Biggest obstacle for final project

The biggest obstable I see myself having with the final project is that I decided on using a pictorial essay as my medium to present my argument. I forsee that I may run into some issue's as I form the pictorial essay because I may find that it is not be the best way to present my arguement. I guess my biggest concern for the assignment is just maybe a little more clarification on what makes a good pictorial essay or some main points to follow as guidelines, just so I can make sure that I can present my arguement using this medium or if another would be a better choice.

Something Instead of Nothing

In all honesty I have never put as much thought into interviews, as Klosterman did, like about the people asking questions, and how people answer the questions. I always just figured that someone wanted to know something or see what people thought so they asked questions and people would just answer. Not why they choose to respond and why they do not just ignore the person interviewing them or that maybe not all of or any of what the interviewee’s responses could be untruthful. I found it sort of funny but really interesting how Prince reacted when he was being interviewed. He would not let the interviewer take any form of documentation of the interview, they weren’t allowed to record it, or even just jot down a few key points or a quote. That way the interviewer had to recall the entire interview from memory later. He did this so that he could not be quoted accurately and that way whatever he said could not be misquoted or the context could not be changed in any way since there was nothing written down or recorded. I also found it interesting that Klosterman interviewed so many people and had asked numerous amounts of questions, and yet he still admitted that he lied during some interviews. This kind of confused me. I feel that if it was my job to be interviewing people it may frustrate me if I knew that people were not giving truthful answers to the questions that I was asking. I did find this reading somewhat useful because it made me think about the final project and when I interview people and how I ask the questions. Like how Klosterman says that people will open up more if they feel that the interviewer is interested and actually cares what they have to say, whether they actually do or not.

in class- something instead of nothing

1) Klosterman says that sometimes when he is being interviewed he does not answer the questions truthfully and he cannot explain why. He said that maybe it was because he has no compulsion to do right when people interview him even if the person who suffers from it is himself. 2)Klosterman's overarching question was why do people talk to eachother, or even bother responding to questions that people ask. 3)He answers it by explaining that if the person interviewing someone has an interesting question, it is hard for people to resist answering it. If the person asking the questions acts like they care about the response the person is going to give, then that person is more likely to give a response and will talk more about themself. 4)After reading Klosterman talk about how trustworthy the answers of the interviewee are and how even Klosterman himself lies sometimes during an interview, it seems that you want to trust the interviewee's answer's are the truth but half the time they may be lieing. We are not necessarily the best informants of ourselves because Klosterman talks about how some people may subconsiously lie to make themselves appear in a different way or in the way they want to be themself. 5) People would not necessarily avoid interviews at all times because if the persons feels that the question they are asked they have an interesting response to they will be more likely to elaborate and talk about themselves. People like talking about themselves especially if someone seems like they care, even if they are just acting like they are interested even though they may not. 5)

in class: Simpsons/ "Coolhunters"

Last Friday's Simpsons episode can be connected to the Gladwell reading because Homer was shocked to find out that he was uncool according to Bart because he was stuck in his time of what he thought was cool from when he was younger and he was not up to date on all the new trends and things that were in. Homer also tries to be cool by taking his kids to a concert for a band they liked because he was trying to follow the trends by following what his kids considered to be cool. It connects to the Gladwell reading of how the two girls are constantly scouting for the new trends and searching for next new thing.

PowerPoint is Evil

I do agree with Edward Tufte that powerpoints today are just a downfall to what ever point you are trying to make or whatever information you are trying to get across. Personally I have never been a fan of PowerPoint, it was confusing to me. I do not understand the need for a professor that teaches lectures to just cram thirty some slides with information, sometimes cutesy pictures that go along with the lecture, and all of the various slide templates you can choose from to make the powerpoint look more appealing. In my opinion it doesn't, alot of the time it is somewhat hard to read off the powerpoint because of the colors and the design of the background. It is still boring to listen to a professor read off his/her powerpoint slides the entire lecture, no matter how nice it looks or what fun effects it has, plus it almost makes me think that my professor may not know all of the material they are trying to teach because they do not really add much to the lecture, besides maybe a few side comments/details or examples, they just read the content on the slides, which is alot of times very similar to what is in the book anyways. When professors use powerpoints for lectures, with a majority of the information already on the slides, and post them online it just makes me that much more unmotivated to go to that class because I can just read the lecture from the slides myself.

inclass: Google

1. What is changing is how easy it is to find information online. This is making people lazy. You can search something and find exactly what you’re looking for in a matter of seconds. Also this is causing people to lose their ability to concentrate because they can read a small paragraph and have their questions answered, or summarized so quickly.
2. The convenience of it all. You can find everything so quickly.
3. “But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.” “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
4. That people are going to rely too much on the internet to do the thinking for them. He is also concerned about losing self-reliance.

