Robin Hood Morality Test

I am disgustingly ill, so I will make this short and sweet and talk about my favorite online quiz. The Robin Hood Morality Test is short and I would greatly recommend taking it. Basically, it presents a hypothetical situation starring the characters Robin Hood, Maid Marion, Little John, and the Sheriff. It then asks you to rate how morally you think each of the characters acted. Given how simple the story is, I was amazed at how sharp the discrepancy was between my friends' answers. I wouldn't pay too much attention to what the test says your results mean--it didn't make much sense to me. But definitely take the test. It's fun. (By the way, my ordering, from most to least moral, was Marion, Little John, Robin Hood, and the Sheriff).

Kicking the English language off its pedestal

I was stuck by the use of concrete form in Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines. By concrete form, I mean the changes in font, text size, and the sort of “bubble text” she uses for emphasis. This concrete style is something you rarely see nowadays in texts written for adults, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I remember how, as a kid, I used to play around with different fonts that I felt were appropriate for the sort of thing I was writing. For my more serious writing, I would stick to Times New Roman. For less serious things, I would use Comic Sans, which is always a good time. I would even occasionally use some impossible-to-read cursive format for things that I felt should be fancier. Eventually I grew out of this habit, as I am sure did all of my peers. My friend summed up the rules of writing well: “For any type of writing you want to do, you should only have to use two styles: your basic, Times New Roman or Garamond font, and, when you want to emphasize a point, that same font italicized.” This is what we’ve come to expect when we read a text, and we are thrown off if we see anything else. And I know this is starting to sound a lot like my last post, but it seems that people take this sort of writing less seriously. Once again, I’m basing this largely off of my friends’ reactions to the Hayles’ text. One of them said that the changing fonts and text sizes made it difficult to read. This is a legitimate complaint. If your goal in writing is to make your point understood (which it obviously wasn’t in Lexia to Perplexia, but that’s a different topic entirely), then you should not write something that is offensive to the eyes. So is it worth it to use concrete form? Can concrete form help convey your point in ways that a single font cannot?

When I think of concrete form, the first thing that comes to mind is the sort of concrete poetry we learned about in middle school. For instance: “Easter Wings” by George Herbert. The concrete form of the poem—the decreasing and then increasing verse length—represents a pair of wings, and also the decreasing and then increasing “goodness” of the state of the narrator. Do we really NEED this? Does forming the lines in a pair of wings really help the point that much? It seems to slam the point in—we get it already.

I think I am a little biased here. I have come to believe, over the years, that in good writing, good ideas should be able to be expressed in a manner that is totally abstract. By this I mean that the actual words on the page are nothing more than a vehicle; the author and the writer should, once they look at a sentence, completely ignore the physical letters and immediately translate them into their meaning. Ideally, the writer should be able to directly transfer his or her ideas straight into the head of the reader. This is obviously not possible, so we require the words on the page to be the middle man. And if the writer does his job well, he should be able to use them as a perfect vehicle. Hence, the use of this funky text shows an inability to express oneself using solely the English language. Hence, the use of concrete form shows an incompetent writer. Ouch. Now, here’s a fatal flaw in the argument I just made: it assumes that the English language, if properly used, can be a perfect vehicle for ideas. This is not true at all. It is full of ambiguities; two intelligent people who read the same thing may interpret it different ways. Even the accepted use of italics in “pure” writing acknowledges the failure of written English to convey emphasis. So why put the English language on a pedestal? Why does good writing need to be pure of anything concrete? Why is the abstract, with its proven faults, so wonderful?

Concrete form, just like the English language, has a set of benefits and drawbacks. One the one hand, it appeals to those who learn best visually. On the other, it can shake people up if they are not used to it. If used well, concrete form can strengthen writing. However, it is not always used well. Is it worth it to propose the teaching of concrete form? I suppose the teaching of new media already does this to some extent. I think the most important thing is to realize that concrete form does indeed have strengths that pure abstract writing does not, but that, like any unusual form of writing, it needs to be used with care, lest you scare away your reader.

Our generation and new media--experts, but amateurs

I wanted to expand a little more on my comment to John C's post about what college english should be. John made a very fair point when he said that English should not necessarily be about teaching networking because "doesn’t our generation, more than ever, already understand and take advantage of this fact?"

I also thought this when I first found out about the nature of this course. However, I came to realize as I spoke to other students the worth of learning networking in English. When I first told my friends that I was taking a course on "rhetoric and network culture", and that many of our assignments would be web-based, my friends immediately assumed the class was a sham.

Why would this be? What makes writing in a blog less worthy that writing a paper? I believe that people of our generation are in an interesting situation in that these new media--blogging, forums, wikipedia--began to flourish when we were teenagers. Hence we took advantage of them in the way teenagers would: we used them for social reasons. Every aspect of Web 2.0 was just there for our amusement. Blogs were for whining about the world. AIM was for chatting with friends. Forums were for geeking out, and so on... It seems only natural that once we went to college and grew out of the habit of these more childish things we would come to view the media that made them possible as childish, too. We are biased, because we learned to use Web 2.0 specifically for frivolous purposes, to believe that Web 2.0 can only be used for frivolous purposes. However, I have seen throughout my time in this course that this is not the case. People in academia have studied these new forms of media extensively; they have also used them to portray their findings, as in this website made by Daniel Anderson.

