That's A Wrap!

Well, English 201 is officially over, as is this semester. I finished with finals yesterday, and boy, does it feel good to be officially entering summer. Even though this blog was started for this class, perhaps I'll continue to post on it. Only time will tell though.

Photoshop 2

Yesterday, I attended the software training workshop for Photoshop 2. I already have had a bit of experience with Photoshop, and I thought the second class would be best for me. In the class we first went over how to make different adjustments to photos. This included tinkering with brightness, contrast, hue and saturation, among other things. We then worked on making a composite document from separate pictures. We went over how to cut out different pictures and mess with the transparency of layers so multiple images could be seen. We also used the great new Photoshop tool that is the Healing Brush. It allows for blemishes or other unwanted details to be easily removed from a photo. I think Photoshop is a very useful skill. It will help me with the final project for creating my site header. Also, it will be useful for editing the photos that I plan to put on the site. Besides for this class, having Photoshop skill will be a great asset for my future. It would come in handy for personal projects, and I could also see myself doing graphic design work at some point in my future. This was definitely a helpful class, and I look forward to taking more of these training workshops in the future.

Bio Mapping and Mobile Landscapes

Today we read an online article discussing “Bio Mapping.” This involves the user to record their emotional arousal coming from their environment. It could be used to see how different environments affect people. I thought this idea was truly interesting. Could we possibly relate this to places and non-places. It would seem that a non-place would be much less stimulating than a place. For instance, I’m much less emotionally involved on the bus than I am say, at a concert. This article also made me think of another article I’d read concerning video games. A new company uses “biofeedback” to interpret brain waves of users. The users concentration is evident in the game. For example, only those people who showed much concentration, would be able to sink a put in a golf game. I find it amazing that our technology has progressed to the stage where we can pick up our own thoughts. Some day will we be able to install chips, which allow us to send thoughts to each other. Maybe we’ll even be able to move objects with our minds.

We also read an article titled “Mobile Landscape.” This article discussed being able to track all of the cell phones used in a city. Then, we’d be able to graphically represent every cell phone, and see the city as an almost pulsating life form. This idea is a bit scary to me. I don’t much like the idea that someone can know exactly where I am or what I’m doing at any time. It seems that as our technology becomes more advanced we give up more of our freedom. Today, we may be giving up our location because of our cell phones, and perhaps tomorrow, we’ll be giving up our thoughts.

Slime Mold

For this week, we read the first part of Emergence by Steven Johnson. In the book’s intro it discusses an experiment involving slime mold going through a maze and finding food at the end of it. I’d never heard of anything like this from an organism this simple, and found it pretty amazing. It’s actually sort of always impressed me how other animals can do this as well. It’s funny that many of these animals could find food better in a maze than a human most likely could. It seems different organisms have different strengths.

The book also discussed how the slime mold had “coordinated group” behavior. This made me think of how humans can behave in the same way many times. We behave one certain way by ourselves, and may act in a completely different manner when we’re around others. I’ve discussed the “sheep effect” before when talking about people following others across the street. While you may not cross the street before the light turns, for some reason, you’re more likely to cross it if someone else does it first. I also thought about how laughter seems to be part of a group behavior. It seems to be contagious some times. Many times I’ve watched a movie or TV show by myself and not laughed nearly as much as if I’m watching it with a group of laughing friends. It’s interesting how such a small, seemingly unimportant organisms, can be models for us, and teach us so much.

Lost in Translation

I’ve seen the film Lost in Translation once before, and remember I wasn’t too impressed. I had the complete opposite opinion after watching most of it in class last Thursday. First off, the movie is hilarious. Bill Murray is definitely one of my favorite actors. He’s the kind of guy that can make you laugh merely by standing in one place. He has a very comical way about him. I thought the way the film plays with different kinds of communication is also very humorous and interesting. The scene where Bob is doing the commercial is one of these. The director seems to say a paragraph of information to Bob, but the translator then says only a few words. While this was very comical, it also made me wonder if there was any truth to this. Is Japanese really much more long-winded than English, or was the translator merely summarizing the directors instructions? Another interesting form of communication occurred between Bob and his wife. I liked how she would write him letters. It would seem calling would be a much more personal and time-efficient form of communication, yet she chooses written words. It’s also funny when she sends him carpet samples. I wouldn’t think this would be important enough to send overseas. The use of “I love you” also intrigued me in this movie. Multiple times, people say it to Charlotte and she doesn’t give a response. Then, Bob says it to his wife, yet doesn’t get a response. Perhaps this says something about the whimsical nature of being young, and the conversely realizing that what you have could slip away at any time when you’re older. This is definitely a humorous film, which also has many interesting ideas about communication.