Is Google making us stupid?

I do agree with Carr in a way that Google is making us stupid, but I feel that Google is just re-training our brains in a much lazier way. He says that, "The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon." I do not fully agree with that statement because it is not fully the internet’s fault, because I have this issue every time I read. I have always had that fight to stay focused when reading and even when I was focused I still had trouble remembering what I had just read and it took a longer time for me to read. With the advancements in technology and the high speeds of the internet, now Google tries to "guess" what you are about to search, then it lists thousands of web links that pertain to what you have typed in. This just makes it easier to find what you looking for and eliminates the need to have to search through numerous amounts of books to find what you are looking for. Or if you do not know the answer to a question you can just type it into the Google search bar and after reading the short bit that is put under each link, along with bolded words that are related to your search, you can find a website that almost always will have what you are looking for. Google is just letting us not have to use our brains to think very hard or have to read lengthy books or articles to find an answer. Therefore, our brains get used to being lazy and people do not want to have to think when Google can just have the solution in just a few seconds.

Final Draft

I do not believe that we have a final draft of who we are. When we are born we are considered to be a "blank slate" and our personality and who we are forms from the influences of genes, heredity, environment, culture, society, and our family. As we grow up all of these factors effect and help shape us into the person that we become. Some may disagree that once you get to a certain age that we have enough experienced and know enough, that we are who we are and consider that to be our final draft. I think that since we will always still be meeting new people, going to different places, having changes (expected or unexpected) in our life, experiences and learning different things that we are always being influenced by our surroundings and therefore we will be adding to or editing the draft of ourself continuously.

"Billy Sim"

1) It was interesting how Klosterman was trying to re-create himself into a Sim character and how he tried to make it just like himself.

2)Klosterman's piece could be connected to one of the other readings Vanish, how the man created a new identity for himself, wore different outfits and then had people try to track him down. While Klosterman created a new identity for himself through a character just like him that he created on the Sims.

3) We don't necessarily agree or disagree with Klostermans arguement, it just depends on how much time children are using computers and how dependent they are on using them.

The Sims

I admit that I do own one of The Sim's games and that my friend Kelsey and I used to play the game and thought it was fun for a little while. After reading what Chuck Klosterman had to say about his experience playing the Sim's made me think back at all the hours that I must have spent playing the Sim's and how pointless and time wasting it really was. Chuck kind of took some of the fun out of playing the game. He said that "Clearly, video technology cages imagination, it offers interesting information to use, but it implicates that all peripheral information is irrelevant and off- limits. Computers make children advance faster, but they also make them think like computers." I somewhat disagree with him. I do not think that that video technology necessarily cages your imagination, although it may weaken it. Like when Chuck asked his niece about his Sim's character; about how he got there, if he had no job where the money came from, where he went to college, etc., and how she answered was by saying that's just the way it is. She could have used her imagination to make up a little background story about the character just like she would have about her Barbie doll. Except maybe if a parent decides to let their child play nothing but video games they may lack an active imagination, but is it technology to blame or would it be the parents fault for not limiting the time spent playing video games.

As Chuck went on playing the game he sort of became angered by the Sim character he created of himself because he had to keep him happy by buying him things and making friends. Chuck was mad because some of the materialistic things he purchased for his Sim would make him happy, but for other expensive things he bought, his Sim would become unsatisfied. Then when he bought a nice table, which was meant to impress the lady Sim that Chuck had met, he reaction was just to clap her hands excitedly. So Chuck decided to have a talk with the creator of The Sims, Will Wright, because he started to question what the purpose of life was. And basically what he said was that while playing this game people discover interesting things about themselves. Also that if by chance the game had changed a person’s perception of the world surrounding you, then the game was successful. I have never thought of the game in that way before. When I played The Sim’s I didn’t create a Sim that was just like me, I just created made up people and just had fun with the game.

Slumming

This weeks reading was somewhat confusing to me. "Poverty, is the new wealth. Anonymity is the new fame." It was shocking to me that this was what one of Mrs. Keyes friends, Inky, said. A wealthy woman who ran Vogue magazine sitting on a bench dressed in dirty clothes and wearing a terrible plastic grey wig, partaking in indecent activities with another wealthy man who was also dressed as a bum drinking a mixture of mouthwash, cough syrup, and Old Spice cologne. Why would these high class millionaires want to live the life of a homeless person on the streets when they could have litereally anything they could ever want? Simply because when they looked at their lives they were not satisfied. Their lifestyle of having banquests, fundraisers, and charities where they wrote thousands of dollars in checks for donations to help others became routine and boring.

