Monday, May 28, 2012
Final Post
(For some reason, the paragraphing is not working correctly. I apologize for that.)
To all of my viewers, or lack there of, I am writing this final blog post to make sure that our signals don’t get crossed. While blogging this year has been enveloped in a different atmosphere than years prior, and has, in my opinion, improved my writing overall, I will not be continuing my roughly bimonthly posts.
This year has given me the ability to explore an area, communication and how people communicate in the modern world, that interests me through a modern communication medium, blogging, that is supposed to allow easy communication and exchange of ideas on a global scale. However, I have unsuccessfully utilized blogging to its full potential because I don’t want people to read what I write, and am self-conscious about it. I have not popularized my blog like I should have to fully obtain the blogging experience, and as a result I have practically no followers, which is expected, and thus have no global perspectives or alternative ideas. My blog has no global communication. Ironically, my blog about communication has failed to communicate.
My writing skills have improved, and I can more clearly articulate my ideas on a page as a result of blogging. I credit this to the nature of blogging and reading blogs because many people won’t take the time to figure out what you are saying and instead will stop reading as soon as they can’t follow the flow of the post. As a result, I have had to focus mainly on clarity, and I have forced myself to play the part of the reader, which I fail to do as frequently as I should. Out of pure practice, I have noticed that I need to completely rework some of my sentences less. In addition, I have begun to notice my writing style. I have a tendency to being sentences with propositional phrases and I frequently use interjectory phrase to elaborate on my ideas. Sometimes I use them too much and it can make my writing sound choppy. It is something that I will work on outside the realm of blogging.
Thank you to all of my readers, if you even exist, for bearing with me for the last nine months. Now, to make sure that there are no mixed signals, I am going to end my senior year of blogging as direct and succinctly as I know.
Bye.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Guest Blog
Here is a guest blog from someone my class to mix things up and provide a different perspective:
With the perpetual march of innovation, a common observation about technology today might note the increased demand, in many societies, for speed and efficiency. In the words of the character Brooks Hatlen from The Shawshank Redemption after he concludes a prison term spanning multiple decades: "The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry." In the field of communications, this is especially relevant. It is rather obvious that over time, methods of communication have become faster - the age of electronics has guaranteed that. Now however, we've begun to see a different trend: not just faster, but shorter. To be sure, communicating with shorter messages is just another way to speed things up, but there are larger implications.
The most well known example of this is text messaging. The use of brief text messages to replace phone calls has lead to some interesting trends, most notably, the development of shorthand slang in a wide variety of languages. This has sparked a debate between those who believe it to be harmful and those who scoff at such claims. I will not comment on how texting may be shaping people's approaches to writing itself, but I do believe that it reflects an ongoing trend in social interactions: many now prioritize brevity and speed over quality in their day-to-day online interactions.
A very relevant example of this is microblogging (no, it's not always Twitter). Here's what this post might look like if I were looking to be as brief as a Tweet: "Life's so fast; technology just keeps on picking up the pace. #whatsthehurry." For my purposes, a "post" like this is utterly inane. It illustrates a newer breed of "blogging" that caters to the needs of those who want rapidfire feedback; acting much more like a social networking service than a "traditional" blog. The website "tumblr.com" directly states in its information section that it is "to web blogging what text messages are to email." Twitter advertises itself as the "fastest, simplest way to stay close to everything you care about."
On the whole, the need for speed is perhaps explained best by the basic economising problem: infinite wants that are constrained by limited resources. The resource in this case is time. Mottos like "live life to its fullest" and "you only live once" reflect cultures which focus on getting as much done as possible within the time given. It's interesting then, that this mentality can be seen so clearly in the way we choose to communicate.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Important Innovations
People have been delivering messages to one another for thousands of years, and there have been many advancements in message delivery over the years. The oldest example that I can think of would be a messenger service that is often thought of when thinking about message delivery between monarchies. But since there are so many things innovations and inventions that I could talk about (papyrus, paper, the printing press, ect…) I am instead going to focus on just America, and how communication evolved.