Non-Places

We talked in class how a non-place can be a place where people come to obtain something but don’t actually want to be in that place. For my non-place, I chose Starbucks coffee on State Street. The atmosphere is casual and has fairly low-key lighting with many bright lights pointed at the walls to illuminate the many paintings. Smooth jazz can be heard coming through the speakers along with the greetings, queries, and thanks of the people working there. Person after person enters the business and go up to the counter, first contemplating their coffee choice, then ordering. Most of them leave, but others stick around and chat with friends. I felt as if I had no identity in this place, sinking into a large comfy chair. There was a great deal of hustle and bustle, yet I felt as if everything was merely moving around me. Everywhere there seemed to be tiny, fairly useless, coffee trinkets, even though no one seemed interested in them. Large ventilation pipes are strewn across the ceiling, some ending abruptly in the middle of the room. The smell of coffee beans floated through the air, and the whole calming aura of the place made me want to sink into the chair and fall asleep. There seemed to be constant movement in this place. As soon as a group left, another seemed to come in and sit down. As soon as a group sat down, another group merely bought their caffeinated goods and left. The bulk of customers seemed to be female. Do women drink more commercial beverages than men? This truly is a rather interesting place. It seems to be a large meeting place, while still being a place for seclusion. Whatever a person’s reason for a visit, this non-place is good for getting your desired beverage and blending into the crowd.

The Amazing ABC

Upon watching TV today, I realized the mass amounts of different information that existed on it. My roommates and I flipped around first stopping on a bicycle race. Watching the pack turn around the corner of the European landscape from afar truly was mesmerizing. They were going downhill on a curvy road, and must’ve been traveling forty miles an hour. Then, a guy lost control and ended up plowing into a lamppost and wall. It was pretty shocking, and came out of nowhere in an otherwise serine bike race. Next we fell upon the great cinematic classic of The Fast and the Furious. Paul Walker’s amazing acting blows me away every time. And how could anyone be more hardcore than Vin Diesel? It really is mechanical magic on screen. We then changed the station to the usual favorite of ABC Family. This station, as embarrassing as it may seem, has brought me many hours of wholesome yet hilarious entertainment. I’d have to say my favorite is Boy Meets World. I love Cory and Sean’s wacky school antics. Also, Mr. Feeny is a classic TV mentor who holds the prestige of being the voice of KITT, David Hasselhoff’s car in Knight Rider, which is pretty sweet if you ask me. Step By Step is another great ABC Family show. I think the best part of the show is that it takes place in Port Washington, Wisconsin. I also really like the amusement park with the digitally added water in the show’s intro. Then, there’s the show that happened to be on ABC Family when we switched to it today. Yes, that’s right, the modern marvel that is Gilmore Girls. Whenever I tell someone that I watch it from time to time, I start to question my sanity and wonder why I do watch it. Then I see an episode, and the constant stream of witty banter reminds me. The characters are pretty funny, and the zingers keep on coming one after another. The mom and daughter take the wit in their relationship to the max, and they aren’t bad to look at either. Yes, there truly is a vast amount of options on TV today. It’s obvious though that anything on ABC Family takes the cake.

Cooltown

For this blog post, we had to read a chapter in Jeff Rice’s book, Writing About Cool. The chapter was on the web, and I found it very interesting. The chapter started by talking about Hewlet-Packard and their vision of the future. They foresee a place called cooltown, where every part of our lives interact with the web. Even our clothes have tiny computer in them so we can interact with the web constantly. Our cars tell us what’s wrong with them and when. While this may seem like a beautiful future, it also seemed scary to me. We talked in class how if all electricity were to suddenly go away today, we’d be crippled. This would be even truer in cooltown. We’ve come to depend on technology a great deal, and I think at times it starts to degrade our intelligence. One thing to prove this that really stood out in my mind was our dependence on cell phones. I can remember when I’d have to memorize all the phone numbers that I needed. Now, they’re all stored in my cell phone. I don’t think I know any number but my own cell phone and my home phone. This point stood out to me in the part of the chapter about HP. The same thing could happen with the cars that tell us what’s wrong with them. People will start not realizing if their cars aren’t running correctly, and if the car can’t tell them, they’re in trouble. It seems like our dependence on technology could eventually lead to our downfall.