Inky also says, "Think of it as a kind of poverty sorbet." "A nice little window of misery that helps you enjoy your real life." That almost seems ridiculous for someone to say. That you need to pretend that you are poor and homeless to appreciate the things you have, but at the same time gaining joy from this pretend lifestyle. I feel that if an actual homeless person could see what these people were doing they would probably be offended and find these people very ignorant.

What seemed like just a fun little game of make believe for the wealthy to get away from their actual lifestyle actually started becoming reality when Mr. and Mrs. Keyes saw a car pull up with a kidnapped girl who was trying to escape and begging for any bit of help like just catching the license plate. But they did not. They saw the newspaper headlines of the missing girl but they felt that they would be no help any only be ridiculed for what they were doing in the nighttime. Then they heard that the girl had been found dead. After that Mrs. Keyes decided to stop partaking in these outings. Except her husband kept going to protect Inky. But one night Mrs. Keyes got a call from the two and they were being chased by someone and couldn't contact the police. Then the next day she saw the headlines in the newspaper that they had been stabbed to death, and numerous headlines of the same sort that a killer was continuing to stalk the homeless.

Personally I think that all of the things that happened to the Keyes and their friends could have been avoided. Simply by not taking their wealth and lifestyle for granted and finding another less dangerous way to show them how to appreciate what they had.

Attempt to Vanish

The topic of people faking their deaths, creating a new identity, and starting over is very interesting. Not just the fact that people can do it and can succeed or try and get caught, but also the reason that they wanted to disappear in the first place. Evan Ratliff's idea to "vanish" was very intrigueing but also seemed ridiculous and crazy. He just decided to leave everything that he had; his family, friends, work and basically his whole life to just go on the run basically and start a new identity to trick people. Then have them go on the hunt to track him down and find him by saying the code word "Fluke" and shoot a picture of him. It was really interesting how he had so many followers and how they created a twitter and other online groups to talk with other trackers of Ratliff to try and track his whereabouts and give eachother clues and tips that they have gained. Ratliff did a very good job covering his tracks and being very careful about his physical appearance, not sticking out when he was in public, covering up his IP addresses and being careful about his privacy online, and all of his money transactions, etc.

I am not sure which shocked me more; the fact that he had so many people basically stalking him through leads and clues they discovered about him, what the motive people had for tracking him whether it was the $5,000 or whatever reason they had, or just the fact that people can gain so much knowledge about someone through technology. The large number of people that were on the hunt acquired so much information about Ratliff that he did not tell them and a great majority of them had no idea who Evan Ratliff was before he "vanished". It is almost scary to know that it is almost impossible to vanish and never be tracked because of technology today. It can also create somewhat of a paranoia for some that complete strangers can access a variety of information or find out where someone is with out ever meeting or speaking to them.

It seems that this project of just vanishing and trying to be untraceable did affect Ratliff. It did create a bit of paranoia in him. Even while he was just out for a usual jog, he felt that people were always watching him, like the helicopter that was hovering near by him on the beach sort of freaked him out. He felt like everyone was "out to get him" which in reality they were. It also seems like he was still affected after he was caught that he was still a little paranoid even though he had returned to his actual life and he was not being followed and no one seemed to care about his whereabouts. Overall I found Evan Ratliff's story extemely interesting not just because it was a contest to find him after he vanished but they way people reacted to it, how and the extent people that people went to track him, and why they were trying to track him down.

Do you call yourself a writer?

Based on the discussions we have had in class about writing, the writing process and the reading selections on writing, personally I would not call myself a writer. In my opinion a writer is someone who actually enjoys writing, is good at writing, writes journals, and/or makes something of their writing. I would not call myself a writer because I do not write just for the enjoyment of writing or for a meaningful purpose. With saying that I do not mean that I do not write at all, just that when I write it is usually for class writing out notes or for an assignment. I can write and sometimes I do enjoy writing and do well but I do not write for fun like in a journal. Most of the time when I write it is because it is required that I write something or have to write a paper or blog. I would not call myself a writer because I would not consider someone who only writes when it is necessary or for an assignment a writer.

Literacy & Voice Questions - In Class Response

(3)  We came to a conclusion that both Facebook and texting are forms of writing, which are usually for an expressly communicative purpose.  And further, that most kinds of writing are for some purpose of communication.

(4/5/6) We think that it's becoming more common for an individual's voice to be a patchwork of quotations and borrowed ideas.  Taking into account technology's effect on voice (making it much easier to borrow ideas from other people), we think it's more difficult for a person to develop their own voice.

Why Write?

People write for many different reasons. Writing is a way for a person to put ideas and thoughts or information on paper so that other people can read it and gain information from what was written. People write as a way to communicate and share news with each other, whether it is electronically or pen and paper. Others may write simply because it is enjoyable for them. While for some writing is a way to express yourself through your words. This form of self expression could be through the story of a novel by the writer having one simple idea and expanding on that to create a plot and details. Another way would be if someone was very passionate about a cause or a specific topic, writing about it would make people more aware of something that they were not before. This could be enough to persuade someone to see the writer’s side and possibly agree with the writer.

