Currently, it is Friday, November 2nd (the week of Halloween) at 2:33pm, and I am just beginning to type this reflection, simply as fast as I possibly can. I’m assuming I am not alone although, because I’m assuming my peers are on the same ride I am. Yet, I did this on purpose, just to justify a point I’m going to try and describe. In class on Monday’s, my peers have seemed to exaggerate the same topic about their posts (mainly the very first blog posts), and that exaggeration is, “I literally started it at 1pm on Friday.” Now, If you think about it, that only leaves approximately 2 hours to read the article, write notes about it, and write a whole fat reflection on the piece (well, I guess only if you’re like me, who stupidly wanted to strive for an A). This week’s assignment finally came around, and it was almost like a slap in the face. “How to Read Like a Writer,” by Mike Bunn. When I first looked at this article–I’m not going to lie–it was at 9:10am on Monday morning in class. Even when I was reading this article, I had to skim, jump, and speed read through as fast as I could. Of course, highlight a few things here and there and then I’ll be good to go. Then came the real kicker, which was trying to read the second “article,” “…and by islands I mean paragraphs.” How in the world was I supposed to fake-read an “article” that changes every minute? Frustrated, I then realized I was being laughed at, almost toyed with. As I skipped through the majority of an article that was telling me how to read more in depth to help me better understand, I was getting frustrated with another one that wouldn’t allow me to read more in depth. As I jumped further down an article that was telling me to read better, I was literally jumping from paragraph to paragraph with a different article and had been about read to throw my laptop. So, I decided to go back to the previous article, that frankly I had taken for granted. I used Mike Bunns ideas to realize why “…and by islands i mean paragaphs,” caused me so much anguish. “When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing” (72). When J.R. Carpenter designed “…and by islands I mean paragraphs,” it was meant to almost prove the frustration that so many people (especially teachers) have with the new generation. We fail to listen, excel in lack of patience, fail truly reading, and excel in getting to the point. Bunn describes, “… I started asking, how—how did the writer get me to feel, how did the writer say something so that it remains in my memory when many other things too easily fall out, how did the writer communicate his/her intentions about genre, about irony? (119–20)” (73). I asked these same questions to further understand Carpenter’s reasoning. “…and by islands I mean paragraphs,” made me feel stuck and confused, and I felt all of these emotions even before I got to read some of the randomized paragraphs. No matter how many times teachers will repeat over and over again to not procrastinate, to read an article before class, or to dig deeper into an article, students will jump again and again to different islands to find a quick read, find a main point and then jump again. If it wasn’t for the frustrating structure and architecture of Carpenter’s article, I wouldn’t have gone back to read Bunn’s article and emphasize the exact point he was trying to achieve. Look at the structure, analysis the building, or your building will tumble, just as mine did.

Summary: Reading Like a Writer

To begin this article, the author Mike Bunn starts off by describing his job at the theater. He then leads into his discussion on what it means to read like a writer by introducing his time as an english major in college. Bunn states how RLW means identifying choices an author has made to better understand how those decisions may be implied in your own writing. By looking into certain choices and decisions, Bunn claims it will help understand why different readings have the effect that they do on the reader. Then, the author also discusses the difference in “normal” reading compared to RLW. Bunn describes the differences by comparing it to an architect looking at a building. RLW means looking at a building and being curious about how the building was made, unlike looking at a building and wondering about its history. Following this, Bunn goes into stating some questions a RLW reader should ask while reading. Questions about the purpose and the audience, where the evidence comes from, what genre is the reading in, why is the language the way it is, and are there parts that are confusing. Bunn restates these questions several times in this article, defining his purpose.

Summary: …and by islands, I mean paragraphs

When first opening this “article,” I didn’t realize that you could move around the screen. This article is very spaced out and has numbers all over the “page,” almost like it should be a connect-the-dots picture. The paragraphs vary in length, but they are all spaced out across the “page,” and are in a poem-like style. As you read, the paragraphs are subject to change at any point. Not only do the paragraphs change automatically, but if you click certain island graphics that are beside the print, you too can also change the paragraph into something completely different.

Making Connections/Analysis:

The two articles almost seem to contradict each other. One describes how to be a better, more in depth reader to help with your writing, and the other one changes so consistently that you can’t even read the full text. “…and by islands, I mean paragraphs,” almost seems to laugh at the reader, because humans have been straying so far away from actually reading. We are accustomed to skimming, reading quick texts or just viewing over a book to find a quick answer. Even as we read an article about how to RLW, we are jumping from paragraph to paragraph to simply get a main idea of each. How will anyone ever read better, if even when we are reading on how to read better, we skim over it?

