Four Letter Word Project: OBEY

I used the word obey because it deals with our everyday struggles of whether to conform to what is expected of us, or rebel against accepted norms. The video I made deals with the pressure to obey government, religion, and society (specifically regarding our obsession with our image).

What Nothing Says

Looking at the buddies on my Instant Messenger list, the one user name that always stands out is "SilenceIsMurder". It makes me stop, if only for a millisecond, and think about the power of silence. We're all familiar with the notion that words are the carriers of meaning, and that in order to establish an argument you must first craft a well organized assortment of words. Ironically, as the power of words grew, so did the power of silence. To prove this, I thought about when I used to get in trouble by my parents. When I did something wrong and I got yelled at, I'd be a little upset, but eventually we moved on. However if I did something wrong, and all my mother did was look at me with a livid expression, I would be terrified. I feel that is true with most people. At least if you get yelled at there is a dialogue and an effort to resolve the conflict. However, the dreadful silence and trepidation of whats to come is simply murder. Therefore, the decision to use or omit words in an argument can be a very effective tool. The same is true in our technological world of advertisements and metadata, as Weinberger explains in this latest chapter.

Specifically, Weinberger deals with the difference between the implicit and explicit. He notes that as hard as we try to make meaning and provide information, there is also a great deal of meaning in what we choose not to include. We create a web of implicit relationships and the links between these relationships thus creates meaning. Furthermore, there is an interesting point that Weinberger brings up that should be discussed. He asserts that there is a paradox of the digital order by pointing out that "As we pull the leaves from the trees and make a pile of the miscellaneous, we free the leaves from their implicit context". He means that our nature to tag, and comment, and, be explicit through the technological order, in turn diminishes its implicit context. We are constantly making decisions about what should be said and what should be unsaid, and in turn we are making decisions on how much we trust can be inferred. And to be frank, I feel as though our powers of inference have already suffered because of this. Remember the lady who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot? Honestly, the day we need signs on our coffee saying "HOT", which I think is already starting to happen, is the day our society can no longer comprehend 'what nothing says'.

Interview With Lauren

Hofstra Interviews Consensus

In my interviews with Hofstra students, I have found that many people are uncomfortable talking about writing. They answer my questions because I ask them too, but they are really uninterested in talking about writing. I feel the biggest reason for this is that none of them really consider themselves writers, because they tend to consider writing as purely a profession, and that their countless texts, facebook updates, and academic papers, while qualify as pieces of writing, do not qualify them as true writers. There is no personal connection for many students with writing, and it is viewed purely as a tedious, boring, activity that they try to engage in as infrequently as possible. When I ask them what they write, the most common answer are essays and other academic writing. The second most common answer I received was from film majors who said that they write scripts. However, no one told me that they write stories, diaries, poems, or any other creative writing. Although, when I mentioned texting and facebook, they did generally decide that they were pieces of writing, but they weren't important enough to remember without my interjection. Overall, I feel that there is no national conversation on writing, because no one is really talking about their writing, even though they engage in digital writing constantly. I feel as though that digital writing is unconscious; we do not even realize how much we write via texts and facebook until it is brought to our attention.

The Materiality of Writing

Blogging in this class has certainly altered my outlook on writing and how its effected by its medium. When I began blogging, there was such a natural, inert desire to follow the universal standards for writing that are instilled in us from childhood. However, as I have become a more experienced blogger, I have tried to break free from this imprisoning structure, using color, font changes, and other creative touches to help express my ideas.

In academic writing, your words are your only tools. Every paper must be white, every font must be Times New Roman, and every text color must be black. Nothing makes your paper stand out from the other. Therefore, all you have is your word bank and grammar techniques to make you shine. However, as the material of writing changes, so do the way in which we can provide our argument. For example, when we used construction paper and crayons in class, my writing became more creative. The same is true for when I blog. I feel freed from the rules of academic writing, and sometimes experiment with font changes, underlines, and color accents, all of which expanded my arsenal for creating an effective argument.

