Essay 1 - On Civic Literacy

Here's what I've got of the first draft!
Essay 1 - On Civic Literacy

Blogging - How I Felt Then; How I Feel Now

In contemplating my experiences with blogging thus far, the greatest personal challenge I’ve encountered has been adapting to the necessity of having to rely on the internet for completing my homework assignments. I’m not quite used to having assignments due on the internet yet, so remembering to get online and contribute posts the morning before the class in which we’ll discuss the posts does not come naturally. I’ve developed a habit for doing easy assignments in the wee hours of the morning before class, but due to the peer-response-oriented nature of our blogging activities, this does not leave ample time for the peer response part.
I’ve been surprised how easily writing online has come to me. Once I start, the easy-going, participation-centered setup of our class posting activities is very stress-free and open. I can talk as though I were rambling to a friend.
At the beginning of this semester, my opinion toward personal-reflection blogging was limited to narcissistic rants about how depressing life is and how nobody understands, reminiscent of some “livejournal” pages. In reading the responses of my peers and through the process of writing my own responses, I better realize how blogging can aid in the selfless and noble expression of ideas by providing another means of communicating thought. Everyone has his or her own preferences toward the various means of expression; some express themselves through paintings, and others through published essays. But for an ever-growing portion of the world population, the accessible and simplistic medium of blogging has become their preference.

A Link! - "A Tale of Two Tasks"

A Tale of Two Tasks: Editing in the Era of Digital Literacies

This article, written by a teacher, questions the legitimacy of quickly dismissing Wikipedia as a legitimate source and justifying the stance by saying, "But ANYONE can edit it!" Is that quality not what makes it so powerful?

Hedges vs. Thompson

  Hedges likes to get us riled up. In our next installment of his beliefs, he reinforces some aforementioned concepts such as life in a “post-literate world,” one where knowledge spreads through images rather than printed writing, while also presenting more statistics to make us cringe, the validity of which is rather questionable. “Nearly all reporting—I would guess at least 80 percent—is done by newspapers and the wire services. Take that away and we have a huge black hole” (Hedges, Bad Days for Newsrooms). As a man who publishes his work with the motivation of degrading non-print media, he is far too biased to make a fair statistic I can accept, regardless of how insignificant his claims are, because Hedges has gone a little too far in his unfaltering ideology, and I am hesitant to accept much of what he says because it’s so sensationalized. If print journalists must rely on tactics like his to sell periodicals, perhaps the death of the newspaper will benefit American society by weeding out the crazies who work only to make themselves sound prophetic and aware of societal disasters before they strike.
  Clive Thompson holds opposing views, ones which are admittedly along the same lines as my beliefs. His article is optimistic and refreshing, using actual professionally-examined analyses of the writings of kids these days. The technological revolution, he claims, is resulting in an effect akin to a writing renaissance. Students who spend hours a day on Facebook aren’t just wasting time; they are learning to better understand the notion of adapting ones writing to the target audience, an enormously helpful skill essential to provocative writing.

Hedges is kind of an asshole.

  Hedges’s opinion of the American public is best defined as cynical. He lacks faith in the decision-making abilities of the majority of the nation’s population, and he simplifies our image into something that unfairly represents us as a whole. In his eyes, we are big, mindless children.
  People aren’t without their own unique experiences to shape their feelings, completely independent of political rhetoric. A single mother doesn’t need literacy to convince her that one politician is more sensitive toward her specific situation than another, and will therefore be a better candidate in her opinion.
  Maybe if everyone were brought up as motivated to learn as Hedges, the problem would not be as broad-spanning. But people are largely a product of their environment, and if the tools aren’t there to use and the people aren’t there to encourage them to be politically-active citizens, it isn’t their fault, and it should be looked at with more sympathy than derision.
  The definition for literacy supplied in this article loosely requires a person to be grounded in a text-based world of news, not merely capable of reading. In his opinion, one can be literate but still rely on the image-based world of FOX News and campaign slogans to make their decisions for them.
  Hedges quotes a statistic describing the percentage of American families who did not buy a book last year. Although impressive, what the statistic fails to consider is the amount of those individuals who perhaps appreciate the joy of reading but not to the degree of being willing to buy a book, instead opting for library books or a subscription to a favorite magazine. Maybe it is true that few read the sort of sophisticated documents that are as intellectually stimulating as he would prefer, but this does not make them illiterate.

Internet Habits of My Peers

Many of my classmates accessed social networking websites, such as Facebook and Myspace, as I did. Our reading habits are difficult to generalize, as the websites visited by my peers ranged across the spectrum. However, I found that, as in our class discussion, these websites could be narrowed down to a few broad categories, including sports/entertainment (including music), product research, general information research, email/messaging, and miscellaneous interests.
In addition, my classmates were online for less time than I had originally predicted. Perhaps this is the result of just having entered college, as the case has been for me. I find myself constantly trying just to get organized in the real world, leaving me less time for the internet than I had in my more carefree days of high school. Then, I might have spent four hours a day playing a first-person shooter online. Now, I use the computer mostly for instant messaging my friends, for keeping up with loved ones who have left town, and for the occasional flash video.
I found that a lot of people use Louisville.edu, which makes sense. It’s pretty much a requirement for academic success at our university. In that light, I would say school is affecting kids’ internet habits in many ways, as teachers update blackboard on a nearly-nightly basis. How convenient organizing life is becoming!
Though it may seem like a no-brainer, Facebook makes it so that most of my classmates do their online writing to the specific audience of their already-established friends and acquaintances rather than general interest articles or blogs that just anyone might stumble upon online. This means their writing medium is more akin to letters than to newspapers or magazines. I guess that was not profound, though.

Internet Activities

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Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan rattles off a list of qualities essential to blogs, most of which have some sort of associated disadvantage that can only be overlooked with good faith. For instance, he recommends "embracing hazards" such as spontaneous posting, an act that often results in emotionally-charged but rationally-hollow writing. Perhaps the reason why Andrew Sullivan blogs is the very reason others do not.
Acknowledging the lack of finish characteristic of a blog post, he advocates his preferred medium by championing the “risk of error” closely associated with the one-step process. To him, making mistakes in front of the whole world is not so bad because it is built into the medium—presumed to be the case. For others, making mistakes is not something so easily dismissed. His relaxation at the thought of being called out shows the resilience of a many-times-burned writer.
All in all, blogging’s disadvantages, which Sullivan may find endearing, are only overlookable when considering the sheer power and relative ease that goes along with instant, online publication. For many, the pros (such as the potential for broad audiences) may not outweigh the cons.
I guess spending years writing for a traditional, paper periodical and having to go through the arduous publication process is enough to give anyone a taste for the simple things, and blogging is most certainly a simple thing. It can be with little effort by anyone with internet access, almost as easily as checking email. But if this simple method of getting ones word out is held highly even by a professional writer as a favorite form of communication, I think it deserves our attention.