Analysis: “Rather than curation, Szucs emphasizes quantity and rhythm: a photograph every single day, no matter what” (Rettburg 34).

Rettburg is pointing out the habitual routine of humans always needing to represent themselves. When we post photos on social media, it’s always our “perfected” images, the one out of 50 that we decided is filter-worthy. Yet, we don’t see each other’s camera roll, we don’t see the trial-and-error of photos that consume our phones. Those don’t even account for the photos we don’t save from apps like Snapchat. If you’re like me, a teenager grown from the technology that surrounds us,  really think about how many photos you actually take on a daily basis. It’s not about the filtered images, it’s about the quantity of photos to get to that image. Like Rettburg also states, “Of course we not only have centuries of diaries and self- portraits, but also have ash narratives that are as short as tweets, photo- copied zines that episodically tell stories from the artist-author’s life and artists, like Tehching Hsieh, who have taken photos of themselves every hour for a year”.  In reality, we  do take this many photos, and it’s not for a project.

Commentary: “And yet her project is so akin to today’s streams of images, a little every day and the whole consists of nothing more than a potentially never-ending row of fragments”(Rettburg).

When I first read this quotes, I imagined fragments being when girls take half pictures of their faces, or cover part of their faces. Yet, social media pages are unfinished puzzles, made up by fragments of images. Every picture filters some part of the person, whether it’s a filtered selfie or a family picture. We seem to design our social media pages how we want them, always hiding some aspects of our lives. Everyone decides what they want their “puzzle” to look like, then we just build onto them. This action is even done literally on Instagram, where people post photos that don’t make a full image unless you look at the profile. I wonder if Rettburg is pursuing this idea of fragmenting, or if she has a different idea of fragmentation.

Making Connections: “Part of the fascination of watching time lapse selfies is watching how the subject changes and eventually ages”(Rettburg).

On Snapchat, I find myself being addicted to watching articles and videos on these time lapses of either people taking selfies for a year or people showing fashion styles of the past 100 years. There’s just something intriguing about watching change and transition in what really is a lifetime. Watching how just one person can look completely different with filters is fascinating. Same with watching makeup tutorials on Youtube or even doing my own makeup. Our society seems to have this desire to use filters not just because it’s the norm, but also just because it’s pleasing to experience change.

Commentary: “What is filtered out? What flavours or styles are added? The word filter has been used in many domains, but usually to describe a process where something is removed” (Rettburg 21).

Whenever I think about filtering, I almost think of it like a very thin sheet of tissue paper. You have an image or a photograph that you lay the tissue paper on top of and it distorts it in some way. Yet, you can still tell what the original image is. Then you add a different color tissue paper. It’s very thin, so you can still see what the image is, but it’s even more distorted. Living in the 21st century, I think of filters this way due to the way I am constantly using filters for my own photographs that I forgot what a true filter is. When we apply photo filters, we actually are getting rid of different aspects of the photo. Sometimes, I use lighter filters to get rid of blemishes, or darker filters to get rid of my pale skin. I am getting rid of certain aspects of my image, but by doing so I’m also adding to my image.

Making Connections: “You can tear out pages or glue photographs over prompts you don’t want to use, but the journal does provide very clear rules for how you should represent your baby’s first year”(Rettburg 22).

Are filters the cause of our journaled baby lives? Are filters the inspiration to having things look a certain way, or are filters a product of having things a certain way? When we are born, our lives are journaled in a baby book in a certain way. Then, we are expected to go to pre-school, elementary school, high school, college, and finally get a job, which we have been preparing for since our relatives began asking the question, “So what do you want to do when you grow up?” They should be concerned, considering that when you aren’t working, you’re preparing for work. Is this the custom that began filters? In our society, this expectation of working has been around for centuries for everyone. Everyone’s guide to education and work is laid out the same, why shouldn’t the small portion of when we aren’t working not be? Filters are the new way to not only work like everyone else, but look like everyone else, have the same family like everyone, and act like everyone else. You can choose what filters that you do and don’t want, just like the photographs. Yet, it’s almost impossible to escape the same format of the journal.

Analysis: “A photo album is not a photo album if there are no photos in it, and it is not a family photo album if all the photos are of landscapes” (Rettburg 30).