Social Knowing

Knowledge is not individualistic; its collective. Knowledge is between us, it emerges from public an social thought. Two things that Weinbereger discusses about social knowing in this chapter are blogs and wikipedia, both of which are prime examples of how third order devices expand our collective knowledge.

The Blog

Every week, we write for this class via blog. As a course that examines writing in a digital age, the blog seems an appropriate medium for us to communicate and exchange our ideas. However not everyone believes in the usefulness of blogs. Michael Gorman, the president of the American Library Association wrote in the Library Journal: "A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web". Although Gorman is attacking the act of blogging, we must first assess his bias. He is the President of the American Library Association. The library is overwhelmingly attached to the first and second orders of order, so of course the president is going to find an opposition to a medium that destroys everything his association s built upon. While a library idolizes concrete facts and proper writing, the blog shows an evolution of writing, where creativity if preferred to the standard universal format. Therefore, while I agree that blogging is unfiltered and unedited, I believe these are strengths, not weaknesses.

Wikipedia

"And what is the most important thing Wikipedia teaches us? That Wikipedia is possible. A miscellaneous collection of anonymous and pseudonymous authors can precipitate knowledge (Weinberger 139)". Who hasn't used Wikipedia? We all rely on the ease of use and plethora of knowledge the website has about virtually any topic. However, if someone said twenty years ago that one day people will rely on a source that is entirely composed from unknown, and largely unqualified authors, many of us would have not believed them. This is the magic of wikipedia. It allows us to have control of the distribution and organization of knowledge, letting every individual edit the next, and allowing knowledge to grow rather than being spoon fed into our brains. I strongly support Wikipedia, not only for the information it provides me, but for what it says about our society, and how we can rely on each other, rather than professionals, for information.

Writing New Media

Cynthia Selfe makes an interesting point in the second section of the book. She links the lack of new media in the classroom as not a result of educators not feeling it is appropriate, but because many educators lack the knowledge and familiarity to access new media texts and determine the usability in the classroom. Fortunately, we are indeed living in the midst of a technological revolution, and hopefully soon technology and new media will be implemented more evenly in classrooms. However, as the digital world seeps its way into our schools, we must be conscious of how it affects the ways our instructors teach and our students learn. As faculties learn to embrace technology into their curriculum, they will be rewarded with an enhanced educational program, including wide ranges of effective projects and assignments, and high levels of student participation and student led discussion. However, technology is constantly changing and transforming the way we write, think, and learn. It is of great importance that we continue to monitor the effects of technology in schools and universities in order to maintain the positive effects it has had on our educational system.

Lumps And Splits

"A well-constructed tree gives everything a place"

"Each thing gets only one place"

"No one category should be too big or too small"

"It should be obvious what the defining principle of each category is".

These quotes represent the requirements that Weinberger lists for a tree of information. However it also shows the limits of this medium, limits that are not found in the third order of order. In the digital order, there are no rules or restrictions. As Weinberger notes, trees require us to "make binary decisions about where things go. Ideas, information, and knowledge shouldn't have to suffer from that limitation". Luckily with the third order of order, they do not have to. A leaf can hang on multiple branches and can be different for every individual. We have already established in the previous chapter that technology has destroyed our sense of the geography of knowledge, but now it has also destroyed its shape, allowing each of us to create our own trees of knowledge.

The Geography of Knowledge

Does knowledge have a geography? Sure, back in the day when people actually used libraries for its books rather than its study space, but after reading Weinberger's third chapter about the digital disorder, I would have to say technology has eradicated that geography. What interests me though is how this lack of geography is going to affect generations to come. Even though we have all grown up with technology, it wasn't as important to our society as it is today. My generation still utilized the geography of knowledge, understanding that To Kill A Mockingbird belongs in a completely different section than the biography of George W. Bush, and that every book has its own unique place. But as websites such as Amazon, which is built upon the idea that knowledge can be organized in as many ways as possible, expands, future generations may loose their sense of what makes different pieces of writing, well different. At a bookstore, when we are in the fiction section, we can trust with a high degree of probability that we are only going to be browsing through fiction stories. However, out on the world wide web, clicking the suggestions for a fiction story might contain both fiction, not fiction, and reference entries. Therefore, the third order of order's plethora of routes of information may not only change the way future generations go about seeking information but also the way they organize their own knowledge-geography maps.

