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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Translations: Good or Bad?

Recently in class, we have been talking about the importance of translations of texts. What is lost in translation? Do the benefits of reading a translation outweigh imperfect translation and not being able to completely understand the work completely because of the language barrier? There are words and phrases that just don’t translate that may have cultural importance. If those cannot be effectively translated, then there may not be a point in reading a translated work because ignorance is better than an incomplete truth.
In languages such as Spanish there are three forms of “you.” The first is used when talking to someone older than you or in a polite atmosphere, whereas the second form is used in a much more casual sense, like that between friends, and the third is used when talking to many people that you are referring to as “you”. In English, there is no such distinction. “You” stands for all of those things. When translating into English from Spanish, this poses a problem because in Spanish because the different forms give a sense of a social hierarchy which could lead to completely different understandings in English and Spanish versions.
Do challenges like this mean that translations are useless and should not be read? Well, this is a topic that my class debated for a while without coming to a clear resolution. Translations can windows into the cultures of other peoples and can offer a perspective of that culture that cannot be understood by simply studying their history. There is a reason that people say you cannot be fluent in another language until you have immersed yourself within that culture because there are too many linguistic nuances that are impossible to learn in a classroom. At the same time, while translations can lead to alternative meanings in different languages, the same story can cause people to reach different conclusions within its original language. For example, Islamic terrorism has risen out of an interpretation of the Quran in Arabic. I doubt that authors would oppose these differing conclusions because they would only lead to dialogue about issues broached in their works.
You could argue that translations cause more harm and misunderstanding that they do good, but I would argue the opposite. They provide a new perspective of alternative cultures that is unattainable otherwise, and they create a dialogue from different understandings that can only lead to more complete understanding of a topic from an intellectual level.

Wordless

I would like to share with you one of my favorite picture books: Why? by Nikolai Papov. What is so unique about this book is that there are no words throughout; the entire book is pictures. Here you can actually see all of the pages of the book, but due to concerns on the legality of having the pages directly on this blog I have chosen to provide the link.

You may thing think that there can’t be much complexity to picture books, especially one with no words, but some are far from simple. A misconception that has always bothered me is that picture books are meant only for children. Picture book authors are faced with the challenge of having to take a complicated topic and make it understandable at a basic level so that all ages can gain something from it. Why? accomplishes this extremely well. The main theme of this picture book is war, and he navigates this topic exquisitely, and even with a little bit of humor, a necessity in this instance, to lighten up the density and heaviness of a topic like war. He took this topic and artfully demonstrates the idea that in war all sides lose, and that once a war starts both sides lose sight of the reason they’re fighting and get wrapped up in retaliation and revenge.

His decision to create this picture book without words is an intelligent one that is done with a purpose. When words and pictures are on a page, I, and many other people, tend to gloss over the pictures and not give the graphics that attention and analysis that they deserve. The misconception is that you don’t have to pay attention to the graphics or pictures because the words will tell the story. But there are often vital details in the pictures. By choosing only pictures as his method of communication, Papov, is forcing people to focus only on the pictures and search out the details in the illustrations that would go unnoticed otherwise. For example, and my favorite detail in the entire book, on the last Papov refers back to the beginning of the book by having the frog hold what the rat held and having the rat hold what the frog held.

In addition to referring to earlier portions of the story to create meaning, Papov also frequently uses foreshadowing. That just goes to show that Papov has kept the picture book at a high level literarily buy using literary techniques. The use of foreshadowing in the books really helps to keep the audience actively engaged in the book and continuing to search for the tiny details.

I would highly recommend this book to everyone because of its high quality and unique nature. Once you finish the book, you can’t help but stop and think about what you have read and go back and examine all of the pictures again, and hopefully after reading this, you will have a greater appreciation for all of the additional information that a simple picture can articulate.

Translations

Essentially a language is only a set of sounds to which the speaker of that language applies meaning. Over the course of time how did certain sounds accumulate meaning over others and develop into a language? It is fascinating. How can two sounds that are so different mean the same thing? When translating, what is lost?

I won’t try and pretend that I have the qualifications of a linguist to talk about how at some point in time this happened or that happened that caused some language to be born. What I do think is interesting that I can at least call attention to is that the number of synonyms and idiomatic phrases can be indicative of what the people of a specific language think as important. For example, the Inuit people in Alaska have over thirty different words for snow. That would make sense. They live in a place where they are surrounded by snow all the time. The snow is a part of their life. Also in the United States, I think that it would be fair to say that people are extremely motivated to be successful in their career. That can be reflected in the number of words that exist in English for money (cash, moolah, dough, bucks, buckaroos, ect…).