It is likely that if these new media were taught to children in K-12 education, along with more traditional English writing, these kids would come to view blogs in the same way they view papers, and they would have an expanded arsenal of ways to express themselves. They would not come to see these new media as any less inherently serious than old media.

Teaching children to use new media would also have the benefit of appealing to a wider range of children. Some people have a better visual memory; some have a better auditory memory. If schools incorporated new media as a way of teaching children, as well as incorporated teaching of how to use new media, this would allow children to find their niche in what works best for them to learn.

My point here is that, although people of our generation are well versed in the technical aspects of Web 2.0--that is, we are experts at using the web to do about just anything we want in the social domain--we are sorely lacking when it comes to an understanding of the full extent to which new media can be used. They can be used to argue a point just as a pen and paper or a podium can. And a person who knows this, and knows how to use this, weilds a tremendous amount of power over anyone who thinks that the art of writing and persuasion is static.

Quantum Teleportation to a Positive Test for Avian Flu in under 5 minutes

So I was in quantum mechanics the other day, and our professor was talking about quantum teleportation, which would allow one to “teleport” information over long distances. The efficiency of quantum teleportation would make it a much better “hot medium” than printed text or movies or anything McLuhan would have conceived of back in the 50’s. However, this idea is perhaps a little complex and the explanation would be far too lengthy for a blog post to do it justice. Yes, I believe this would be better suited by academic writing, as much as we all despise it. Yes, academic writing: I could write it in a manner similar to how I will write my chemistry lab report that is due next week, assuming I don’t kill myself first by spilling sulfuric acid all over my skin. Speaking of things that will kill you dead, we learned in my Organic Chemistry lecture about the avian flu and the new drug to treat it. This drug, called Tamiflu, is currently being stockpiled in the homes of chemists and neurologists everywhere—think they know something we don’t? But one shouldn’t get to too paranoid about these things: we learned in probability that for viruses such as the avian flu that have a low occurrence in the population a positive test for the virus is not definite. Even if the test is accurate to 99%, the odds that you actually have the disease, despite the fact that you tested positive, are quite low.

Can Web 2.0 beat Big Media?

Over the summer, I read a great book called Can’t Buy My Love by Jean Kilbourne. It’s about the power of advertising, and the negative effects it has on people. The part of the book that struck me the most was the idea that advertising can control the information we get. Most of the media we see is controlled by five major companies. A particularly scary aspect of this is the news station side of things. For instance, News Corp, one of these big five media companies, owns FOX TV and FOX News. Fox includes advertisements for alcohol during its commercials. This gives the alcohol companies that advertise with FOX a fair amount of power over what FOX programs, and they wouldn’t be very happy if FOX News were to say, take a scathing look at the effects alcohol has on the liver. The conflict of interest here is a little scary. The companies that advertise for these big media companies do have real control, at least to some extent, over the information we receive.

What we talked about in class last week pertains strongly to this. It is becoming easier and easier for people to put their voice online, and for people to actually read what these average people are saying. There are a lot of people out there who know a lot about something who, without tools such as Wikipedia and blogs, would have no possibility of sharing what they know with people outside their sphere of acquaintances. Now, people are starting to trust Wikipedia for information. If something exciting happens in Delaware, some guy from Delaware will post on his blog or on his favorite forum about it before you’d see it on the six o’clock news. This has the potential to put millions of people’s ideas and opinions out there for people to read, to accept or to reject as they see fit.

This diffusion of information—that what we see is now not only controlled by five major companies but by whoever has the notion of creating a website—is quite interesting. It certainly gives people more options as to where to get their information. It has definite disadvantages as well. The web contains so much stuff: how do you filter through all the crap to find something actually interesting—because out of the billions of websites out there, surely someone has something good to say. With this new technology, where pretty much any information you want is out there, the problem is no longer one of access to the information, it is one of finding a needle in a haystack.

Another possible concern is that impressionable minds might take too seriously what they read on the net. Some of the opinions on the internet are bound to be way more outrageous than anything you'd see on FOX News, and if enough people are stupid enough to believe some of the more outrageous things on the web, this could cause serious problems.

I believe that these are pretty good problems to have, at least compared to the alternative—too much information, even if most of it is junk, is better than information that is controlled by a handful of companies.

Hmm... now that I do further research on News Corp., I see that they also own MySpace, which effectively makes my title "Can Big Media beat Big Media?" Darn. I suppose this raises another interesting question: could it ever come to pass that the material we see on the internet becomes just as filtered as what we see on tv? We are the ones who make the blogs and the wikipedia articles, but at the end of the day, it is some big media company that actually owns the forum or the blog provider. Could the content of the internet become controlled by these companies?