The Possibility and Actuality of Visual Argument

In one sentence: Advertising sells everything but the product.

Advertising sells a image, a location, a feeling, a desire, a fear, a lifestyle... but not the product.

It feeds our subconscious and we devour it eagerly and unknowingly.

What does this picture have to do with Pepsi as a product? Nothing......

Brainstorming the Digital Arguement

Obey

1. What are three or more concerns you have - political/ economic/ personal/ cultural/ educational -now?

2. List any visual images that come to mind when you look at what you listed in #1

3. which images from #2 seem most compelling to you? Why?

4. What colors do you associate with what you listed in #1?

4a. Why do you associate with what you listed in #1?

5. What association might other people make with the images you listed in #2?

5a. What might you do with the images you listed in #2 to help other people make similar associations as you do? Who are these people (the audience) anyway?

Interview With Deedee

What is an Essay? What is a Composition?

Here at Hofstra, we are constantly writing. We write long academic papers, short homework assignments, text messages, emails, journals, blogs, facebook comments and tweets. Are all of these writings the same? Of course not, academic papers are long, tedious and structured, while text messages are fast, messy and full of abbreviations such as "brb" and "lol". However all forms of writing, I believe, have one commonality: they are compositions. When I first began investigating what a composition was, and how it differs from an essay, I turned to Webster's Dictionary for a definition. The dictionary listed seven different possible definitions for the term, and left me with the impression that it is not concrete; a composition is an abstract idea that composers use to define their creations. Therefore, I expanded my thinking to not only how compositions and essays differ, but how they relate to one another.

Essays are scary. Everyday, students pray that the word doesn't escape their professor's lips, for they know what is in store for them once the essay is issued: endless researching and procrastinating, followed by writer's block and attempts to drag out a boring subject to fulfill a five page quota. However, if you were to take any of these students phones and accumulate all of the text messgaes they sent over the past day, there is a high probability there would be enough text to fill 5 pages. And yet, this form of writing comes so easy, so what is it about essays that cause such hardship? There are several reasons, primarily the structure of the writing. With an academic paper, there is little room for creativity and imagination. Your task is to write five pages about a subject that , most of the time, has little to no interest to you. Furthermore, you are also bound by guidelines. Perhaps you are writing an essay on the Swine Flu Pandemic and have to discuss the ways the virus infiltrates and affects the human body. However, as a Public Relations major, you are far more interested on the affect of the Swine Flu on our daily lives, such as school closings and other preventative measure that have been taken. Unfortunately, you are bound by the guidelines of your professor and cannot write about an aspect of your topic that truly interests and engages you. Therefore, the biggest problem with essays is that you are not the authority. Essays oppress students' free will to write about what they truly desire. And as we have learned throughout history, people to not enjoy being oppressed. We like to be free to do, feel, and write, as we please. The rigid structure and oppressive nature of essays not only makes writing them more difficult, but on some level creates a resentful attitude towards essay writing that is not found in compositions.

A composition is any creation that is assembled by seperate parts to create one complete piece of work. It is also free of form and medium. Unlike an essay, a composition, has less guidelines, leaving the composer free to create something original and satisfying. There is no dictator in composing; you are the authority; you decide when, what, and how you will compose. Additionally, compositions are not constrained to paper and pen. A composition can be a film, a piece of music, a poem, a play, or even an epic novel. There is no limits to the possibilities of compositions. However, having total authority also gives you total responsibility. In an essay, there is structure and you know that you have completed the task when you have reached the assigned guidelines. However, in a composition, you are only bound by the limits you set for yourself. While this may be freeing for some, it may also put pressure on those who are accustomed to relying on others to tell them how to complete an assignment.

While comparing the differences between essays and compositions I realized that, based off my definition, an essay is simply a form of a composition. Each individual letter, makes up words, which make up sentences, which make up paragraphs which makes up the essay. Therefore, every-time a teacher asks for an essay, they are also asking for a composition. Unfortunately for the students, the essay is probably the most rigidly structured and least creative of all of the forms of composition, however it is a composition all the same.