This is a big reason as to why it is so challenging to translate from one language to another. Sometimes there just isn’t a word to accurately translate. If it occurs only a couple of times then it might not severely impact the meaning, but the more words that don’t have an accurately translation, the more the original meaning becomes convoluted. Often times in order to garner meaning for a foreign work, you don’t need a translation but instead just need to listen to the words and the tone in which they are spoken, but that’s a post for another time. Therefore, in the spirit of the holiday season, I would like to leave two videos for you in hopes that they can say what I was unable to. They are both the song Silent Night, but the first one is in English while the second one is in its original language, German, and known as Stiller Nacht.

Bacterial Communication

Have you every wondered why we get sick? Maybe not, but the answer is incredible. With so many bacteria within our bodies, it doesn’t seem possible that we would ever get sick because our immune system would go into action. Well, bacteria while small are great communicators.

Bacteria talk to each other. I don’t mean that literally, but they can recognize how many cells around them are the same bacteria and how many cells around them are different bacteria, and all of this is done on the microscopic level. Bacteria accomplish this with a very simple system of two receptors and two molecules.

Every bacterium makes two molecules, one that is specific to that bacteria and one that is a generic molecule produced by all bacteria. These molecules fit into receptors that are embedded within the bacterial membrane, and again, one is specific and another is generic. Now the really cool part happens. Based just upon these two molecules, the bacterium can identify how many bacteria like it are in the same area and how many bacteria that are different are in the same area. Once there are enough bacteria present, then they all act at once (keep in mind though that most bacteria do not cause us to get sick). The pathogenic bacteria know that by themselves they won’t be effective therefore, they accumulate and multiply, almost like preparing for war, and attack simultaneously. If you would like to learn more specifics about cell communication or see graphics to help with your understanding of the process then watch this TED video, and even if you don’t I would still recommend watching the video because it is fascinating.

This concept could be central to the next wave of antibiotics and anti-bacterial drugs. Now many bacteria are becoming resistant to modern drugs because they are commonly designed to cause the bacterium to explode, or interfere with its replication process, but as a result we are causing natural selection to occur and making the bacteria even harder to fight. Therefore, if drugs can be developed to prevent the attacking bacteria from recognizing that there are enough of them to attack by creating molecule that would attack to the specific or generic receptor, then the bacteria won’t be able to count the other bacteria around them and they will stop their attack. The next wave of medicine will be the result of bacterial communication.

Abbrevs.

Twenty, thirty, probably even ten years ago, people were using abbreviations on a limited basis and when it made sense. Doctor was shortened to “Dr.”. Incorporated became known as “Inc.”. We even use abbreviations when writing peoples names: Mr., Mrs., Jr., ect. But these convenient shortenings have been taken to an extreme and have begun to seep into everyday conversation and become a part of our culture.

The two prime examples that I can think of are LOL and the more extreme, “legit” (Laugh Out Loud and legitimate for those of you who are unaware). I find that LOL is used quite frequently in everyday conversation. In my opinion, LOL has replaced the awkward laugh: the one you use when you force yourself to laugh at a joke that just isn’t funny. “Legit” is frustrating for me. It has become so ingrained into our culture, that I find using its elongated form, legitimate, weird. Whenever I use it, it just doesn’t sound right.

But where do these abbreviations originate?

I hold texting and instant messaging (IM) responsible. The both encourage rapid communication and abbreviations only facilitate that. Because we know that texting and instant messaging can be fast, we expect them to be fast, and we become impatient when there isn’t an immediate response. In order to appease our impatience, we developed abbreviations for words and phrases to expedite the process. Here are some of the more commonly used abbreviations.

brb – be right back
2 – to, too, two
ttyl – talk to you later
gtg – got to go
k – okay
omg – oh my god
lol – laugh out loud
rotfl – rolling of the floor laughing
l8r – later
cuz – because
Test your abbreviation literacy by taking a sporcle quiz.

