Essay roughdraft

Colin McMaster

WRIT 1122- 39

Professor Leake

30 January 2012

I have chosen to write this essay towards a person that is their college career. I chose that group people because this issue is most pressing to them, they are directly impacted by the developing use of the internet and online mediums.

Writing and Reading with Comprehension

Picture yourself, at your computer. It’s just like any other time you open your laptop at home or in class. Nine times out of ten a betting man would say that Facebook is the first thing to pop up. This is just a showing of how our generation is addicted to social media and constantly staying connected. Also it shows that we just plain get bored and want some simple entertainment. This search for constant entertainment is changing the way in which kids of the current generation are using the internet and that is also changing the way that we read and write.

Chris Hedges does not have the nicest opinion of the general American public. He sees us as only two classes of people, the literate people who are capable of complex thought and live in a print-based world. Then there is the other kind of people, the ones who can not read and write, rely on images for information, and have severed them self’s from the print-based world. This is a very basic and pessimistic view of our society, but is it really all that far off? We often do find ourselves avoiding doing things that will make us think hard or might make us go out of our way.

Hedges also discusses how the illiterate class is becoming more and more easily swayed by political rhetoric and the news media. This I feel is overwhelmingly true however it is not limited to just the illiterate. Even scholarly people can find themselves wrapped up in an extremely sensational news story to only finish it and feel almost less intelligent. The news we watch on TV and often read is unfortunately watered down to the point where it almost loses all of its credibility. Yet, people still trust it, and only it. When that happens and the television news isn’t reinforced with factual print articles, a person is left not fully informed and is not necessarily equipped with the right knowledge to let’s say pick a president. Candidates can easily fill their campaigns with easy to digest ideas and words that seem like they solve problems, but really just mask the problem and make themselves look better. They can get away with it because the “illiterate people” as Hedges puts it, just absorb and do not critically analyze it.

Through high school I was blessed with one of the knowledgeable teachers I think I will ever meet. Dr. Jim Harris is a PHD from the University of Kansas in Electrical engineering. He formerly owned his own company making electronic components for helicopters before retiring to teach at my high school. Dr. Harris was responsible for teaching the school physics, Honors physics, AP physics, and Astronomy. He had one very strong common theme that he tried to teach all of his classes, and that is “one, Physicists are lazy and two, read with comprehension”. He was under the impression that if his students could learn to read a question or text and understand it fully, he has succeeded in his lesson. According to Nicholas Carr however, we may be taking a step in the wrong direction.

Nicholas Carr finds himself asking the question, “is Google making us stupid?’ In his opinion we might be, but he does not really know if it is. Carr seems to have found himself in a not so good place, he can no longer pay attention to longer readings even if they are longer blog posts. This phenomenon seems to be happening more and more to him and his friends. I also find myself struggling to stay focused after a couple paragraphs. He thinks that our brains have possible reprogramed themselves to only enjoy short little streams of information, like a computer. He thinks that the constant internet browsing, only looking at short headlines, and going from video to video has reprogramed our brains to only except information, “the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”(Carr 1) That thought seems kind of scary when you listen to it. Something as arbitrary as the internet forcing our brains to change the way we think, no sir I’ll have none of that.

I don’t think that the internet is changing the way we read really, it has more the effect of changing what we are expecting to read. We find it easier to read smaller things that interest us and can be supplemented with videos we can pull up at random or quickly switch to a page that explains any confusion. We haven’t lost the ability to read books or long articles, we have just developed laziness towards reading or maybe even an internet induced ADD. This would make sense of our obsession with Facebook and YouTube; we are simply using them as vises for our “disorder”. We are still capable of reading in the old way; it’s just not nearly as fun. So, the internet isn’t so much making us stupid, it has just changed what we look for in reading. We go online to “avoid reading in the traditional sense.” (2)

Like with the printing press, some people believe that having vast knowledge available at our fingertips will detriment society by causing academic laziness and making an intellectual rely on a computer to reiterate his knowledge. But just like the printing press and the positives being over looked, even when the negatives were true, those overlooked positives made the printing press an easy way for people to share, spread, and spark new knowledge and learning.

