Unrequited Love

Dear Cheater,

            What do I have to say for you to stay loyal to me? Do you not find me interesting? I need you to try and see it my way. I find myself doing everything to please you and following your demands, yet you discard me. I thought you, out of all people, would understand. Yes, like any person I have made mistakes in the past, but I try to correct them to please you and the rest of the world. Why are you so impressed with those others, who do not share your interests or thoughts. I want you to change your mind. Come back to me! The fact is, without you I have nothing but ideas in my head. I just need you to listen to me, otherwise my writing is meaningless.

From, Your Jealous Author

            Writing, like love, is wonderful, but it can be quite frightening. In dating you have to put yourself out there and be yourself. This can be dangerous because of the assumption others will have about you. This is the same in writing. According to Joan Didion, an American author, writing is “the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.” When putting fourth one’s ideas it can be intimidating, there is always this fear of rejection and that your opinions and viewpoint will not be excepted.  Jacques Derrida, a well known 21^st century philosopher, said in an interview that his subconscious thought that his ideas were too bizarre and offensive and that he should not be writing them. However without him taking the risk of exposing his theories, the world wouldn’t have known. One of his theories is deconstruction, which  is  actually him teaching us how his mind works. It is analyzing text and interpreting it’s alternative meaning.

As writers, we try to please the reader by writing safe. Joan Didion, tells us in her article Why I Write, that she tried to follow Derrida’s theory of deconstruction and failed. She described it as “trying to think” and not being able to “think in abstract.” She would get distracted and write what is considered inoffensive. Because of the intimidation of being yourself when dating someone, people tend to try to be the person they think that person would like. We do this in writing also. In school we have grammar rules and set topics that we write about. Academic writing is about information and thoughts on another authors work. There is no room for being  thinking outside the box. Students find it dangerous to use a different font size let alone to write something abstract.

Do you have any advice for those of us starting out? Just like dating location is key. If you go to a crowded restaurant, with so many distractions, it might be difficult to have an intimate meal with the other person. If you go to a private more secluded restaurant it could be more expensive. Ron Koertge, who wrote the poem  Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?, says that to write you should leave your house or apartment and “go out into the world.” In the poem he makes small statements about childlike things. For instance having a notebook with a kitten or spaceship on the cover. He also says that the library is a good place to write next to the aisle to see a child playing. Koertge says, “be like the child… laugh so loud everybody in the world frowns and says, ‘shhh’.” Children have huge imaginations and come up with ideas a grown human being would not think of. This is Koertge’s way of saying, when writing have a child’s imagination. So put yourself in a childlike environment and the feelings and memories will follow.

I find writing difficult, because I do not know how to captivate the reader and to make them want to listen to me. I have always tried to write what I think the readers would want to read. Didion, Derrida, and Koertge have shown that readers want something new and different. To think in abstract or like a child, brings about a new perspective for audience.

Chapter 4 Breaking out the visual

  Digital image claims to have more authenticity and able to give out information with greater immediacy then print. We are bombarded by images everyday from commercials, billboards, phones, and computers. Scholars are saying that image will take over the written word, but does that mean that print is being threatened?
   Print today is continuing to remake itself so that it can keep up with the digital media. A good example is the USA today. This magazine/newspaper makes its layouts look like a computer screen. The index now has summaries gathered in a column with a small picture included like an icon button. Newspapers are now looked at as visual experiences to dictate what people should feel when they read a story rather than just gathering information. So which is in control image or visual?
   It doesn't matter the ratio between image or text but the way an image supervises its reading. Graphs are a good example because they don't show a lot of words but give off a lot of information. You can see what has a higher percentage and what is being compared with just a few brief words. You can also use words to show a visual image by using metaphors or descriptive language. Today we have many print styles that show every possible visual relationship between word and image. Traditional non-fiction books in which the word dominates and art books or billboards where the image dominates.
 

