part because I hate to be hypocritical for my views of mediocre photography. For sometime, I kept a journal full of poems. This doesn't make me a poet. I certainly won't be entertaining a crowd or publishing a book any time soon, I was just being a teenager. I have also written news-styled blog entries, but few read them and I wasn't paid - so I'm not sure whether that makes me a writer, or just a blogger, or if those are the same. I won a couple short story contests in school, but I also won speech contests and art contests, and I am certainly not a public speaker or a painter. All I really know is that I like to write, to act, and to draw, among other things - why should I worry about what I call it?

Evan Ratliff and Other Vanishings

It’s something very romanticized by movies and books, I think. The idea of dropping off the grid, creating a new life for yourself. Even more so, of traveling the U.S. and touring with a rock band. Ratliff lived many people’s dream in the time that he was posed as both James Gatz and the “lazy roadie and moneyed patron” Don. However, in doing so, he lived in a very anxious state - even believing that a helicopter was following him on his morning jog. He worried that “They’d contacted my cat sitter; would they kidnap my cat?"
This story made me think of the many sort of conspiracy theories surrounding celebrities’ deaths. Some people believe that Elvis Presley or Kurt Cobain may have faked their own deaths and even be alive today. After reading this article though, it seems that this would be a very hard thing to do. Sure, Ratliff’s whole life was posted on the internet and there was a contest going on for his location - but isn’t this somewhat true for celebrities, as well? If these deaths were fake, Elvis and Kurt would be constantly be on edge, concerned about being seen, and eventually, I believe, they would be found out. And certainly by someone a little more professional than the various bloggers so concerned with them, such as “Proof: Elvis is Alive!!” and “Kurt Cobain is still alive.”

If Ratliff couldn’t hide his identity, what makes people think that the King of Rock ‘n Roll could hide his?

Literacy and Voice Questions

3. We both agree that texting and online communication, like Facebook, are writing because they communicate, but not writing in the sense that we talk about in school, like novels or academic papers.

4. It seems that the idea of voice and identity as is seen in writing can also be seen in music. One artist may have a similar sound to another, but they still have their own voice. We, as writers, may not have completely original ideas but we can take the ideas and information from others and shape it with our own voice and experiences.

5. A writer's voice can seem more authentic to us, but may not seem so to someone else because that authenticity can be subjective. An example of this could be seen in political writers, who some people respect while others see as biased.

6. Imitation is important in constructing our own sense of self because we can find ourselves in the voices of others, then build off of that. Music, once again, can serve as an example of this because we can relate to lyrics and take those feelings or ideas as our own.

"Why I Write" by Joan Didion

“Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.”

Didion is not the first writer I have seen say something like this. Like Didion did not know who the narrator would be for her novel, Jay Asher has said that he didn’t know who the speaker was going to be in his debut novel, Thirteen Reasons Why (an interview in the bonus material of the book). He had to see where the story took him and then revise. It turned out that the book goes between the speaker, Clay Jensen, and the audio of the tapes Hannah recorded for him and 12 others. Laurie Halse Anderson said about her popular book Speak (in an interview in the platinum edition) that she did not know in the beginning where the story was going. She said that the girl, Melinda, came to her in a nightmare and was trying to tell her something and she just had to write it down. Just as the reader doesn’t know until later in the book that Melinda had been raped, Anderson said she didn’t either.

I think it is really stirring, these author’s pull to write. They have images and voices in their heads that they can only get out through writing. This phenomena, of course, does not apply to all writers or all forms of writing, but is interesting.

I also thought it was interesting how Didion said that she couldn’t think. She said that she focused on concrete images or the “peripheral.” It’s strange to think that someone who is clearly intelligent, having written multiple novels, feels that she fails to think because she does so differently than others.

In-Class: Why Write?

We can learn almost anything from books, articles, and documents. We can provide others with our ideas and thoughts in various styles, as well. It is obvious that writing is an effective form of communication. More so, however, I think writing is a form of expression. Poetry, novels, speeches, letters; these things can give us much insight to a person’s beliefs or personality - as we discussed some last class with the Obama speech. Writing can be therapeutic, too. Keeping a journal, putting down on paper what you couldn’t possibly say out loud. With the growing popularity of social networking sites and online journals, however, communication and expression are coming together in a whole new way. Books, speeches and other types of writing have communicated ideas in an expressive way for a long time. However, we haven’t seen published diaries and private thoughts portrayed quite the way they can be now through blogs and status updates. We can connect with others with similar experiences and beliefs around the world. Today, this is why many people write: to connect with others.

Obama's Speech

We think that he made the changes to make the audience feel included, to engage them, both Republicans and Democrats. One line, Obama adds "I know that many in this country..." This addition shows that he wants to make his speech personal. He is not delivering it as a fact, but letting the audience know that he knows this, just as they do.

No one in our group really follows politics, so we don't have much of an opinion about the bloggers interpretation of this speech. We do, however, agree with the second paragraph's points about his drawing individuals as "active agents," because we feel that is important in relating to and engaging the audience.

Response to A&P

1. The two senses we felt from the end of this story were liberating and eye-opening. Sammy is realizing that he cannot grow up and mature in a job he hates, just because he was given the job. This realization and risk-taking is liberating. Also, Sammy realized, after taking this risk, that though it was necessary, this would lead to some tough times. This closing line is eye-opening for Sammy.
2. Porter sees Sammy's decision as one to live "honestly and meaningfully." In a way, we agree because if you disagree with the politics at your job it may be best for you to quit. However, quitting because his boss embarrassed a girl is very different than quitting a corrupt law firm - that would be living honestly and meaningfully.
4. The detail in this story helps to build the reader's interpretation of the character's identities. We also see more of Sammy's identity, not only in his decisions through out the story, but also in the way that he assumes things about the girls based on their descriptions.