With technology and the internet creating large gaps in the reading levels and things are becoming more available to the masses, what is happening to peoples writing? The internet has created a whole new place for people in instantly connect and share ideas. Most noticeable of these are places like blogger and Facebook. According to Andrea A. Lunsford and Clive Thompson kids are writing more than ever. Lunsford studied the writing of 189 Stanford students starting there freshmen year through graduation. What she and her colleges found gives hope that technology is not destroying our literacy. They found that students are writing significantly more than their parents did. Kids are writing not just school papers, but all the interaction on the internet is a form of writing. According to Lunsford writing in these different mediums has given us an advantage. The internet has not harmed writing but, “rather than leading to a new illiteracy, these activities seemed to help them develop a range or repertoire of writing styles, tones, and formats along with a range of abilities.”(Lunsford 1)

Lunsford’s team found that the students had a remarkable knack at writing in the style, “kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across.” (Thompson 1) This new knack of writing to a specific audience comes hand in hand with the internet. When writing a Facebook post, blog post, or just a tweet we know exactly who our audience is and write to get our idea or thought across to exactly who is seeing the post.

The internet has caused many shifts in the world we live in today. We have gone from a word were you could maybe get a newspaper two times a day, to a reality that news from every corner of the world is available with just a few clicks of a mouse. Being able to have everything so close has indeed made us lazy, as Carr and Hedges would agree with; but it also has created a generation that can write affectively that Lunsford and Thompson agree with. The difficulty is, literacy is both reading and writing, not just one. The problem with reading on the internet is that it makes us want to be there and enjoy ourselves while reading. After watching videos and reading short news reels no one want to read 200 pages out of a boring book. Our reading has become weaker simply because it seems to no longer be capturing out imagination. On the other hand writing is excelling because of the ever changing conversation on the internet. People are more aware of who their writing is going to and will tailor it to suit the audience. To bridge the gap between excelling writing and lazy reading, I believe teachers need to employ Dr. Harris’s approach. By making reading with comprehension a main goal, it can be possible to teach kids to read past false information and extract true meaning from online souses and mediums.

the end of the beginning

Here I stand 4 weeks after starting a blog, and I’m still alive. It turns out that blogging is not the evil I once saw it as, of course that was before I fully understood it. I see now that blogs aren’t bad, instant sources of false information. They can be places of valid idea sharing and where people can further discussions about topics that interest them. Personally, the whole talk about whether or not the internet and technology is influencing us for the better or worse is starting to rub off on me. I see myself becoming more conscious of what I write and read on the internet. More importantly my web habits have drastically changed. I now find myself not endlessly creeping facebook, but instead actually getting my work done then checking. After seeing how my fellow classmates along with myself were abusing the internet for enjoyment while we all had work to do, made me change. I do sometimes still get distracted but I’m TRYING to do better.

By far the hardest thing about writing a blog has been trying to start writing, and then trying to stay on topic. I always feel like I ramble on and on and eventually end up way too far away from my starting subject. It slowly got better, but I was just out of practice writing in such a free way. That might just be what all of this is about, getting away from old restricting ways and letting the creative side loose.

The other side

Scribner and Thompson have now shed the light on the other side of this whole idea that the internet is killing America’s literacy. Their combined literacy metaphors and Harvard research made the American literacy problem seem just a little bit less extreme. In fact the light they shed on the “new” style of literacy makes it seem as if our technology and new ways of writing are helping to promote kids literary skills. Scribner does a good job of bringing in examples that relate literacy to people’s social and economic status as well as showing that literacy just has a perpetually changing meaning. However it does cross my mind that Scribner did write this in the eighties, and a little bit has changed. So how valid is it? I think that it is still valid, because the ideas and instances are set in history, which we must always take into account.