The oldest form of message delivery would be a system or network of carriers riding stagecoaches led by horses. They would deliver the same things that are delivered now like letters and packages. A famous network would be the Pony Express. This network consisted of around 400 horses, 120 riders, and 184 stations and connected St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California, a distance of about 1,900 miles. The cost of delivering anything was $5 per half-ounce, but the letter would get there in an astounding 10 days.
The next great innovation was the telegraph, which was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837, but it wasn’t put to widespread use until after 1844 when he completed a successfully telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. Many of you are probably wondering how a telegraph works, and here’s how: there is a constant flow of electricity flowing through the wires, and each key stroke interrupts the current for a specific period of time and can be interpreted on the receiving end.
My guess is that about half of you are familiar with Alexander Graham Bell, and for those of you who aren’t, he’s the inventor of the telephone. It’s easy enough to see how the telephone revolutionized communication. Exchanges that use to take days could now be done in minutes because people to talk directly to one another. The number of phones in service skyrocketed over the years. Just two years after its invention, there were 10,000 phones in service. In 1948 there were 30,000,000 and in 1971 there were 100,000,000.
The last major innovation in communication was email. People can share files that they would not have been able to over the phone, and as a result, businesses began to function much more efficiently and cheaply because email is free and companies don’t have to pay for international mail or phone calls. The inventor of email is considered to be Ray Tomlinson in 1972 because he denoted the @ symbol as a way for a computer to recognize to send that information to another computer. Now there are over 600 million email users world-wide. As a result, fewer and fewer people are using the postal service and if the trend continues, mail may become obsolete.
The oldest form of message delivery would be a system or network of carriers riding stagecoaches led by horses. They would deliver the same things that are delivered now like letters and packages. A famous network would be the Pony Express. This network consisted of around 400 horses, 120 riders, and 184 stations and connected St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California, a distance of about 1,900 miles. The cost of delivering anything was $5 per half-ounce, but the letter would get there in an astounding 10 days.
The next great innovation was the telegraph, which was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837, but it wasn’t put to widespread use until after 1844 when he completed a successfully telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington D.C. Many of you are probably wondering how a telegraph works, and here’s how: there is a constant flow of electricity flowing through the wires, and each key stroke interrupts the current for a specific period of time and can be interpreted on the receiving end.
My guess is that about half of you are familiar with Alexander Graham Bell, and for those of you who aren’t, he’s the inventor of the telephone. It’s easy enough to see how the telephone revolutionized communication. Exchanges that use to take days could now be done in minutes because people to talk directly to one another. The number of phones in service skyrocketed over the years. Just two years after its invention, there were 10,000 phones in service. In 1948 there were 30,000,000 and in 1971 there were 100,000,000.
The last major innovation in communication was email. People can share files that they would not have been able to over the phone, and as a result, businesses began to function much more efficiently and cheaply because email is free and companies don’t have to pay for international mail or phone calls. The inventor of email is considered to be Ray Tomlinson in 1972 because he denoted the @ symbol as a way for a computer to recognize to send that information to another computer. Now there are over 600 million email users world-wide. As a result, fewer and fewer people are using the postal service and if the trend continues, mail may become obsolete.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Blogging
I have realized that up to this point, I have yet to talk about the means of communicating that I am using right now: blogging. While I disagree with the concept of blogging and it is still a medium through which ideas can be shared, and it also comes with some benefits.
It allows for a global perspective on the issues that a blogger writes about. People from all over the world can offer their own unique perspective on the issue, and propose ideas that may not have occurred to the writer. The Hindu that lives in India will have completely different ideas than the feminist that lives in the United States or a communist from China. It is this free-flow of ideas that lead to innovative solutions to complex problems that plague the world we live in. The comment tool available on each post enables contribution to this web to be easy and simple. By simply taking a few minutes to write a thoughtful comment you could propose your unique perspective.