A&P

1. I interpreted the ending as Sammy having a quick reality check of what he had just done. Looking back at the store, he realized that he really had just quit his job because he wanted to impress the girls that had gotten yelled at for wearing only bathing suites into the store. After he quit he realized that the girls did not care that he quit because Lengel had embarassed them and since he knew Sammy's parents, Sammy probably knew that his parents were not going to be pleased at all about the situation.

2. I disagree with Gilbert Porter because the Sammy overreacted somewhat to the situation. He quit because Lengel told the girls that they were innapropriately dressed and needed to wear clothes over their bathing suits. Lengel wasn't embarassing the girls because they should have had shoes and clothes on. Sammy just wanted to impress the girls by sticking up for them and then by quitting. Only to realize that the girls did not care and were gone by the time he walked out.

4. The story was very descriptive and had many details. The specific details helped me actually picture the story as I was reading it. All the descriptions relate to the story's identity because they are all from Sammy's point of view and everything that he saw, with out any other person's side of the story.

Why I Write by Joan Didion

The way Joan Didion described writing was very different. It made me think of writing as actually interesting rather than somewhat boring. She explains it as a way of getting your point across to other people and getting them to listen to you in a completely different way. You can make the reader listen to you, make a point and persuade people to see your side, and cover up any aggressiveness towards the reader just in the words you choose and the way you arrange those words on the paper.
"Why I Write" was a very good title for Joan Didion's, even though she stole it. It stated in three words what she was going to tell you with a very good explanation. She did make me want to keep reading what she had to say like when she talks about shimmer and all the descriptions of pictures in the mind. She describes what goes on in her head while shes writing and how she makes sense of the pictures in her mind. I thought it was really interesting not only why but how Joan Didion writes. How she starts from the pictures she has, which have no meaning yet, with out any idea what the plot is even going to be. Then with however many pictures she has she makes them into pieces of the novel and builds off of them. With all those pieces she fits them all together on paper and turns it into a novel.

Obama speech

We think he made the revisions that he made to make the speech more personal and relatable to the audience. For example when he says “But those of us who knew Teddy” The way he says us and Teddy. We also think he made the speech more comprehensive to the audience. Also he gave very relatable examples for the listeners. We also agree with the blogger when he says the government "has to step in to help deliver."

Spam 3

The writer is trying to induce pity from the reader by telling the reader about her parents death and how her fathers death may have been plotted by other family members. The writer tries to make it sound credible. The typos make the writer sound somewhat uneducated. So we decided that the spam mail was Pathos because she is ovbiously trying to appeal to the readers emotions and make them feel sorry for her and in turn want to help her out.

Lindsey Todorov, Alyssa Brown, Ike Andrews

The Phenomenology of Error

A few paragraphs into reading "The Phenomenology of Error", I could tell that it was a scholarly article and that it was meant for writing teachers. For me this reading selection was almost somewhat difficult for me to read and fully understand because of the way it was worded. At some point I found myself re-reading in many spots because after I would read a few paragraphs I would stop because I was not fully sure about what I had read because it almost was written too well for me to comprehend. Also it may just be me, but the selection sometimes seemed a little repetitive when he was trying to make his points.

I am not sure if this was his main point but he did state "The point is this: We can discuss error in two ways: we can discuss it at a level of conscoiusness that places that error at the very center of our consciousness. Or we can talk about how we experience (or not) what we popularly call errors of usage as they occur in the ordinary course of our reading a text". The way he worded this, in my opinion seems that he is saying that he can discuss where the origin of the error comes from, from our own knowledge and what we think is correct. Or he can discuss errors that occur in writing and why they are errors.

"The Phenomenology of Error" made me realize how common errors in writing are. He even makes it a point to show examples of grammarians making errors in their writings. It made me realize how easy it is to make errors while your writing, even when what your writing is on errors that other people make in their writing and how to correct them and then making the error a few sentences later. I think he shows these examples to show that even people who's job it is to check for errors and make corrections still miss some of them. There are so many rules for writing that it is hard for one person to remember all of them all the time, and that some errors sound gramatically correct or do not look wrong and these errors are just passed and not corrected.

I think that Williams locates the error in the reader and the writer but at the same time neither. The reader may be at fault because they might not be looking for specific errors while they are reading and therefore may miss some errors. Or the reader may just not know every single rule or be able to look for every kind of error that could be made while they are reading. The writer could also be at fault because when they are writing, they are writing their thoughts and even though something might be an error, it sounds correct.