Cut Up Assignment

I did not find this exercise particularly useful. While a cool idea initially, I failed to see any new insight into the English language, the process of composition, or the exchange of ideas. Thus the only thing that distinguished it from being a complete waste of time was when I theorized about it. If you had the same size font, had approximately four people write similar stories of approximate length, then mixed and matched randomly POSSIBLY that'd work out. The only real explanation I can offer for the relatively long time this practice has been around is that writers' vent their frustration with the pen by using the scissors. If one is trying to switch gears in their writing in a random but semi-fluid manner I think the human brain is powerful enough to do this without the aide of scissors; perhaps two human brains would be required, but that still leaves out the scissors.
I suppose I'd like to hear a good argument for this practice.

Writing Instruction

After our discussion on Wednesday I have concluded that while the old rubric style of grading may be outdated, or inefficient, it is a necessary evil. That is to say unless we somehow get more funding from our government for education, which is not likely to happen anytime soon. The student to instructor ration is just too high to get away from it. How then can we teach people to write in other forms besides academic styles? The internet is seen as destroying much of the proper English language, but perhaps communities will emerge where more abstract writing style are highly regarded. We'll just have to see...

Multiple Sides of a Sphere

Warning: For all whom hate math, tread lightly...there will be some terms

I often like to think of myself as a sphere. The radius is the measure of my culminative experience of life, and therefore is constant or in a state of expansion. As you well know a sphere doesn't have sides, but mine certainly does; at least according to you. When we interact with people, especially new people, we try to share our spheres and hope that at least some of our radiai coincide and our respective spheres overlap. When we meet someone with the same musical tastes for example, we can intereact more deeply then if they are respectfully different. However when we try to share our spheres, and we focus on the overlap, the rest of our sphere is unexpressed. That's why Mr. DJ Spooky brings up the idea of multi-plex personas. Most of us are incapable of sharing our entire lives, our spheres, with those that we share a common interest. Try telling your drinking buddies about how you enjoy watching ballet...chances are not too much overlap. Thus, we are going to act differently around them then someone with which we share that part of our sphere with.

The great power in people lies in our ability to parameterize and transform what we don't share into something that we can. To transform an object in three space into two and two into one until we get to a point (mathematically and verbally) where we find at least something in common about each aspect of ourselves.

Some say people are vastly different from each other. I think we are just transposed expressions of the same fundamental points that cause our spheres to look like other shapes to other people. Because for us, the only radius that we can measure truly is our own (if we can), we only see the lopsided shapes of peoples' lives that they show us. Thus we act and perceive multiple personas for the same individual.

Illustrations would help I feel, but I hope you pulled something out of it atleast.

Re and Re part Deux

Here is the text that wouldn't go with the below picture

So after I finally figured out how to drop off my works in the dropbox online 4 days after everyone else did (I assumed if I uploaded them to my locker that would be sufficient, apparently not) I had time to take a look at others and reflect. This assignment was interesting, though the more and more I viewed others the less and less I could grasp the argument. Some were clear, others not so much. This means either be need more practice visualizing arguments, fabricating visual arguments, or just arn't used to an assignment like this. Perhaps if we had more of a free culture, we would be able to familiarize ourselves with assignments like this more frequently, and the results would be better.I didn't find using the creative commons restricted my vision much, especially because I typed in images until I found a centerpiece then worked around it. I could see copyrights really infringing on peoples' ideas however and so when I did my remix (thanks to Courtney's) I essentially just put some famous peoples' thoughts on intellectual property and copyrights.

Remix and Reflection

Government and Copyright Law

What kind of society do we live in if our creators, those who try to bring something better into the world, have to rely on lawyers to defend their rights? Especially when said lawyers cost a hefty price. Coming from a father involved in the education of law, it has always been instilled in me to obey the law even though it may rub my ideals and idea of common sense the wrong way. As I come more and more into my own though I'm beginning to realize just how wrong our law makers are about many topics. And I'm not talking about subjectively wrong, where the sides are debatable but the facts are agreed upon; I'm talking about those in Washington who eat up the lobbyists' skewed facts and opinions like a Scientologist eats up claims of extraterrestrials from a former science-fiction writer kind of wrong.

The question now then, for me at least, is to what extent can I break the law and feel justified? If the laws do not make sense for our society, if they hurt our society as a whole and not just a few inevitable individuals, is it no longer wrong to break the law in a certain, increasing, number of cases?

Plagiarism

This experience pushed me to understand what plagiarism felt like, at least in a extremely blatant sense. I'm sure I'm guilty of multiple accounts of what would be considered plagiarism without knowing it, but this was the first time where I took most of my paper word-for-word without the correct citation (just some obscure articles in an attempt to cover my trail). I did this paper relatively quickly in an attempt to simulate what a blatant plagiarist's experience would be. I was unsuccessful in duping my readers, as one found the majority of my essay on a website.