There are plenty of others that are used too. With IM all that these abbreviations did was speedup the process, but that was the point. With texting there was another reason. There is a character limit per page, and phone companies charge per page. Therefore, abbreviations also encouraged saving money. It is really incredible how language adapts to cultural changes. In a sense, this phenomenon reminds me of the book Frindle by Andrew Clements where the main character renames his pen a frindle and eventually enough people start saying it, and frindle becomes a word in the dictionary. The English language has undergone changes to be compatible with the growing use of electronic devices.

Metaphors

We live in a world where everything is defined by metaphors, and they are used to help make sense of the world that we live in. Metaphors are used to make complex ideas easier to understand, and they shape the way we think. Metaphors are necessary in our lives.

Many common metaphors are centered around life. Many idiomatic expressions stem from this metaphor like “playing your cards right” or “it’s the luck of the draw.” There is even an entire board game dedicated to this metaphor. Another common once is thinking of life as a road. The problems that each person faces become known as roadblocks and obstacles that must overcome. This is also frequently seen in poems and most people probably think of the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost with its famous line, “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” This image of a diverging path is often used in reference to making decisions with each taking you in an entirely different direction.

My favorite metaphors are those about time because I am aware of significant differences in how it is viewed by other cultures. In our culture, time is viewed as being linear. At one end of the line you are born, and at the other end you die. In thinking this way, common metaphors that come to mind are thinking of life as a day, with the sunrise beginning life and the sunset ending it, or life as a year, where life is usually divided into the seasons which each represent a different time in your life. However, these metaphors can also be tweaked to correlate with other, typically more eastern countries like India, where time is thought of as being cyclical. The metaphors of life as a year or a day could be thought of as continually cycles that will always repeat themselves. What is interesting to note is that this metaphor aligns itself with the belief of reincarnation in Hinduism that is common in that area.

Each metaphor that is used is revealing of the culture that uses it. The metaphor of time being cyclic might reveal that that area is strongly influence by Hinduism. So, what do metaphors that we frequently use today tell us about ourselves and the culture we live in?

The Insights of a Child

I read a blog post of one of my friends, and she told an intriguing story about a time when she gave her 7 year-old cousin a dollar because she lost a bet, and her cousin started running around the house screaming “I’m rich! I’m rich!” It made me realize that we have our best communication skills when we are children. Children don’t worry about being politically correct or whether or not what they say is offensive. They tell you exactly what they mean without being tactful. If they don’t like how something tastes they will say, “Yuck,” whereas an adult would say, “I think that it has too much salt.” Why is it that as a human race, as we age we only get worse at communicating.

Maybe that’s exactly the problem: we age. As we get older, it is not socially acceptable to be blunt. With a child, those blunt comments are seen as funny, whereas with an adult it is only seen as rude. As we age, there is an expectation that we will also mature, and as we mature, there is an expectation that those offensive, blunt comments that get to the heart of the problem should no longer be accepted. So then why is it that as we mature, and our vocabulary and processing skills improve that we find it more difficult to say what we want to say?

One of my hypotheses is that we become too concerned with social correctness that we lose the meaning in what we are saying. It’s like writing a good essay. There is a reason that many drafts are required, we don’t get it right the first time. When we talk, it’s like speaking in first draft form. This could be why many people are communicating more frequently with texts and emails. It allows us to formulate the “right” sentence without the awkward moment when the person is standing in front of you waiting for an answer.

Many people, when hearing a criticism, immediately assume that it is only meant to demean what they have done. Often times, criticisms are meant to improve what you’ve already accomplished. We think of the word ‘criticize’ in its pejorative sense too often. It could be this way of thinking that is forcing us to revise our criticisms to the point that it loses its meaning. Instead of using the word ‘bad’ we replace it with ‘developing’ or always make sure to add a ‘but…’ What I mean is that there is always a comment praising another portion of what you’ve done that makes the criticism meant for improvement seem less important. That is why I always tell people who are trying to come up with “the right words” to tell me what they initially thought. From my experience, the watered down version of the truth that occurs from mental revisions only cause more communication issues. Ironic how in trying to come up with the right words to solve a problem, we can often create another one, and the most innocent people in the world, children, are the best at saying what needs to be heard.

The "Information Filter Bubble"

We live in a world where all the information is available to us right at our fingertips. If we want to know something, then we can find it on the Internet: the invention that has revolutionized the way the world communicates. Well…not exactly. Eli Pariser was completely unknown until he discovered recently that the algorithms for search engines, and even social networks like Facebook, are using our past searches and providing us with the results that it thinks that we want, and he discussed it a TED talk. In essence, they are filtering our results for us. He calls it an “information filter bubble”. To see the video, click here.