Is a genre really a filter? Take two photo albums side by side, one is filled with baby pictures, and one is filled with wedding photos. No one would say that the wedding album is a filtered version of the baby album, but they would describe them as two different objects. There has to be a point to where something isn’t just filtered, but it’s a whole new image, a whole new idea, or a whole new person. When do humans reach this point? I disagree with Rettburg on her topic of genres as filters, because if you completely alter the main idea of something, it’s not just filtered. There has to be a stopping point of filtering and accept that there is a point to where you jump off the cliff of filtering and enter a whole new outlook. Rettburg also talks about filtering coffee in her analogy, “Technically the coffee filter does stop the ground coffee beans from getting into the pot beneath, but the point of a coffee filter is to add flavour to water by slowing its ow through the coffee beans” (Rettburg 21). When you take that same coffee and add in creamer, sugar, flavor, and milk, when do we finally call black coffee a cappuccino?

Making Connections: “These habits blind people to the real changes of our time” (McLuhan).

The world is more connected than ever, yet it has never been so disconnected at the same time. Humans, who were once unable to send letters across seas in under six months time are now able to send messages across the globe in a fraction of a second. With ability, we should know what’s going on everywhere, right? Humans may have developed all this technology to connection, yet we also developed the habit to skim. McLuhan discusses not how social media has caused us to develop this habit, but the newspaper did. This habit has expanded into today’s world and has only grown. When we view our phones, we scroll through and quickly view posts or articles, unless something of interest appears. We started this habit with the newspaper due to it’s jumbled formatting. In school, we may still be taught to analysis, but we do not carry this habit through everyday life because of our built in habits since we were given a cell phone.

Summary:

In this article, “The Mechanical Bride,” McLuhan describes how the newspaper relates to work Margaret Mead, Picasso and James Joyce, the cluster of visual material. He then relates physics to prove a point of, “They demand much greater exertions of intelligence and a much higher level of personal and social integrity than have existed previously” (McLuhan).  Continuing to relate works of art with the newspaper, McLuhan states, “The past is made immediately available as a working model for present political experiment.” Yet, he counters this statement by describing how people do not actually take in media by saying, “The sheer technique of world-wide news-gathering has created a new state of mind which has little to do with local or national political opinion” (McLuhan). In the article, he describes how humans do not absorb information because of the past layout of media, how it blinded man to the events around him. This habit has caused man to have no desire for information, as McLuhan claims, “The same man would rather dunk himself in the newspaper than have any esthetic or intellectual grasp of its character and meaning.”

Commentary: “This inside point of view would coincide with the practical point of view of the man who would rather eat the turtle than admire the design on its back. Industrial man is not unlike the turtle that is quite blind to the beauty of the shell which it has grown on its back” (McLuhan).

When I first read this statement, I was confused as to what McLuhan was really trying to say about industrial man. Obviously, the industrial man referred to the man of the 21st century, connected to the industry he has built and connected to people through his technology. What is the design that McLuhan discusses? I then realized that it is technology. We grew it, manufactured it to keep use secure, to keep people connected. Through it, we can do amazing things, yet the average male doesn’t realize it. As humans, we hide ourselves within our creation and let it consume our lives, yet we don’t admire what we originally made our design for. We created phones to stay connected to people, but now people give us a reason to stay connected to our phones. Instead of taking in the beauty of our design to stay open to the world, we use it to hide ourselves from it.