The chapter also discussed hot and cool media from McLuhan’s book Understanding Media. I thought this chapter did almost a better job of describing this idea than McLuhan did. He talked about how hot media requires little participation, while cool media requires more participation. Movies and books are hot, since we just glance over them, while the telephone is a cool media, since we must talk into it. One thing that Rice clarified for me, which I didn’t understand from reading McLuhan, is how movies are hot, while cartoons are cool. Since cartoons are less real, we must put more effort into realizing what they represent and making them real in our minds. Whether a media is hot or cool, we must be careful not to let it control our lives. Even though it’s nice for us to have technology, after a certain point, technology may be having us.

Cyborg Sensation

For today’s post we read an article by Andy Clark entitled Natural-Born Cyborgs. I thought there were some interesting ideas in the article, but mostly I just found it wordy and hard to follow. Clark seemed to constantly be describing complex ideas with even more complex words. He basically talked about how we are all cyborgs, and that our differences from other animals make us this way. One specific part of the article I liked is when he described how our brains worked. He said we’re “bad at logic and good at Frisbee”. This means our brains are bad at complex planning and logic, but good at perception and controlling actions.

We also looked at a website of a professor who creates cybernetics. He even grafted a cybernetic arm onto his own. The arm moves when he does. He also creates large moving cyborgs. I thought this site was very interesting. While some of the grafting stuff can make you a little squeamish, the idea of a man becoming part machine has always interested me. We find this idea all over in the movies and on TV. Just today, I was watching I, Robot on TV. Will Smith has a pretty hard core cybernetic arm in the movie. Also, both Anikin and Luke Skywalker have cybernetic hands in Star Wars. It’s sort of strange that there are so many instances of robotic arms in our society. I suppose it’s due to our arms being very important to our livelihoods, and us liking the idea of them being extremely powerful and strong.

Cool Music

For this Tuesday, we read a chapter in “Writing About Cool” entitled popular culture and cool. I thought it was rather interesting. The article talked a lot about popular music and what made it cool. This goes back to my constant debate about whether cool is something that is rebellious, or something that is popular. It seems obvious that the coolest music is the most popular. If many people are listening to it, many people must like it, meaning that the music must be cool. On the other hand, it seems like people are constantly trying to be cool and on the cutting edge by listening to artists that no one has ever heard of before. While this might not necessarily make the person cool, it is definitely and attempt at cool by them.

Another idea similar to this is a band becoming less cool when they’re popular. Many people seem to make the claim that “I was into this band before they were popular.” This claim puts the person liking the band when no one knew about them, and before the band was “cool.” This ironically, is an attempt to seem cool by liking something that isn’t cool. This points to the idea that rebellion is cool. Once the artist is mainstream and cool, you’re not necessarily cool for listening to them, since everyone else is too. It seems that the world of music cool is just as complicated as any other form of cool. Apparently, the only way to be a cool music connoisseur is to like unpopular artists, and the only way to be a cool artist is to be popular.

On a Hunt for Cool

For this blog post, we were supposed to conduct our own cool hunt. As I came into work this evening, I realized this and thought I was in trouble, since I hadn’t started my hunt yet. I then realized that my work environment would be the perfect locale for a cool hunt. I work in a computer lab under Camp Randall for student athletes. What better place to be immersed in cool than a place which is full of hip, trend starting, athletes. I noticed a quite a few things. Most of them like a good slouch when they sit. I suppose this gives off the feeling of comfort and relaxation. These both seem like very “cool” qualities to posses. Going along with that, many of the athletes wear sweats. While I’m sure this partly has to do with the ease of working out, I think it also goes along with the comfort and relaxation point. As in Gladwell’s article, many of the guy athletes wear the oversized leather boots. These have been around for a while, but seem to me to be in the fad category. They don’t seem too comfortable or practical. Many of the athletes also sport the backwards baseball cap with the flat brim. Rice talks about consumers using products in different ways than producers intended to make them cool. This is a perfect example. The main point of a baseball cap is to keep the sun out of your eyes. The curved brim helps with this. Turning the cap backwards makes it purely aesthetic and takes away its practical value. The flat brim only emphasizes this.