One thing that has been beneficial about blogging is that it encourages more formal writing than in any other English class I have been in during my academic life. Usually, the only formal writing done in most English classes is the essay after finishing a novel, which is usually highly restrictive in terms of topics. With the limited amount of exposure to constructive comments and the amount of time between essays being quite lengthy, it becomes difficult to further develop writing skills since there isn’t the necessary practice that is required to improve at anything. The blog posts act as the practice. They help to break up the droughts of writing and maintain efficiency at a minimum.
This practice is also helpful in developing a distinct voice to your writing where the is the constant struggle between that informal style of a blog as well as carefully crafted language and sentences to accurately convey the message. I think I did an especially good job of this in my past post titled “Bacterial Communication.” There could have been a post riddled with complex terms and ideas that would have made sense to few but instead I chose to use a more dynamic voice to make the post more entertaining and dynamic instead of dense and dry which are commonly associated with scientific topics because of complex terms.
I still don’t enjoy blogging as a means of communication. It merges the public and private lives too much in my opinion. But, no matter how much I would rather not blog, I still realize that if I want to get better at communicating with others through writing I need to practice, and blogging is helping me practice. It’s like how at a young age parents are always telling their kids to eat their vegetables. No matter how much you may dislike the taste or texture, you must eat them anyway because they are good for you.
It allows for a global perspective on the issues that a blogger writes about. People from all over the world can offer their own unique perspective on the issue, and propose ideas that may not have occurred to the writer. The Hindu that lives in India will have completely different ideas than the feminist that lives in the United States or a communist from China. It is this free-flow of ideas that lead to innovative solutions to complex problems that plague the world we live in. The comment tool available on each post enables contribution to this web to be easy and simple. By simply taking a few minutes to write a thoughtful comment you could propose your unique perspective.
One thing that has been beneficial about blogging is that it encourages more formal writing than in any other English class I have been in during my academic life. Usually, the only formal writing done in most English classes is the essay after finishing a novel, which is usually highly restrictive in terms of topics. With the limited amount of exposure to constructive comments and the amount of time between essays being quite lengthy, it becomes difficult to further develop writing skills since there isn’t the necessary practice that is required to improve at anything. The blog posts act as the practice. They help to break up the droughts of writing and maintain efficiency at a minimum.
This practice is also helpful in developing a distinct voice to your writing where the is the constant struggle between that informal style of a blog as well as carefully crafted language and sentences to accurately convey the message. I think I did an especially good job of this in my past post titled “Bacterial Communication.” There could have been a post riddled with complex terms and ideas that would have made sense to few but instead I chose to use a more dynamic voice to make the post more entertaining and dynamic instead of dense and dry which are commonly associated with scientific topics because of complex terms.
I still don’t enjoy blogging as a means of communication. It merges the public and private lives too much in my opinion. But, no matter how much I would rather not blog, I still realize that if I want to get better at communicating with others through writing I need to practice, and blogging is helping me practice. It’s like how at a young age parents are always telling their kids to eat their vegetables. No matter how much you may dislike the taste or texture, you must eat them anyway because they are good for you.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Development of Language
Recently, I have been very interested in language, especially how there came to be so many vastly different languages today. My theory before researching this topic was that there must have been one original language from which all other languages were derived, and regional accents that developed eventually become so different until they became their own distinct language. This cycle has been perpetuating for ages, and is still continuing today.
While researching I inevitably came upon the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story (I had heard that the Tower of Babel was the cause of different languages, but new none of the specifics before reading about it), the Tower of Babel was built by humans who all spoke the same language. The purpose of the Tower was to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. God knew about the man’s goals and believing that it would only cause people to leave Him, He made it so that no one could understand each other and spread them across the earth. Since I am not a very religious person, I was unsatisfied with this answer and continued to search.
