Essay 2

Essay 2

Countering My Past

  On October 27, I wrote:

  However, having immediately read the Times before writing this blog post, I suspect that the short-paragraph format of that newspaper may have influenced the frequent paragraph breaks in this post, thereby influencing my writing habits on some small level, even if only temporarily.

  I could certainly expand upon this point, given my experiences of the past few weeks. Although I initially made a correct statement in my hypothesis that reading the Times is affecting my writing style, I most likely understated its effects. Moreover, as an analysis of how taking English 105, as a whole, is affecting my writing style, there is more to be said yet about how my style is changing, and it isn't all because of the Times.

  In addition to the new phenomenon of frequent paragraph breaks occurring throughout my most recent writing assignments and blog posts, I feel that I may go into greater detail with my texts than I have in the past, a feature of both the style of the Times as well as that of Harris, whose book we are working our way through as a class.

  For instance, I feel as though I tend to follow a pattern of first making a general statement and then following it with a specific example. As I wrote on October 27:

  Though I have no trouble seeing where he is coming from in his will to explicate the changing relationship between the press and the individual, I feel he oversimplifies to an embarrassing extent.

  That is my generalization, followed by specifics:

  The press has never been the only filter for news. There have always been observers—if not publically commenting on blog pages, perhaps just injecting their own feelings into a word-of-mouth news account. There has always been a separation between the press and the government whereby the two can be considered distinct entities.

  I don’t believe it’s possible to adequately represent every change in my technique since the beginning of the semester, as some are more subtle than others, but my newfound consciousness of this generalization-to-specific format has made me more aware of when this tendency surfaces.

Countering in Blogging

  Countering is the method of establishing one's views in a position alternative to a cited text. Harris places much emphasis on the fact that effective countering is not completely invalidating the source, as little ground is gained in finding flaw in every piece of thought offered by another; instead, it is necessary, in order to be seen with any sense of authority or rationality, to accept part of the text and then simply offer another point of view on the subject. This adds legitimacy by lessening the possibility that one is just being argumentative for sport, as the case was in the silly Monty Python skit featured in Harris's chapter dedicated to the method. But I doubt that serious intellectual circles of today are immune from this same sort of belligerence.

  Sullivan, once again, provides a handy example of exactly what I'm looking for. Upon establishing that Mark Noonan is okay with torturing Americans suspected of involvement in the Fort Hood shooting. He doesn't outright cast claims of complete ignorance upon his opponent, but he does assert that he is misled in his conclusion. Sullivan warns against being so hasty to say that it's okay to harshly interrogate people.

  What remains the same is that the event is "terrible." (I know, this is a bit of a stretch, but Sullivan doesn't allow for much sympathy in his response--a particularly harsh sample of "countering".) What is gained is the fundamental insight that it isn't okay to torture people to extract information from them. What else is added is the analysis that the phenomenon of this seemingly-increased acceptance of torture as a legitimate means of interrogation is the result of Bush's presidency.

Forwarding in Blogging

Joseph Harris’s concept of “forwarding” is an ever-present force in the blogosphere. Upon reading the assigned blog prompt and going in search of examples on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I immediately came upon the perfect example of Harris’s description—and it took no real searching, as the first post at the top of the page was so filled with forwarding, it’s almost absurd.
Sullivan forwards a response made by a reader of The Daily Dish onto the front page of The Daily Dish, a response which was constructed in reaction to an article Sullivan previously forwarded from a person named Rob Dreher. In the post currently on the front page of The Daily Dish, the responder forwards Abraham Lincoln from the time of his debates with Stephen Douglas.
If this isn’t a prime example of what forwarding is, then I’m not sure what forwarding is. But I’m pretty sure I know what forwarding is, and in case I’m not, I will share my impression of the term.
Forwarding is the act of taking information from an infinitely-stretching conversation and adding to the conversation in a way that both provides your own personal thoughts on the conversation as well as incorporates information previously contributed to the discussion. It is how any major subject that requires understanding progresses along the path of knowledge-gaining, and without it, people would get nowhere in the path of knowledge. We would constantly be starting over if we were without what previous generations and even our peers have added to the conversation.

The Times and Blogs in the Press Sphere

  Following Think Progress and Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, in addition to reading the New York Times, brings up a few things to consider in response to the question of how they fit in to a new news model. One important point to bring up is that the newspaper is largely the first presentation of the news. It is the slightly-less-filtered news source from which many bloggers probably read up on the topics about which they blog. Conversely, to the question of how often a newspaper bases its information on information first posted in blogs, the answer would almost definitely have to be, modestly, significantly less-frequently.
  Perhaps it is just my ill-educated guess, but I would assume that newspaper information-gathering requires much more work and time, often utilizing sources closer to the authority of a primary source than a blogger might use. After all, entire buildings full of people work together in an extremely structured way to discover the newest news and put it together, whereas a blogger is often just one guy reading what he has around him (the newspaper, fellow bloggers, as many news websites as he feels like reading).
  Though both newspapers and blogs often contain writing from many different authors, newspapers tend to be far more unified in style from one author to the next than blogs. For example, Andrew Sullivan’s blog offers many contributing blogger posts, but they tend to present information in variable and seemingly-improvised ways. Newspapers, on the other hand, usually make their presentation through short paragraphs—many only a sentence or two in length—and consistently provide a background city as the first word after the title to help set the scene.