Gladwell also talked about diffusion and how “cool” spreads through culture to different people. While I wasn’t explicitly looking for this today, I saw a good example. While standing at a stoplight, waiting for the light to change, I saw a person move to the middle of the intersection, even though cars were still coming from the other direction. Sure enough, most everyone else waiting for the light to change went out into the middle of the street. While this doesn’t necessarily say anything about cool, it shows the point of diffusion, and that people are much more likely to do something if someone else does it first. This example shows that the same thing can happen in fashion or other areas of cool. If something new is seen on someone else, the trend will catch on. I’ve said it before, but group mentality is very interesting to me. It’s strange how we might do something or say something because someone else does or says it first, even though we’d normally never do it on our own. I guess it just goes to show that humans are a pack animal, and at times, we’ll go against what we think is right if everyone else is doing it too.

Viruses, Fads, and Cool

Today we read an article by Albert Barabas as well as a chapter in Writing About Cool. I thought both were rather interesting. The article started out by discussing a “cool” young man and went on to tell of his rampant homosexual exploits. He averaged around 250 partners a year. The point of interest here is that he was at the center of the AIDS epidemic in America in the early 80s. The article then went on to tell of a teen that made a cartoon about the ballots in the 2000 presidential election. He sent it out to a few of his friends and when he returned home he had thousands of hits on his website, and hundreds of emails. The article is entitled Viruses and Fads and focuses on how both can spread rapidly through our culture. This seems to be a bad almost cruel comparison. A virus is obviously a horrible thing that no one looks forward to. A fad on the other hand, only propagates because people like or enjoy the object of the fad. It turns out that the two do have some things in common; mainly the fact that they can spread very rapidly before anyone really even realizes it. I liked this article because it told a bunch of different little stories and shifted focus fairly often. It was a nice change of pace, and it was easy to stay focused on the reading. I liked the story about the hybrid farm. I found it almost unbelievable that between 1933 and 1939 the number of acres of farmland with hybrid corn rose from 40,000 to 24,000,000. This is a dramatic increase, and it yet another example of how quickly a fad can spread.

The article from Writing About Cool was also interesting. It talked about advertising and mainly focused on how advertisers use the idea of rebellion to make a product “cool”. If a product is seen as different and rebellious, people will want to buy it. This is an idea furthered in part by people like Elvis and James Dean. This whole idea of cool rebellion seems to go in a circle. Something is new and different. People buy it because it is seen as a form of rebellion. As more and more people buy it however, it becomes more popular and is almost an antithesis to the original rebellion it started as. An example I thought of was the RAZR. At first, these phones were the bee’s knees. Soon, it seemed like everyone had a RAZR. When you see someone with one today, it’s not a huge deal. Instead, newer, more rebellious phones take its place in the position of cool. I find it very interesting to think of the concept of cool. I like watching the group mentality of people and how all are affected by the actions of one. What does cool really mean, and why do most of us strive for it?

Guitars and Kanes

Ahh, the grand open post. The world truly is our oyster for blogposts such as these. An interesting guitar story happened to me this past weekend. Last week, I learned one of my favorite songs of all time. The song is Narcolepsy by Third Eye Blind. I hadn’t learned this song before now, since it called for a complete retuning of my guitar. I decided to bite the bullet and retune it, and I was pretty happy I did. I learned the song and got it down pretty well, since I didn’t want to go to the trouble of re-retuning my guitar. Then, on Saturday, I was rocking out pretty hard and broke my third from bottom string. This is the first time I’d broken a string since obtaining my guitar this summer, so it was kind of a momentous event. I luckily had a spare set of strings, and I proceeded to switch the strings on my guitar. I started from the bottom, and replaced the first two strings. Then, working on the third string, it snapped. This was the same string that I broke in the first place, so I didn’t have any sort of replacement string. I thought I was in quite the predicament. Luckily there was still enough of the new string to make it work and the rest of the string replacement went off without a hitch. The new strings are all on, and they sound great.

This week, in my film class, we watched Citizen Kane. This movie is regarded by many as the greatest American film of all time. I had never seen the entire film before and I was a little unsure what to expect. After viewing it though, I was quite impressed. The story was interesting and the cinematography was outstanding. It really was a beautiful film. Upon immediate viewing I wasn’t too impressed with the film, but thinking about it afterwards really let the movie grow on me. It’s quite impressive the amount of art and thought that was put into a film like this over 60 years ago. If you get the chance, I recommend this film. Even if you don’t hold it in as high of a regard as others, it’s still a large piece of cinematic history.