I next came upon an answer that I believed was much more practical and had evidence to support its claims. Most of us have probably heard of the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian) that were derived from Latin. We know that these languages are related to one another because we are able to analyze their texts and can see that they all share similar roots. From further analysis it was determined that there was an even more ancient ancestor that was shared not only by these 5 languages, but also by Germanic and Slavic languages. However Germanic and Slavic languages have no ancestral languages that had written texts and the similarity was determined by phonetics. These unknown ancestral languages are called Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic. And it was determined that there was an even older ancestor that includes most Indo-European languages. There is then an even older language that is more encompassing called Eurasiatic languages that includes the Indo-European languages, as well as Altaic (Turkish, Japanese, Korean, ect…), Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish, ect…), Eskimo-Aluet, and Chukchi-Kamchatkan languages. It is believed that this continues back even further to when modern man evolved fifty-thousand years ago, and there is DNA evidence gathered from bones of this species of man that has been used to draw correlations between when the genes began to rapidly change and the development of language. For a more detailed explanation and interesting examples visit this site.
After researching this topic, I am even more intrigued by language and would like to explore in a future blog post how we determined what a rock was and how we associate a definition with a mix of sounds.
While researching I inevitably came upon the biblical story of the Tower of Babel. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story (I had heard that the Tower of Babel was the cause of different languages, but new none of the specifics before reading about it), the Tower of Babel was built by humans who all spoke the same language. The purpose of the Tower was to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. God knew about the man’s goals and believing that it would only cause people to leave Him, He made it so that no one could understand each other and spread them across the earth. Since I am not a very religious person, I was unsatisfied with this answer and continued to search.
I next came upon an answer that I believed was much more practical and had evidence to support its claims. Most of us have probably heard of the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian) that were derived from Latin. We know that these languages are related to one another because we are able to analyze their texts and can see that they all share similar roots. From further analysis it was determined that there was an even more ancient ancestor that was shared not only by these 5 languages, but also by Germanic and Slavic languages. However Germanic and Slavic languages have no ancestral languages that had written texts and the similarity was determined by phonetics. These unknown ancestral languages are called Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic. And it was determined that there was an even older ancestor that includes most Indo-European languages. There is then an even older language that is more encompassing called Eurasiatic languages that includes the Indo-European languages, as well as Altaic (Turkish, Japanese, Korean, ect…), Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish, ect…), Eskimo-Aluet, and Chukchi-Kamchatkan languages. It is believed that this continues back even further to when modern man evolved fifty-thousand years ago, and there is DNA evidence gathered from bones of this species of man that has been used to draw correlations between when the genes began to rapidly change and the development of language. For a more detailed explanation and interesting examples visit this site.
After researching this topic, I am even more intrigued by language and would like to explore in a future blog post how we determined what a rock was and how we associate a definition with a mix of sounds.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Freudian Slips
Most of us have probably at least heard the name Sigmund Freud. You may only know of him as the psychologist guy from a long time ago, and I’ll admit that my knowledge of his is very rudimentary. You may not know what he theorized in the field of the subconscious, but you have probably heard the term derived from his namesake, a Freudian slip.
For those of you who haven’t, a Freudian slip, or parapraxis, are commonly thought of as ‘slips of the tongue’ or unconsciously saying something that you didn’t otherwise mean to say, but in terms of psychoanalysis, things such as misplacing objects, mishearing or reading, and forgetfulness are also included within the Freudian slip theory. As entertaining as some of the examples might be, like calling a girlfriend by the name of your ex, it is believed that these ‘slips’ reveal what you are actually thinking about or what is repressed.
Here is a brief video of some examples if you are still unclear about what exactly they are (for some reason many of these slips lead to sexual references).
If in fact these ‘slips’ are caused by repressed thoughts on certain topics, then can’t these subtle, and often times, missed bits of communication function as a window into the beliefs of a society or someone’s past that they have tried to block out? By delving into the source of the ‘slip’ we would consequently be uniting the conscious with the unconscious. This raises another question: do we truly want to have only one consciousness or would we be better off with having conscious and unconscious thought?
