Truth or Fail?

When thinking about what I wanted to say, I felt kind of confused about it.  Unlike the last post, I actually understood the article; I just couldn't decide if I agreed with it.  In the end, I decided that it was accurate, but misguided.  Sort of like rolling a strike in the wrong lane.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire by Errol Morris makes a bold claim.  The first two sentences sums up his view very well.

Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words. But a picture unaccompanied by words may not mean anything at all.

He goes on and talks about how pictures cannot be true or false themselves, and must be put into context to make any sense.  While nothing that he says in the article is incorrect, I don't feel like it accurately portrays photography (or any still images) as a medium.  Take a look at the following image.  Is it true or false?

Even if you want to believe in fairies, you have to admit this photo is fake.  This is, in fact, one of the first fake photos ever taken.  Two girls borrowed a camera form one of their fathers, and took this photo with painted cardboard.  This photo was taken with a specific intent (to "prove" fairies existed to their parents) and uses fallacious means of doing it.  I believe that this photo can be called false (even though fake works better).

Despite that, I do believe that she was right in a lot of ways.  It is true that looking at an image of The Lusitania without any context doesn't tell the whole story.  In fact, most modern images gets it's context from society.  80 years down the line, somebody's going to look at a LOL cat and will have to have it explained to them because the same social constructions wouldn't exist.  That being said, writing isn't the only way to convey a message.  No one medium (especially images) is exempt from great story telling.

"Approach but never reach" -Zeno

When I sat down to write this blog post, I had a hard time actually starting.  Of all of Harris' weird ideas, this one is the most difficult to follow.  It might be that he tries to make a contrast between creative works and intellectual works.  I kind of lost him for a while after that point.  

My understanding of "taking an approach" is basically forwarding, but with the style than the content.  The idea being that if you like an authors style or taste, you would make a piece trying to write it as if it was him/her doing it.  Maybe here would be a better place to define a parody.  This seems to be enforced by the line "And what you listen for in a good cover is not an imitation of the original... but a new rendering of it."  

But again, it's when he tries to define writing in this that I start having problems with it.  "But while creative artists often reshape plots or images that strike them as somehow troubling or flawed... academic writers tend to make a more generous and sympathetic us of their influences."  First of all, artists don't make covers (or parodies for that mater) because they don't like them.  Jonathan Coulton's cover of Sir Mix-A-Lot's Baby Got Back is very different, but has gone on record saying that he liked the original, but wanted to try something new.  Not all artistic "approaches" have to be out of any sort of disapproval.  Also, why must "academic" writers be so different from artistic writers?  While writing for, say, school does require a different writing style, it does not mean that it has to approach the work from completely different directions.  In fact, I feel that the best academic papers are the ones that have a lot of artistic voice in them.  

But that's just my thoughts on it.  If you read this, please comment.  It's how I judge how well my blog posts do :P.

This Title Is a Lie

Before I start this post, I would just like to mention something I put in my extended essay.  In it, I mentioned Tangental Learning, or the idea that if you present somebody with something, they will research it themselves.  I experienced tangental learning when I read the Monty Python quote in the start of the chapter, as I googled the skit and watched it on YouTube.

Joseph Harris invents many words in his book Rewriting, but "countering" might be the one I like the best as a concept.  Countering means to create a new line of thinking from what the author originally wrote.  This could be from taking the complete opposite opinion from the author to testing the limits of the position that the author originally took.  For an example of rewriting, but I noticed my earlier blog post on Hadges fits the description well (I realize it's kind of egotistical to pick one of my own writings, but it's a post I know well).  Much like Harris' essay he mentions at the beginning of the chapter, I went in to the blog post with the intention of arguing a number of his main points he said in the article.  While not all countering is strait disagreement, it is the easiest way of presenting it.  Countering is an important part of critical analysis.  If you read something that you don't like and can't counter it, then you really need to work on that skill.  You need to be able to not take everything at face value, and figure out all the details that go into it.

Countering and Forwarding go hand in hand to me.  Forwarding is kind of the opposite (forwarding emphasizes what the author wrote while countering negates parts of it), but they are related in that they have the same goal: to work off of the previous work and expand it for it audience.  While countering my change the views on the writing, it is sometimes important to let your own ideas take control of your paper.

Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Amazing Blog Post

In his book Rewriting, Joseph Harris coins the term "forwarding."  He defines it as taking a work, and rewriting it for a new audience.  At the beginning of the chapter, he quotes Kenneth Burke talking about a conversation that continuously gains new people in the middle and compares it to academic writing.  My first thought when I read this was that it sounded a lot like myths.  The old "classic" tales get retold over and over again until the original story almost disappears into it.

When thinking about forwarding, only one thing really came to mind.  I realized a good modern example of forwarding is the entire concept of a meme.  For example, the YouTuber known as saraj00n forwarded two pieces of work by Chris Torres and Daniwell-P when he created the video we know today as Nyan Cat [cite].  The idea of a meme directly relate to forwarding.  When someone likes something, and then does something with it, such as reposting, covering, parodying, revamping, adding/changing audio, remixing, or even just recaptioning (as is the case with advice animals), they are forwarding it to their own audience.  When a lot of people forward a piece (and the people who saw the forwarding forwards and so forth), it becomes a part of the culture (or in other words, a meme).  