Thompson’s article really caught me by surprise. I was not expecting to agree or appreciate this until I read it. He has the great point that, “writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see”. I believe in this whole heartedly. Thompson found that kids are writing in this style more, and this style is called kairos. Or writing for a specific audience, purpose, and writing in the moment. All of which I can honestly say do seem to be happening a little more easily for myself. There is one limitation however, this new writing that is emerging in this time of technology will only hold valid IF youth and people in general keep the practices of Reading with comprehension and higher level thinking. We must still fight to stay out of a picture and media run state.

illiterate America

Chris Hedges does not have the nicest opinion of the general American public. He sees us as only two classes of people, the literate people who are capable of complex thought and live in a print-based world. The other kind of people are the ones who can not read and write, rely on images for information, and have severed them self’s from the print-based world. This is a very basic and pessimistic view of our society, but is it really all that far off? We often do find ourselves avoiding doing things that will make us think hard or might make us go out of our way. Not unlike what Nicholas Carr believe has happened to our society and reading, we are simply doing less of it because it’s hard.

Hedges also discusses how the illiterate class is becoming more and more swayed by political rhetoric and the news media. This I feel is overwhelmingly true however it is not limited to just the illiterate. Even scholarly people can find themselves wrapped up in an extremely sensational news story to only finish it and feel almost less intelligent. The news we watch on tv is unfortunately watered down to the point where it almost loses all of its credibility. Yet, people still trust it, and only it. When that happens and the television news isn’t reinforced with factual print articles, a person is left not fully informed and is not necessarily equipped with the right knowledge to let’s say pick a president.

Goole = ADD

SO, is Google making us stupid? In Nicholas Carr’s opinion, well he doesn’t really know either. Carr seems to have found himself in a not so good place, he can no longer pay attention to a long reading even if it’s a blog post. He thinks that our brains have reprogramed themselves to only enjoy short little streams of information, like a computer. He thinks that the constant internet browsing, only looking at short headlines, and going from video to video has reprogramed our brains to only except information, “the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.” That thought seems kind of scary when you listen to it. Something as arbitrary as the internet forcing our brains to change the way they think, no sir I’ll have none of that.

I don’t think that the internet is changing the way we read really, it has more the effect of changing what we are Expecting to read. We find it easier to read smaller things that interest us and can supplement it with videos we can pull up at random. We haven’t lost the ability to read books or long articles, we have just developed laziness towards reading or maybe even an internet induced ADD. This would make sense of our obsession with Facebook and Youtube, we are simply using them as vises for our “disorder”. We are still capable of reading in the old way; it’s just not nearly as fun. So, the internet isn’t so much making us stupid, it has just changed what we look for in reading.

From blogging to Rewriting

Joseph Harris’s goal with his book Rewriting: How to do things with texts was not to provide a manual for writing, but to teach people how to take other peoples words in scholarly writing and use them for your own purpose. This I am thankful for. I like to think that I know how to write, but I do still need work on analyzing and using other scholarly works in my own writing to make a point. Harris finds this to be at the heart of all writing, to add to or respond to another’s writing in order to add to the conversation. This is also what I think writing should be. Using others work not just to defend your work, but to add upon and create meaning from another’s work.

Sullivan and Harris both see writing as way to convey information to readers. However Harris’s take is in a much more structured and scholarly direction.

save time

After looking at my fellow classmates’ use of the internet and comparing it to my own, I’m only left with one question. WHAT ARE WE DOING WITH OUR TIME?! (sorry for the cap attack) I’m just as big of an offender as any but seriously Facebook has taken over, or it will. Yes, not all time we waste on the internet is actually wasted but it quickly can become wasted with the introduction of StumbleUpon and Facebook drama. That’s why I am finding it important to wean myself of my Facebook impulse. The goal is to rid myself of the all too common idea that “sense I’m on the internet, I’ll go ahead and get on Facebook”. Hopefully it is possible and will help with my productivity levels. I am really hoping that if I end up saving loads of time, the time can go towards activities I like or even surfing productive websites like Ted or News sources.

Also while looking at others use of the internet is was interesting to see that more or less everyone seemed to make an effort to at least look at news. That to me is the most important thing about our generation. We need to pay extra attention to the events that surround us and not get sucked in to Facebook land. Facebook land is purely social and will wait for you; the real world is constantly going on and waits for no one. We need to be well informed because one day it will be our job to run this world.