Power

This week, we read an article by Duncan Watts entitled “The Connected Age.” I found this article to be very interesting and thought provoking. I thought about how Watts said that in our day and age we have accumulated a vast number of devices and services to make our lives better and easier. While this seems undoubtedly true, I started thinking that these things could, in fact, make our lives more busy and stressful. It seems like these days, everyone is on their blackberry or cell phone, scurrying around, always in a hurry. Things in the past just seem more simple and laid back. It seems like pretty ironic that the inventions and services designed to make our lives easier might actually be the stress bringers that we’ve been trying to avoid.

I also enjoyed the part about the electrical network. I never really thought about the fact that we have a monstrous grid of power lines that allow us to do everything that we’re used to doing. Watts wrote about a 25-hour blackout in New York City in 1977. Riots busted out and millions of dollars in damages were accrued. It made me feel pretty scared to think about what might happen today, in an age when we’ve relied on electronics like never before. Watts then told of a huge power outage on the west coast in 1996. This one was more of a chain of events. One power line touched a tree, causing it to blow. This put stress on other power lines, causing them to blow, and so on. It was nice just reading some stories in this article. I liked not trying to have to interpret what the author meant, but merely hearing a tale. Watts also talked about how the individual parts of power aren’t too hard to understand, but it’s the system as a whole that is extremely complex and unpredictable. This is much the same as a crowd of football fans or stock market investors. I found this idea especially interesting. It seems counter intuitive that we could understand everything about individual parts of a system, but the system as a whole can still boggle our minds. It seems like connecting people, ideas, or things together can have consequences that we could never dream of.

Robots and Artifacts

This week we had a couple readings by Katherine Hayles. I thought the reading on material metaphors was especially interesting. I’ve always thought the field of robotics was interesting and scary. It seems like such a good idea to create things that have the intelligence of us, and can do great things for us. It is also a scary idea that we could create, build, and enjoy things that would eventually lead to our demise. I never really thought about copying someone’s whole mind into a computer program as described in this reading. I found the story about the CEO creating a boardroom with screens to put his copy into an interesting idea. It made me think of the book iRobot. We try to create these contraptions to help us, but we don’t look ahead to what problems they could cause.

I also found the part about describing the book interesting. I’ve never really thought about the fact that books are comprised of pages, which are one after another. The page has two sides, and writing is organized in a linear fashion. This description made me think about the YouTube video we watched in class about the new books versus the old scroll. I guess a new invention really does make you realize what you’ve had this whole time. I wonder what new form of media we might be trying to learn when we’re in our golden years. I also wonder if our children will get as frustrated as we’ve been trying to teach it to us.

The reading also talked about different forms of the book. One in particular was the Reading Eye Dog. It is a computer that scans text and reads it to the user. The article talked about how this change in the “material artifact” would change how the user interacts with the artifact. This would then change the meaning of the words. I found this to be a strange concept. Can the way we hear words really affect their meaning. It seems that a word will always have the same meaning, no matter how it is communicated. It made me think of an exercise from film class the other day. We watched the same series of images with different music and narration over them. The effect was to show us that the sound we hear could greatly affect the way we see the images. I suppose the same is true for text. It seems the way we are introduced to words and ideas is almost as important, if not more important, than the words themselves.

Idea Overlap

One large overlap that I found in different course material was between this class and my introduction to film class. Last week we talked about hot and cool media. We discussed how film was a hot media, since it was full of information and didn’t need much user input. My film class would definitely agree with the “full of information” part. The second one might be a tougher sell. We are constantly dissecting films and studying what actually composes different shots and scenes. While McLuhan may have meant something different than this when he talked of audience participation, we definitely participate a great deal in this class.

There is also massive overlap in ideas and terms in my other classes. My Biochemistry and Bacteriology classes are good examples. Much of the same material is covered in these classes. Bacteria is similar to many other cells in that is has an outer membrane made up of two lipid, or fat, layers. This is called a phospholipid bilayer. We use this term all the time in biochemistry also. We talk how the lipid bilayer contains proteins and other goodies that are essential for life.

Many of our classes will overlap in material, ideas, and terms. If we study these classes we can uncover this overlap. If we uncover this overlap, we may be more likely to better understand the material wherever we learn about it.