Random fact of the day: the word "meme" comes from the Ancient Greek word "mimeme" meaning "something imitated."  Maybe an argument to make is that imitation is a form of forwarding.

Another random fact: the word "nya" (the word nyan comes from) is japanese for the onomonopia "meow"

Newsy Type Stuff

In his article The press becomes the press-sphere, Jarvis discusses how news reporting has changed because of the internet.  He explains how news changed from a linear system (story to journalist to writer to editor to print) to a large interconnected system he calls the "press sphere."  The press sphere is affected by many different factors including companies, readers, external news sources, and comments. They're all connected... like some sort of WEB that spans the entire WIDE WORLD or something.  All kidding aside, I actually agree with pretty much everything that he said.  I am a firm believer that the internet will replace all other media as the main source of news and entertainment in 10 to 20 years (at least it will if the FCC and Google can actually make this free internet thing work).  All these people connected to such a collaborative medium as the internet, we're going to see a huge shift from larger organizations (such as news channels) being the main source of information to individuals and small collections of people.  Heck, there are already great examples of this.  The already viral nature of how media is being shared on the internet holds the key to fast and accurate news reporting from every possible angle.  Much like the videos from the numerous revolutions in the middle east helped actually present the news to the world, the future of news will center around people with their smart phones (or whatever) capturing the news as it happens.  It is much harder to miss a story when everybody can report, not just a select part of the population.  

Anyways... Yeah.  Go Internet!  

News vs News: Who Will Win?

Reading through a large number of posts from the last blog assignment, I found two different sides of this.  The side I'm on is the "word of mouth" side.  Over half the people I read get their news for the most part form friends and family and Facebook.  Much like I do, they don't read too many publications, and prefer to have their friends filter through and find the meaningful stuff.  The other side is the people who DO read articles.  Most of these people read online sources, but some do read paper sources.  Most people use online newspapers or magazines, such as The New York Times website, or television websites, such as CNN.  These tend to present their information the same way as their own media, but in a structure that fits searching the web.  I don't have a problem with this model; I just don't like these sites as news sources usually.

I would like to add that in the time since my last post, I did find a new source of news: reddit.com.  Reddit is known for being a way to find memes (not so much a source for new ones; that would be 4chan).  However, it does often have links to news sources to interesting topics.  If other people (who like what reddit usually does) likes it, they "upvote" it which brings it to more people's attention.  The really good news articles bubble to the top, and I'll usually read them.  Horray :)

While I don't really care what Hedges or Sullivan or Carr would say on this, I do know that this would mostly just enforce their preconceptions.  People are stubborn with their beliefs and faiths usually, so something like this, being interpreted in different ways, would enforce each of their beliefs.  Hedges might say that this split between the class is the split between the literate and the illiterate America, Carr might say that this is due to the internet's influence on our attention, and Lunsford might say that it's just us soaking in different writing styles.  Is any of them right?  I don't care.

Breaking News: I Hate News

When I read the blog post assignment, I knew immediately what my answer was.  The problem I felt like I faced was trying to figure out why it was, and I think i have an answer.  So, where do I get my news from?  The answer is simple: I only get news from word-of-mouth from fiends and family.  I do not read new articles from news papers or website, I do not watch television news, and I sure don't hunt down news.  If there's any news story that's important, my parents will tell me.  Even so, the last major piece of news I got interested in was pointed out to me by my roommate.

So why?  Why do I not go after news personally?  The answer is simple: I hate news.  For the most part, I find news can be split up into 4 major categories, and I have a reason each for not liking them.

The first is political news.  This became very prevalent last year for obvious reasons, but I despise them not for what they are, but for what they represent.  Politics is just people with firm beliefs trying to push their beliefs on other people.  I don't believe that there is one right solution for most problems – I do not believe that either raising or lowering taxes is inherently a good or bad thing – and I despise anybody not willing to compromise, which is all politics is.  Political news is just these same uncompromising people not getting anywhere.

The second is "Hollywood" news.  This is the easiest to explain why I don't like it.  It's people obsessing over people I couldn't care less about.  Enough said.

The third is any news that is "Sad News."  This specifically covers the latest trend of news about mass shootings.  Now I know this will sound a little offensive to people from around here because of the Aurora shooting, but I hate these types of articles.  While, yes, lives lost are inherently a sad thing, the news stories about them show a bit of arrogance and obliviousness.  Daily, lives are lost all around the world.  Lives are lost in all the wars going on.  Thousands of Palestinian rockets have attacked Israel in the last year alone.  Many children die from starvation in Africa.  The world mortality rate is 8.37 per 1000 people, with the highest being in South Africa.  About 577,190 deaths from cancer happen earch year.  Yes, a mass shooting in a school is sad, but why should it get all this attention when there are many more lethal issues to consiter?

The last is just boring news.  Anything that doesn't fit into any of the above categories is just "meh" on my level of interest.  While keeping up with the world's happening is good, there just isn't anything worth reading about.  I would go into detail, but CGPGrey has an article that explains it much better than I can.  Seriously, read that article.

There are, occasionally, a few news stories that catch my attention – such as the Jonathan Coulton vs Glee debacle – but I was personally invested into Jonathan Coulton's work long before the news article.  Scanning a news source for something that would interest me is unrewarding, and not worth my time.  If there's something I would want to hear about something I'm already invested in, I will find it.  Otherwise, I just don't care.