I have heard many things about my grandmother throughout the years, yet I felt like I never really knew her, like there were parts missing from the stories. Even though 2018 wasn’t very technologically advanced, I did know that they had social media. So I decided to look her up on Instagram first. Lately, some social media sites had begun erasing accounts that have not been active for years, but luckily I found her. From the images, I could tell that she had accomplished many things, but what stuck out the most was how she seemed to always be around people. There were many images of herself, and she always looked happy. I was curious to know what her friends were like, so I clicked on photos that they were in to see their social media. Some pages were very artsy, but the majority of images were almost, selfish. The feed was composed of selfies and group selfies, there were few images that didn’t include my grandma. I knew that she wasn’t a selfish person from the stories, and I also knew that she was very intelligent. Yet, none of the posts showed that side of her, or of her friends. I began to wonder how my grandmother’s society even thrived if everyone’s main focus was around themselves. I realized that I was making these accusations when I was only looking at Instagram, an imaged based social media site, so I hoped to find my grandmother on Facebook. I had hoped to find written posts about her life, updates or even posts about the current situation during her time. What I did find were more images, almost the same ones that were already on her Instagram. She had very little to say, and I didn’t find any posts about her opinions or even just what was going on her in life. I did find a few links that she shared that were videos of American Idol contestants or just funny videos, but nothing very interesting otherwise. My grandmothers society seemed to be very self-based. In her friend’s feed and her own, any picture posted almost always had to include themselves. None of my grandmother’s friends wrote posts either, and my grandmother didn’t seem to have a blog either. When I really began to think about it, I realized that her culture seemed to just surround images. The captions were always short, but it was the visual that counted the most. Her personality through her images told me that she was a fun, happy, and beautiful person, yet the images her friends posted told the same story. Yes, they did different activities, but every page I went to seemed to be a copy of all the others. I closed my laptop, feeling as if I knew even less about my grandmother. I didn’t know her hardships, I couldn’t find academic achievements or papers she wrote, and I didn’t know her opinions or thoughts. Her entire generation seemed to make sure that the image they wanted to show was there, and nothing else. It seemed as if her society was also connected through social media by looking at the dates of the posts, but it made me wonder if they were too connected. I reopened my laptop and found a video that my grandmother shared on her Facebook. It was a video of a couple of girls at a baseball game, not watching the game, but taking selfies instead. It wasn’t just my grandmother and her friends, it was her entire generation. Her society was disconnected from the entire world around them, they would rather post about an event than actually experience the event. It was repulsive to think about my grandmother being one of the girls in the video. It was as if her society’s intention was to create cell phones to stay connected to people, yet they used people as an excuse to stay connected to their phones. In my world today, phones were still used, but I didn’t want to believe that they were used as much as in my grandmother’s generation. I always looked up to my grandmother, but now I didn’t know what version of her was really her. I then turned off my phone and laptop, because for the first time, I didn’t want to use them ever again.

When I read that only 2-7% of all internet users are bloggers from, “Into the Blogosphere,” initially I honestly wasn’t that surprised. I mean, who has a blogging account nowadays that isn’t middle aged and living in their parents basement? Of course, it took me a minute to realize that I’m writing this on my own blog site. After I actually took time to reflect on this fact, I began to question my previous first impressions. What defines a blog and are they really that unpopular? The blogosphere isn’t as small as Lampa thinks, in reality, it’s a transforming and ever growing community. Blogging is still popular, but it’s in the form of social media, and journalist blogging isn’t necessarily the minority anymore. Blogging is categorized under many different names now and though the term “blogging” seems unpopular, there are so many different forms of it just under new names. In the 21st century, everything is adapting and changing, blogging is just one more of those changes.

Most individuals separate social media and blogging, because two different ideas come to mind. When we think of social media, we picture sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter etc., while we relate blogs with sites like WordPress. In Lampa’s article, he divides the blogosphere into two separate groups, which are the diarists and the journalists. Could we not separate people who use social media into the same groups? On my Facebook page, I have friends that are always sharing links to different news articles, posting their political opinions, or just sharing a story from their weekend. Lampa states, “On this point, blogging clearly has the upper hand on print and broadcast journalism. For forming community, hyperlinks become essential for creating the central core of the blogosphere. Bloggers have the ability to publicly debate issues back and forth by directly linking to one another’s posts as well as news articles that may serve as source material” (Lampa). Is this not what social media users also do in their social media spheres online? Amateur journalism not only occurs in Lampa’s definition of a blog, but also in social media. Now, I say, “Lampa’s definition,” because the true definition of blogging is, “a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.” The blogosphere is not this small community of users, in reality, the style of blogging that Lampa discusses is just the smaller part of the blogosphere. The entire blogosphere should include many more parts of social media, because it’s just the new style of blogging. Posts are shorter, sharing links has become faster, posts are also becoming visual and more easily attainable. Not only is the blogosphere growing, but there are not as many barriers to blogging as Lampa claims. He states, “Adding to this global digital divide is the dominance of English on the Internet, which is reflected in the blogosphere as well; English-language blogs outnumber all other blogs three to one (NITLE, 2003)” (Lampa). With technology, humans can instantly translate messages to practically any language. Yes, initial internet access may still be a restraint for many individuals, but in today’s society, it will only expand from here on out. In Lampa’s conclusion, he suggests, “The community must begin to find ways to promote the writings of diarist bloggers in order for their unique style of blogging to be more widely represented, which would serve to deepen the shared experience of diarist bloggers and subsequently strengthen the image of community” (Lampa). In reality, the community already found a new way to promote diarist and journalist bloggers, and that new way is social media.

Lampa, Graham. “Into the Blogosphere – University of Minnesota.” Conservancy,

                  conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/172275.