Oops

I already wrote my Thursday post, and it did not include a single image, or link for that matter. So, in amends, here are my pictorial thoughts on what writing is. The first picture is the Swedish Embassy in Second Life that Sweden actually bought. The second is a wonderful essay possibly written by some high-school age kid Jeremy Lavine. To see more of his works, check this out. I believe that the rest are pretty self-explanatory.

Can new media free the writer?

When I think about my experience with academic writing, the first thing that comes to mind is the experience I had today in my chemistry lab. I was writing up my in-lab procedure, in which I describe the steps I am taking in the experiment, any observations I have, etc… and I was making notes to myself in the margin of the page describing the reaction in an informal manner (saying things such as “I wish I were able to measure this more accurately” and “this distillation is going very slowly…”). We give our lab notebooks to our TA at the end of lab so she can look over them and give them a grade. When I handed mine in, the TA took points off for these informal comments made to myself. Now, my TA is in no way a horrible person—she is the best chemistry TA I’ve had, and she was just following the procedure set forth by the university. Despite having no one in particular besides myself and “the man” to blame, I was quite frustrated by the experience. These notes were obviously to myself, written in parentheses: it was obvious they were not meant to be taken as part of the procedure. However, my grade was still hurt because I showed the slightest hint that a human was writing this. This extreme case is an exaggeration of the norm I’ve experienced so far in academic writing. Academic writing is tailored to be cold, formal, and, at least in the case of my science classes, show no voice. This idea of a voice is interesting. In most of the writing I’ve done for college, the “ideal” writing style is one in which you really cannot tell that a person wrote it. Ideally, the piece of writing should look like it was something squeezed out from the collection of knowledge in the world—the writer is no more than an instrument for taking what is already known and putting it on the page. In some cases, this is certainly appropriate. Does a chemistry write-up really need a voice? If the point of the writing is simply to advance knowledge, then what good is a voice? Well, we’ve already learned that it is some good. That is what rhetoric is: it is the method of using style, using a voice, to clarify an argument. In describing a confusing point, in an English analysis or in a chemical analysis, one can use his or her voice to explain the point in the manner that suits him or her best.

Is new media more accommodating to the writer’s voice? What are some examples of new media? Wikipedia, blogs, websites… I do believe that these allow at least slightly more freedom for the writer to express his or her voice—but that may be just because I don’t generally think of those things as being graded. Once put into a classroom, despite the possibility that anyone in the world can read these things, the student is, when it really comes down to it, still writing for one person and one person only: whoever gives out the grades. You can be conscious of the world as your audience when you are writing your blog, but the world does not hold the red pen. Can you ever have freedom in your writing if there is always one person who will define what “good writing” is? How does new media change this?

I am being a little harsh here. If nothing else, teaching new media equips students with the skills to engage in a new and different type of writing, one which is every day becoming more widespread and more accepted in academia and professional life. Just giving students this new tool in some way frees them, because once they leave college—the land of the red pen—and are given the choice to write in whichever way suits them, they have yet another mode of expression to choose from.

Rhetoric in a new light

My thoughts on rhetoric have changed somewhat since my last post, largely influenced by class last Tuesday. As I said in my earlier post, I used to believe that the aspects of rhetoric, as defined by Herrick, other than argument, were a waste and were of no use other than to cloud the argument. I didn’t realize the extent to which rhetorical style can be used to clarify the argument. The two clips from “Thank You For Smoking” made a distinction for me between “bad” rhetoric—which is used to cloud a bad argument—and “good” rhetoric—which can clarify a strong one.

The first clip was of Nick speaking to his son’s class about his job. He used rhetoric in this scene to put a good spin on what he does for a living and on cigarettes themselves. I felt like this is a perfect example of what I’m calling bad rhetoric. He is using his knowledge of language and style to manipulate people with less knowledge of rhetoric (in this case, children) into making them believe in a false argument. This type of rhetoric is the type that people criticize heavily, the kind of rhetoric people refer to as “mere rhetoric”. “Mere rhetoric” is rhetoric with no strong argument to back it—it is simply the stylistic elements of rhetoric, cleverly crafted so as to make people forget that your actual point just sucks.

The second clip shown was Nick explaining his job to his son, and unlike the previous clip, here he tells the truth. Explaining the duties of a lobbyist to a kid is no easy task, however, so he uses an analogy about an argument over ice cream won by “mere rhetoric” to get his point across. What Nick does here is what I would call good rhetoric. He is explaining a difficult concept (the trickery of language he uses on a daily basis as a lobbyist) to his son, and he is using style (analogy here) in order to present his point in a way that his son can understand.

This is an example of the usefulness of the stylistic aspects of rhetoric: if you’re arguing a point worth arguing, then the point is obviously not that clear-cut; it probably requires a great deal of study on the part of whoever will be arguing it. Rhetoric allows the speaker to present, in the clearest manner possible, a complicated point to an audience who is less knowledgeable about the concept.

So my conclusion is that rhetoric may be used for good or evil. In the hands of someone with nothing good to say, it will only hide that fact. In the hands of someone with a strong point to get across, however, it can light the way.

Our Wikipedia discussion was also interesting. I'd have to say I'm very pro-Wikipedia, vandalism and all. After all, without wikipedia vandalism, how would we have this wonder?