Dr. Miller's Lecture

  Dr. Miller a professor at Rutgers University gave a lecture on teaching in the digital age. He brought up some great points that I never thought of as a student. Since the internet information has become "ubiquitous" and because of this students have loss curiosity and creativity. Websites can be very shallow. Websites are information cramped into about three pages, compare that to a book that is over 300 pages. The internet has everything so how can you find good information. We think that research is just getting information, it is about opening up a new realm of experience. Students need to have the motivation to not just answer the question being asked but why that is the answer or how that is the answer. Since he was talking to teachers about teaching in the digital age he advised them to use Drigo for teaching. It moves reading into the public eye by publishing the research. Other ways of using the internet to our advantage is blogging, which is what I am doing now. Dr. Miller made the statement "If we release all the time we spend infront of the television we can build a better world."

Chapter 5 The Electronic Book

   The third group looked like they understood what Bolter was talking about. When they showed a slide or quote they would not just read the quote but explain it. They first talked about the writing changing from a papyrus roll (25 ft long) to a codex. Codex is a leather bound book with a pre-numbered amount of pages and introduced mass reading. Bolter describes "illuminated manuscripts at its finest (pg. 79)."Codex gave the sense of closure and with the digital technology that closure is being diminished. They explained that E-books are trying to imitate the physical appearance of the codex.
   The encyclopedia was created to store a vast amount of information. Britannica was the first to come out with a series and also the first to come out as an encyclopedia in technology. Internet as a whole became an encyclopedia. People now are thinking that libraries are going to go extinct. Bolter thinks that libraries are going to be around for a while but there is talk of a digital library, in which books are stored in machines.

Writing in the Dark

1. The earliest encounters I remember with writing and reading is when I was three years old. My grandmother was living with us ,after my grandfather died, and her and my mother would write these stories for me and would let me draw the illustrations after I read them. After that I started to write my own stories with them. The stories usually rhymed like the cat sat on the mat while the rat ran with a bat. It was very trivial but some of my fondest memories. We still have the stories that we wrote together in the office at home. This is something I will never forget.

I feel like Im repeating myself....

1. How does this electronic space refashion its predecessor?

    Eletronic space refashions its predecessor not by the physical facts, like turning pages in a book to now pushing a button that says next page with an arrow; it is the amount of written work that can be published. Buying a book on the Kindle or buying a book in Barnes and Noble is not going to create a homogenous audience. Electronic text does not create a homogenous audience. People are still going to read what interests them. If someone likes nonfiction murder mysteries, they are not going to go look in the science section because now they have so many books, blogs, or any other form of published work to choose from. They are going to stick to what they know and what they like. What it is going to change are the authors. If I decided to write a murder mystery and can not get mine published in a literal book or a book you can buy on the kindle I can just blog it and name it murder mystery. Someone can go on google type in murder mystery stories and they could stumble across my story. I might not be paid but I did publish my work and someone did read it (I hope). Electronic text only creates HOMOGENOUS AUTHORS.

    2. How does it claim to improve on print's ability to make our thoughts visible and to constitute the lines oif communication for our society?
   One thing that is cool about electronic text is the ability to communicate to your audience. If you would like to comment on my story or give me advice of what I should have done you are able to. This brings the author and audience closer together, giving the author an idea of what type of people read their work and their response.

Writing Evolution

  Jay David Bolter talks about, in the second chapter of Writing Space, the shift from writing to typing as a natural part of life, and gives many examples of the shift of writing through the ages. He talks about the Greeks beginning to write on papyrus rather than telling stories orally. Then they went from papyrus to codex. And in Western Europe handwriting to print. Will electronic text take over print text, just as the others took over?
  This  transition between print to electronic text, that is taking place, is similar to the western Europe movement of handwritten books to print. This caused a huge controversy especially with the Catholic Church. Since books were handwritten there were very few copies and only the influential seemed to own them. When print came about and it was possible for the lower class to own a book, most importantly the Bible, the Church was furious and skeptical. Did this cripple the Clergy's power over the congregation when ordinary people who weren't ordained by God were allowed to read the Bible? Did this movement make the audience homogenous?
   This question is being asked today with the conversion of print to electronic text, but with a twist. Instead of the audience being the same, are the writer's being homogenous? With electronic text my writing and many other amateurs writers are able to publish there work and have the same chance of people reading it as the next best selling author does. The fact is I am a terrible writer but I can still publish my work speeling mistaks and all. Who gave me permission to let people read my work?
 I left these questions unanswered so that you may tell me what you think.