The interesting part is that he found it on a different website that I did. Hence, I'm curious about how much of the web is blatant plagiarism that we are just unaware of. I believe this was not the only incidence of word-for-word hits to be discovered on different websites without proper citation, which speaks for a vast amount of plagiarism on the web. Perhaps our society doesn't understand why plagiarism stifles creativity, and are just worried about the consequences of getting caught and penalized, as we are in school. With that fear removed on small time internet sites, plagiarism looks that much more attractive for time pressed individuals; it's hard to find someone not strapped for time in our modern society.

Enough rambling...

My Ghostwriting Experience

Originally I was going to ghostwrite for a roommate of mine who had a paper due in her class about Siberian shamanism the next week. She wasn't very good at explaining her ideas, or giving me facts, and because her primary source was 200 pages long, I wasn't about to spend an entire afternoon and evening catching up on mystical practices in a place I don't know too much about the culture to begin with. Her style was immensely different from mine, and my best efforts to imitate and recreate failed miserably; I sounded like an inverted form of myself.

This headache pushed me to search for other options. My brother had a paper on Honore de Balzac (possibly my favorite name for an author, as mature as that is) due next week, and he was already done with his outline including some quotations pulled out and ready to use. It was nice because I had far too much information about a subject I knew a little about, compared with my first attempt where I had barely any information on something I knew nothing about. I also have a more similiar style to my brother's writing, then to most and this made it easier to attempt and pretend I was him when writing.

In general though, this assignment has really made me question where we get our writing style from? Our favorite author? Our most frequent editor? A teacher? Or does a lot of our writing style come from within?

I think a lot of us would agree that we speak in similiar patterns to our close friends, each borrowing variations on our common language, but we don't often write academically with our close friends. So who is analogus to a close friend in terms of the formation of your writing style?

Fear and Plagiarism

Howard's article made one thing quite clear; the definition of plagiarism is not clearly defined. It bothers me then that so many educators take the approach of trying to scare their students into not plagiarizing , whatever plagiarizing might mean. I feel educators should explain more what they consider plagiarism (or cite a more subject oriented definition), explain why one does not do it, and explain the consequences if one does plagiarize. At higher institutions, like the one we attend, we are certainly mature enough to agree and follow anything that makes sense if it is logically presented to us. Students should be scared of the consequences, but in order to nip plagiarism in the bud educators should convert their students by reason and fear, not fear exclusively. Let's just hope every educator has an original explanation of plagiarism and if not, they cite their sources. . . .

On "Artful Deception"

Baruch's article struck a chord with me, especially in the opening paragraph when he points out that students who pay others to write for them are often expelled. It's weird to think that as a society we care more about honesty in students' inconsequential term papers then when we drop thirty bucks for a novel that a well-known name "wrote."

I'd like to know what others think about this, as well as the backlash upon this questionable activity. I think the music industry might offer some insight...

When file sharing became prevalent a few years ago, album sales dropped, and record labels were, and still are, furious. Personally, from what I've witnessed, the more a musician was deemed an "artist" by their fans, the least they were outraged and affected. Everyone downloaded the flavor of the month songs without thinking twice about it; we all know it's crap, and while fun to dance and party to, these songs will be readily replaced in the next month or so and consumers see no point in dropping fifteen bucks on an album with one song they want, only to have that song fall out of grace shortly after. I feel that people still buy, to varying degrees, their favorite artists' music because they want to support them. Radiohead fans amply rewarded their latest release when revenues were based on optional donations. I feel we are beginning to see a shift towards paying explicitly only for music we feel is deemed credible, unique, and original.

I wonder if our society might not see something similar with books; especially those which are ghostwritten. I wonder if these works might be pirated more often, since we feel ok not paying for a book that the alleged author didn't write. Electronic books are not nearly as popular as electronic music files, but I feel it will be interesting to see how both media forms, and the way consumers pay for them, evolves as electronic forms become even more prevalent.

Can We Trust Machines to Trust?

In Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Power of the Mobile Many an interesting idea, while perhaps not the focus of the article, is established; that a formula for 'trust' could be made to link together people with commonalities to further both parties endeavors through mobile technology. Rheingold cites Kortuem et al. (on pg. 43 of the course packet) and their experimental system WALID. The idea of WALID interests me because it offers efficiency to the mundane errands we loathe. As a society we already look for ways to make these errands simpler, from drive-thrus at many stores to common purchases collected together at 'convenience' stores, however WALID lumps individuals together to trade favors to further efficiency. The novelty rests in technology determining the trust and relative payoffs of each action.