Hot and Cold Media

This week we read Marshall McLuhan’s article discussing hot and cold media. I thought this was a very interesting article. I especially liked the first couple of pages. He described how media could be either hot or cold. Hot media has high definition, while cold media has low definition. I never really thought about what high or low definition means, but I think McLuhan did a good job of defining it. He said that in a hot media, less participation is required from the audience. Just the opposite is true of cold media. The telephone is a cold media, since we have to participate a great deal to get anything out of it. Radio, on the other hand is a hot medium. He also stated how a medium may be low definition if very little information is provided. Some of this seemed to contradict itself though. He stated how the written word was a hot medium when compared to hieroglyphics but cold when compared to speech.

Another part of this article that I found very interesting was when a hot technology succeeds a cool one. He gave the example of the missionaries who gave steel axes to Australian natives. The axes used to be scarce and worked as a masculine symbol. Now, both women and children had them and when men had to borrow them, their masculinity was hindered. This tore apart their society. Besides being a good story, I liked this part because we discussed it in my cultural anthropology class last year. We discussed how even the smallest, most insignificant-seeming addition to a culture can be detrimental to it.

As the article continued, I found myself becoming more and more lost. McLuhan seemed to go on endless rants about organic myth or retribalization. Some parts also seemed counterintuitive to me. He described how backwards and unindustrialized countries could better understand and confront electric technology. This seems like a backwards statement. I’d think the countries that developed these technologies would better understand them. Even with the bit of confusion at the end of the article, I found it to be very interesting. I thought the subject of hot versus cold media is a though provoking one, which could help us better understand our own culture and community.

New Media and Academic Writing

In the past, my experiences with “academic” writing have been fairly good. I’ve always thought of myself as a fairly decent writer. These experiences have also been very formal. I try to sound like I know what I’m talking about, and present facts in a professional way. New media is completely different from this. Thanks to Facebook and instant messaging, writing in the twenty-first century has become much more similar to a casual conversation. We get used to typing to our friends and using informal language and even abbreviations. We shorten entire phrases into two or three letters.
Examples like this would be completely absurd if used in “academic” writing. I think they have started to creep into academic writing though. I constantly find myself shortening words or not capitalizing other words. I usually catch my mistakes and correct them, but just the fact that they happen in the first place shows a negative affect that new media may have on academic writing. Besides making our writing more casual, new media may also detract from important facts of our history. If we are bombarded by videos and music and Internet lingo, it must detract from what we could be learning about Shakespeare or the Gold Rush.
I do, however, find many benefits in incorporating new media into the English curriculum. First of all, if something is constantly surrounding us, it is a part of our culture, and thus, is important. I think that in order to understand anything from our past, we must first fully understand ourselves and why we are the way we are. New media also brings powerful tools to the English table. Thanks to new media we can communicate across the globe with other English enthusiasts or publish our ideas to the web for all to see.
New media being incorporated into the English curriculum truly is a touchy subject. Some may see it as a degradation of all that we’ve learned from English in the past, while others see it as the only path to our future. Either way, I believe that new media is here to stay and is a great method of learning for our generation.

What is Writing?

Networks and New Media

I thought that the article about Middlebury banning Wikipedia for student sources was rather interesting. I wasn’t really sure what the big deal was. As far as I know, all the information I’ve gotten from Wikipedia has been accurate. I was always fairly sure that it’d be a reliable source for finding information. At the same time though, I don’t think I’d ever use it for scholarly purposes. Just knowing that other people write it is scary by itself. I do think it might be a good place to start. One may be able to find a general overview of their subject, and find some good links to credible sources.
I had a bit of trouble with the reading, “What Should College English Be?” I thought there was far too much jargon, and too many big words for me to really concentrate on it. I found this rather ironic since I as the subject of the piece couldn’t even follow it. I did grasp onto the idea that our network culture is all around us and constantly affecting us. We are surrounded by the internet, Facebook, cell phones, TV, and movies everyday. Whether we like it or not, these things affect the way we perceive the world, and in turn how we’ll write about it. I found this very interesting and agree with the idea that college English should be about the network. If something has this large of an impact on us, it should be the center of study.
We also watched a short internet video for this week. It was about a teacher who wanted to expose his students to new media. He had them make videos about our new media situation and how it affects our lives. I think the main thing I got out of this piece was the fact that producing anything allows us to better understand it. If we create something, we can be fully aware of what was put into it, and what other people might get out of it. I know this to be true for me. I've made a few lame videos in the past, and they've definitely helped me better understand the creative process. The teacher wanted his students to understand new media, so he had them create new media. I think the hands-on approach is a very valuable learning resource, and a good way for anyone to learn about a subject.