Freudian slips are not restricted to speech but can also pop up in writing. It is these intricacies that can help investigate the psyche of the characters. I am planning on looking specifically for these Freudian slips as my class finishes reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare. I believe that it will be the specific words he says, or unconsciously says, that will reveal whether or not Hamlet is actually insane, an issue that has already be broached in class.
For those of you who haven’t, a Freudian slip, or parapraxis, are commonly thought of as ‘slips of the tongue’ or unconsciously saying something that you didn’t otherwise mean to say, but in terms of psychoanalysis, things such as misplacing objects, mishearing or reading, and forgetfulness are also included within the Freudian slip theory. As entertaining as some of the examples might be, like calling a girlfriend by the name of your ex, it is believed that these ‘slips’ reveal what you are actually thinking about or what is repressed.
Here is a brief video of some examples if you are still unclear about what exactly they are (for some reason many of these slips lead to sexual references).
If in fact these ‘slips’ are caused by repressed thoughts on certain topics, then can’t these subtle, and often times, missed bits of communication function as a window into the beliefs of a society or someone’s past that they have tried to block out? By delving into the source of the ‘slip’ we would consequently be uniting the conscious with the unconscious. This raises another question: do we truly want to have only one consciousness or would we be better off with having conscious and unconscious thought?
Freudian slips are not restricted to speech but can also pop up in writing. It is these intricacies that can help investigate the psyche of the characters. I am planning on looking specifically for these Freudian slips as my class finishes reading Hamlet by William Shakespeare. I believe that it will be the specific words he says, or unconsciously says, that will reveal whether or not Hamlet is actually insane, an issue that has already be broached in class.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Sounds have Meaning?
In class we have been talking a lot about how the sound of words can add meaning to a passage, line, poem, or any other work of literature. To be honest, I don’t really think that I buy it. The best example I have to demonstrate this skepticism that I have was when I was reading in poem in my English class a few years ago, and my teacher was convinced that the repetition of the “p” sound was intentionally put there to mimic the sound of gunfire.
I think that often we are subject of over analyzing whatever we are reading, and in the end we make something out of nothing. The following graphic is a depiction of this stance that one of my friends had posted up on Facebook (pardon the language).
I find that over analyzing just beats any piece of writing to death and makes me end up disliking many of the books that I read in school simply because I believe that we over analyzed them and attempted to synthesize meaning that simply wasn’t there. And for me, this idea of the sound of words having meaning seems too far-fetched. When I tried to get people to help me understand this apparently logical idea, I’ve gotten clear explanations like, “It makes sense to me.” or my personal favorite, “I play music so that’s why I understand it.” Well, I play music too and have been for longer than most people I know, and it still isn’t clear.
So I guess that I asking if there is anyone who can give a clear explanation of this concept because if I am missing something that is really cool from a literary stance, than I want to understand. I also don’t want an answer like, “Some people get and some people don’t.” It’s like understanding this concept is having membership to an exclusive club where the only way to become a member is to know the secret, but members aren’t allowed to tell the secret to anyone. There is nothing more frustrating.
I think that often we are subject of over analyzing whatever we are reading, and in the end we make something out of nothing. The following graphic is a depiction of this stance that one of my friends had posted up on Facebook (pardon the language).
I find that over analyzing just beats any piece of writing to death and makes me end up disliking many of the books that I read in school simply because I believe that we over analyzed them and attempted to synthesize meaning that simply wasn’t there. And for me, this idea of the sound of words having meaning seems too far-fetched. When I tried to get people to help me understand this apparently logical idea, I’ve gotten clear explanations like, “It makes sense to me.” or my personal favorite, “I play music so that’s why I understand it.” Well, I play music too and have been for longer than most people I know, and it still isn’t clear.
So I guess that I asking if there is anyone who can give a clear explanation of this concept because if I am missing something that is really cool from a literary stance, than I want to understand. I also don’t want an answer like, “Some people get and some people don’t.” It’s like understanding this concept is having membership to an exclusive club where the only way to become a member is to know the secret, but members aren’t allowed to tell the secret to anyone. There is nothing more frustrating.
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