What Do You Write? Why Do You Write What You Do?

When started to think about what I write, the first things that came to my head were academic writings, such as essays, lab reports, and the like. However, when I really started to think about it, I use writing much more than I realized in my personal life. Rarely do I ever put my pen to paper outside of the classroom, but I compose an enormous amount of digital writing. I first discovered this when looking at my iPhone. Now there may be people out there who do not consider texting a form of writing, but those people have simply never had an iPhone. The phone organizes all of your text messages with each individual person into one seamless flow of dialogue. Furthermore, there is no limit to the amount of texts that can be stored in this seamless flow, allowing a endless narrative of events between two people. The same is also true for Facebook status updates and tweets on Twitter. Individually they are just short blurbs about one's life and experiences. But cumulatively they are a digital autobiography of notable moments or events in one's life.

Alphabetization And Its Discontents

Today, alphabetization is so strongly embedded into our lives that we cannot even imagine grouping things in any other way. However, it wasn't until Weinberger pointed it out, that I realized how unimportant alphabetizing objects really is. As Weinberger asserts, "it tells us exactly nothing about the real relationships among the parts". His point is so true. Soda and soap are relatively similar in spelling, but that link only gives superficial information about the two, there is no physical relationship. Furthermore our society has become overwhelmingly politically correct, something I am not proud of, and would cause a social uproar if we used any method other than alphabetization for classifying things.

Alphabetization is blind to social contraptions, and in a world where equality is everything, blind is paramount. "On a field trip", Weinberger writes, "no one gets upset when students are told that A through M go on Bus No. 1 and the N-Zs go on Bus No. 2, but it would be front page news if students were divided by race, prettiness, or their parents' incomes". This is the reason alphabetization is so loved, it prevents discrimination. In a sense, grouping ourselves in such ways brings us back to the separate but equal notion that was defeated decades ago by Civil Rights activists. When looked at in that light, alphabetization becomes more than just a manner of grouping, it becomes a protector of our civil liberties and rights to equality.

The New Order Of Order

As a species, human beings love organization. But as technology progresses, how are we changing the way we group and label information? Is the digital world helping us achieve the organizational utopia which we've always longed for, or is it making us more miscellaneous than ever? That is the central question that David Weinberger grapples in Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. In order to understand how the digital age is changing the way we store information, we must first explore and understand what Weinberger terms "the orders of order".

The first order of order is the actual organization of matter. We store our books on the book shelf while our groceries are kept in the refrigerator. In this order, there is little room for the miscellaneous. Every item is limited to one location, forcing categorization. Personally, I am very disorganized, especially when it comes to CDs and DVDs. Whenever my mom would come into my room, she would yell at me to take better care of my movies so that they don't get lost and I know where to find them. I tried to explain, to no avail, that my DVDs we're completely organized, just in a structure that was specific to me. The video games go in a pile next to the Xbox and the DVDs go in a stack underneath the DVD player. The first order of order is utilized by all individuals, regardless of how organized a person is or isn't. One person's mess is another's constructively organized chaos.

However, as the quantity of organized items increase, the retrieval process becomes tedious and painful. In comes the second order of order: the card catalog. The card catalog has both its pros and cons. It is beneficial in providing important information about the queried item. However, a large catalog can take time to flip through, and furthermore, the physical limitations of the card hinder the amount of information that can be printed.

"The problems with the first two orders of order", Weinberger notes, is "that they arrange atoms. There are laws about how atoms work". However, the third order of order does not have to abide by these laws. Once a picture or an item is brought into the digital world, it can be put into an infinite quantity of folders and be labeled in any way imaginable. While this creates countless benefits for information seekers, it also creates a miscellaneous order that allows countless combinations of organization.

I believe the most astounding aspect of this miscellaneous order is what Weinberger declares at the end of the chapter. "The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and-perhaps more important-who we think has the authority to tell us so". I think this is a very powerful notion because it asserts that the common people have a strong influence on matters that we're once out of their control.