It's hard enough to know whom one can trust, let alone if face-to-face contact has been minimal. So I wonder, can humans know how to program a machine to determine trust between individuals? For actions as simple as picking up milk for a little known neighbor around the corner, most likely, but beyond that how far would this trust extend? When do the risks outweigh the payoffs?

While many of the ideas in Reingold's article are fairly abstract and years away, they are certainly interesting to think about as even today we increasingly let machines shape decisions about our lives.

What makes an author/writer/poet great?

Thoreau’s words has never struck much of a pleasant chord with me, and for him to say, “the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them,” as he is quoted in the Howard article, really makes me question his own command of the language. For how can one be “great,” yet not have a large affect on mankind? Shouldn’t a “great” poet be one that is accessible to people of all walks of life; their work is so relatable and of importance that both readers of “low” and “high” literature marvel at it? I think perhaps what Thoreau meant when he said “great” is a poet who can maximize and pull together characteristics from a small number of similarly “great” works that are read incestuously by the intelligentsia of “high” literature.

I similarly draw back a step to question whenever I’ve encountered a literature teacher that Howard describes in the closing of this article. Howard states that, “students are imagined as having lowbrow reading tastes that must be elevated,” indicating that we are treated as those who have never really “read” the work of the “great poets.” I certainly agree with Howard that student are “placed not on the shoulders but in the shadow of [literary] giants,” for I’ve never encountered a student that has felt at least the potential to be one of these “great” poets someday. Though, then again who would want to be one of these types of authors? One who knows many words, and complex arrangements to maximize the essence, or some other similarly cheesy word, of an expression only to have a few relatively narrow minds decode the meaning from your “genius”? Wouldn’t one rather aspire to be a great communicator? One that shapes the peoples’ lives around them whether poor or rich, highly educated or minimally, fan of literature or not, and create works that speak to people instead of making people attempt to lean into the meaning of one’s writing?

For me, someone like Hemingway encapsulates what it means to be a “great” author. His simple prose, yet complex movements underneath the text offer many of the same things for both members of “high” and “low” literature, if there are such classifications. A twelve year-old kid can emulate Hemingway’s simple, yet direct style, and never be the wiser to the stir of emotions lingering under the words he reads. Then when read again later, much more is noted, much more is appreciated, and yet still one doesn’t have to be a “great poet” to understand.

Thoreau may have never envisioned a writer with such capabilities, and believe me by no means do I mean Hemingway is the only one. Thoreau was a product of his time and place of ideally incestuous intelligentsia, and perhaps he does know that the greatest of “poets” can really only be understood by their own kind, much like the “best” chefs make some of the weirdest tasting food and are really only understood and appreciated by chefs of the same caliber. However I tend to believe when we read works included in the literary canon, their reputation must be abandoned, if possible, and must be looked at to see if their message is conveyed clearly, eloquently, and with justification just as much as one would look at any other work to determine if it is great. For a teacher, or any other authoritative figure, to say one work contains more genius that another, and thus is in the literary canon, is to perpetuate the idea that only the great communicate with the great; which is something I just can’t buy into.

The Explanation

My name is Nathan and I am currently a sophomore originally from Bloomington, IN. I enjoy music, traveling, and trying new things. I love the outdoors, and going backpacking especially. I took English 201 to become a better writer, as I feel writing is one of the most powerful tools that someone can have. In general I'm fairly laid back and interested in what other people have to say.

Brief thought or two on blogs:
I have never blogged before, and don't have too much experience reading them. I have my doubts as to whether I think blogging is a good form of communication. While a blog's ability to give anyone with an internet connection a space to express ideas or a passion is a good thing, the fact that one can say anything in this space creates the potential for abuse. The abusers may be a small minority, but there will certainly be people that change facts, steal ideas, and cloud discussion to further some personnel agenda. This combined with the fact that the author can make up any qualifications he may like about himself, to an extent at least, furthers the uncertainty that surrounds the content on someone's blog.

More traditional media sources have problems too; perhaps I put too much trust in publishers and editors in providing me with accurate information. They too may have agendas; especially the agenda to put out what will sell well, even if that means changing some of the content, or dropping more scholarly works for works that give more thrills. Thus I am interested in seeing how my initial thoughts on blogs, as legitimate sources of information beyond opinion, develop as we progress through the semester.

I try to live my life by getting as many good experiences as time will allow, and exploring the outlet that blogs provide many people will be another experience that can better me as a person. I go into this class then with an open mind, and interested in classmates reactions to communicating in this form about the subject of authorship.