I was a bit unsure what to write about in my first open blog post. I decided it’d be a good idea to write about something interesting and recent. I decided on this past weekend’s Badger hockey games. We played Minnesota State on both Friday and Saturday. The games were pretty much polar opposites. The first game I won’t go into much. We lost to those menacing Mavericks 1 to 3. Saturday night’s game was completely different though. We scored early in the first period. It made for a nice start to a game. A small fight also broke out in the first period. It wasn’t anything too serious. The refs just had to break up a couple of players. In the second period, we scored again. I’m not sure if it was this scoring, or the heat of the moment, but a huge fight broke out in the second period. It started with two players, and as soon as the refs got that fight broken up, at least two more started up. They came complete with gloves and helmets being whipped off and punches thrown. Both teams ended up with at least 5 players in their penalty box. They couldn’t even sit down in there due to the lack of room. Coming into the third period tensions were high. They were even higher when Minnesota scored their first goal, making it 2-1 Badgers. A few minutes later though, Jack Skille scored his second goal of the game, almost assuring a Badger victory with a score of 3-1. With only a couple of minutes left in the game, the Mavericks pulled their goalie in order to get some needed goals. This allowed for Jack Skille to score a third goal. In hockey, it’s called a hat trick when one player scores three goals in a single game. I’d never seen this before, but I’m glad I did. It was quite a sight. The crowd went nuts, and at least a dozen fans threw their hats onto the ice. This really was the icing on the cake that was a great game. This was easily one of the best hockey games I’ve seen in my life, and it assured that hockey is the sport for me.

Rhetoric

Before this class, and the readings for it, I don’t think I was too sure what rhetoric was. I had some vague idea, and I’d heard the word before, but it was definitely in the gray area for me. When hearing the word, I’d think of politics. The exclamation “That’s mere rhetoric!” would come to mind. I assumed it was speech full of jargon, intended to express a person’s distorted view about ideas or events.
I now realize the much broader definition of rhetoric. I never really imagined how all encompassing and universal it is. The reading really helped me to see this. I also always thought of more modern times when hearing the word rhetoric. I never knew that the use of rhetoric is thousands of years old, going back to the times of Plato. Upon thinking more about it, I see that we all use rhetoric every day.
I especially liked the example Herrick gave about rhetoric use in relationships. He stated how we may unconsciously present ourselves in a certain way, in order to persuade the object of our affection that we are the person he/she desires. I found it intriguing that we use rhetoric without even knowing it. I also thought rhetoric use in sports and medicine was interesting. Usually when I think of persuasion and convincing, these fields don’t come to mind. Both sports and medicine are governed by rules, regulations, and ideals. Herrick points out however, that many times arguments occur in sports over a call from a referee. When there are arguments, there will be persuasion. Also, in medicine, doctors have to make decisions. A clear-cut answer doesn’t always exist.
Another important point is that rhetoric must be adapted to a specific audience. You must realize what your audience knows, how they feel, and how receptive they are to new ideas before you can try to convince them of anything.
I thought our discussion in class today was interesting also. I especially enjoyed the clips from Thank You for Smoking. I found the main characters description of his job to his young son both comical and strangely uplifting. I never thought that a lobbyist for a tobacco company could be a good guy, but the way he spun his description made is seem innocent, and merely just another job. It seems he was excellent when it came to rhetoric use.
Rhetoric is clearly a far more complex subject than I had ever imagined it could be. It surrounds us and we all make use of it, probably every day. Rhetoric has been around for thousands of years, and no matter what your opinion is of it, it’s here to stay.

On your marks, get set, BLOG!

Hello, fellow blogsfolk. My name is Bobby, and I'm setting up this blog for my English 201 class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm a junior here, and I'm majoring in Genetics and Film. It may seem like these two fields have massive overlap, but they're actually quite different. Hopefully, I'll make a break-out film right out of college with a lifelong friend. In the extremely unlikely event that this doesn't happen, I have a career full of petri dishes and micropipettes to look forward to. I'm a laid back guy, and my biceps are the size of fully-inflated volleyballs. Check out this stunning picture of me. Well, there's my first post. We'll blog ya latter!