2 Days in my Computers History

SUNDAY

11:30am-12; Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Black Board.

Checked email and Facebook like normal morning. Printed off a few assignments from blackboard, and took a reading quiz.

2:00-3:00; YouTube, WIMP.com, blogger, Stumble.. Facebook

Typical video watching while writing a blog and working on Engineering. Continued my steady addiction of stumbling for hours on end.

7:00-9ish; Facebook, Stumble, Web central, blackboard, New York Times, Colbert Report and Daily Show cites, Drudge report.

Took my time doing various homework assignments while creeping on facebook. Then took time to watch news clips and read some articals.

11:50- bed; Late night Facebook creep and funny video watching from Facebook and wimp.

MONDAY

7:00-7:30; Check Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Blackboard before heading to class for the day.

8:00- around 4; On and off of Facebook, Blackboard, WebCentral, New York Times, Wichita Eagle.

Random and sporadic check of webcites when I have time during class.

6-7:30- Gmail, WebCentral, WolfRamAlpha, and Facebook

A strictly business trip to the internet, accomplishing physics homework, but what’s homework without a little Facebook.

12-12:30; More late night facebook and twitter. Skype with a friend back home.

Let’s face it, I’m addicted to Facebook. I can live with that because it is a functional addiction, unfortunately. My internet habits, in my opinion, are not that strange. Facebook is almost like a nervous tick, the instant my browser is open or I’m waiting for something to load, I’m checking facebook. Other than that I enjoy wasting time watching videos, many from news web sites, or just plan YouTube and stumble. Of course, there’s the constant Email and blackboard checking to keep up with school work. My impact on the internet is not that great, the occasional wall post or status update. One of my favorite things to do will always be to find videos, often of epic music nature, and share them with my Facebook friend and I get to see others find enjoyment out of the same things.

Making my blog.

Creating a blog turns out to be one of the easiest things to do on the internet. Besides maybe getting credit card information stolen. I had no idea that creating a blog would be so easy. I was under the impression that it would take time and be cumbersome to do, I was wrong. Before now I have never kept a blog because I have never seen a reason to start. I find that some blogs are good and fun to read, but there are a greater number of blogs out there full of balderdash and hate. Those I find highly offensive and unnecessary. However everyone is entitled to their free speech even if it’s not the best thing to write about in public.

People have often told me that keeping a facebook updated is just like having a blog, and I have always been on the side that they are very much different. In my opinion blogs are for the sharing of ideas across a vast amount of people, not necessarily for the purpose of following peoples/friends lives. Facebook is aimed, in my opinion, to make social networking instant and easily available. Facebook does have statuses that are similar to mini blog posts, but it is usually frowned upon to post long rants that anger people. Were the blog steps up to fill the gap. It is my hope that in the near future blogging becomes a more enjoyable experience for not only myself, but for all users of the internet.

Why Andrew Sullivan Blogs

Andrew Sullivan has been blogging sense before it was cool, an obvious blog hipster. He took the blog to a whole new level and has essentially made it an everyday job. He took the qualities of a daily news column and made it instant, “a blog is not so much daily writing as hourly writing.” Sullivan sees blogging as so instantaneous and in the now that is it comparable with what extreme sports is to athletics. To Sullivan the act of blogging became almost like an act of writing out a stream of consciousness. He found it to be “literary liberation”, his mind could speak about whatever it wanted, with next to no repercussions. With the freedom to say anything that comes to mind, comes the responsibility to be accountable. Sullivan finds blogging to be a great form of free writing because of the responsibility one must take when writing for an instant and intelligent audience. The blog also is a nice atmosphere because it forces the writer to be emotionally involved and get personal with posts. When writing multiple times a day reactionary posts are easily flooded with emotion that can show someone’s true colors.

The main thing that the blog lives for is the conversation. As long as people are engaged in the discussing of ideas intelligently, the blog will always have a place in day to day conversation.