All that this is doing is causing the global community to become more ignorant to the issues going on in the world. The search engine may identify us by our religion or political beliefs or interests and will tailor the results to fit our interests ignoring the fact that there is another side to each argument. This will only enforce the beliefs that we already have without testing them against other’s counterpoints. For example, two different people could enter ‘food’ into the search bar, and one might get results about great local restaurants that provided ratings and comments while the other might get pages on recipes and ingredients. The differences may be subtle, but they more that you browse the web, the more that the Internet will personalize your results, until eventually, the opposing arguments have disappeared completely from your searches. The Internet in its attempt to broaden knowledge throughout the world has only proved to be detrimental by narrowing the breadth of information to which we have access.

By no means do I want to scare or prevent you from using the Internet, but this is a real problem that exists. We are getting what we want to hear instead of what we need or should hear. I do not know how to solve this problem or I would tell you, but I want to warn you of this “information filter bubble” that surrounds each of us on the Internet. When doing research on the web, be sure to always ask yourself, “Do I have the complete truth?”

Poisonwood Bible

In class at the moment, I am reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. It follows the Price family (mother, father, and four daughters) as they move from Georgia to the Congo to convert the natives there to Christianity. But, as in any quality novel, the family faces their fair share of challenges, and many of the issues the Price family faces in terms of their mission could have been minimized had they been willing to communicate with the native people.

Reverend Nathan Price, the father, is the guiltiest on this count. His thoughts are clouded by his faith, and his ego. He refuses to work at all with the local figures and judges them without giving them a chance to defend themselves. For example, Mr. Price often sees the local religious leader drinking, and not acting “proper” in terms of his beliefs, but never once has he held a conversation with the man. Mr. Price might also be more successful if he could grasp his mind around the idea that not every native will want to convert. He assumes that because he is “bringing the word of God” to them that they will willingly change their belief system. He is arrogant to think that he can come into another culture as a foreigner and change everything that he believes is wrong.

Mr. Price is not the only person responsible for the lack of communication. The natives are equally responsible as well. For example, Mr. Price wanted to have a baptism in the river nearby, but many locals weren’t comfortable with that plan, and based upon the portion of the novel that I’ve read, the baptism has yet to happen, but Mr. Price did discover why people were uncomfortable with the location of the baptism, a child had been eaten by a crocodile in that same river recently and people were afraid of it. This information was relayed to him months after he initially voiced his plans. The natives are probably doing this because they had finally ousted the Dutch colonial presence, and were cautious of any person who had white skin because Dutch brutalized the population.

Both Mr. Price, and the natives are guilty of the same crimes: failing to communicate to others and failing to allow others to communicate to them. Communication is a two-way street. You must first be willing to communicate in order to receive anything in return, but at the moment, neither Mr. Price nor the natives is willing to take the first step because neither is interested in learning from each other. And until one does, they will remain in a tension-ridden environment that will displease both parties involved.

The Beginning

Hello. My name is Bill and I am a high school student in the Chicago area. For an English class and International Relations class assignment, I had to create a blog that had an overarching umbrella, or general theme, that I could use to discuss different topics relating ideas discussed in class. The umbrella that I selected was communication, and throughout the year, I will be exploring this idea from various perspectives such as political, social, literary, or international relations viewpoints.

With the world becoming more globalized, there is a greater need for countries to interact with each other, and the effectiveness and functionality of the relationship depends entirely on how each player expresses their interests. This idea can also be examined at a smaller level. Every country has citizens that are a part of it. What that country chooses to share, keep from it citizens and why they choose to share or keep that information secret merits exploration.

From the English lens, I can examine how various characters act towards one another. I find that the best books, movies, or television shows are all those which has taken the time to develop the characters and transform them into real people with unique and authentic personalities. The conflicts that arise because of these clashing personalities are often the result of a lapse in communication, and I would like to examine how that personifies itself.

Another interesting perspective is how we as a society communicate in the modern world. With technology advancing at such a rapid rate, and with the new inventions such as the Internet and cellular phones that have revolutionized interactions between individuals and businesses, communication has been forced to change as well.

I would say that the general encompassing question that I will explore on this blog is: How do we communicate in this modern world? I am excited to begin this intellectual journey, and I hope that you as readers will contribute to my journey by asking questions that intrigue you, and challenging my thoughts.