Author: Brieya Walker

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Brieya Walker 10/6/18 WEEK 6 Vannevar Bush, As We May Think.

For this week’s blog post I chose to reflect on Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think from The Atlantic Magazine. This article discusses the use of science and the new gadgets and useful tools that science lead to the creation of. It always states that when referring to science “there is a growing mountain of research”(Bush, 1945) I like section two of thos article where it discusses photography and how the progress of photography is never going to stop because I agree.  I always relate everything back to my personal experiences so it made me think about how growing up I remember my mother using the camera’s that needed film and we couldnt see what the picture looked like until we got them developed. Then as time went by we upgrade to digital cameras and needed SD cards and we had to print the pictures out. This is when apple started with ipods and the first iphones and the camera quality wasnt as good. Now our iphones takes the best pictures and we can edit them right on our phones. There’s the canon and other top notch brand of cameras that cost a fortune but take great quality pictures. I think for the last decade science and photography definitely evolved more than we expected and it happened quickly.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 13 Mar. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/.

 

 

 

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Brieya Walker 11/6/18 WEEK 11 Elizabeth McHenry, “Forgotten Readers: Recovering the lost history of African American literary societies.”

This week’s reading Forgotten Readers: Recovering the lost history of African American literary societies, written by Elizabeth McHenry discusses the creation of women clubs in the late 1800’s  and early 1900’s for black women.  During this time there were limited opportunities for black women to educate themselves in a formal academic setting. These women clubs served as an alternative an setting for them to practice the skills they needed to confidently enter public and organizational life. These women’s primary social interests were providing welfare services, building community institutions, defining the position of black women, and protesting against racial injustice.  Black women seen their accomplishments of self education and self improvement as equivalent to material accomplishments. (the outward signs of successful endeavors for the public good) They also wanted to be apart of the conversation for potentially effecting change.  In addition, these club meetings were also beneficial in contributing to the public realm because they helped with practical skills learned and helped with building confidence for these women from the educational programs that the club meetings. These women clubs focused on reading, conversation, and mutual support. I appreciated this reading because there aren’t a lot of readings that explain African American women involvement in literary societies.

 

Elizabeth McHenry. “Forgotten Readers: Recovering the lost history of African American literary societies.” The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.

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Brieya Walker 11/13/18 WEEK 12 Aja Monet, Mobilizing a Movement of the Mind.

For this blog post I decided to reflect on Aja Monet’s spoken word “Mobilizing a Movement of the Mind”. I believe that the main idea of  this poem was to reflect on how far we’ve come in society and realize how much times have changed. She mentions how presently we rely on gadgets and devices and everything is mobilized. The line that stuck out to me most is when she said “we photograph moments best kept in photo albums of our memory and upload them into society.” I recently had this discussion with one of my friends about how our generation don’t invest in photo albums. Our parents, grandparents, and all of the other previous generations made sure to have photo albums filled with pictures of important milestones, family gatherings, and just images of us just growing up.  I feel like since smartphones came around nobody feels the need to anymore because they can store every image in their phone. The only issue is what if you lose your phone? all of those memories are gone. After that conversation I made the decision that I’m going to start printing out the pictures that I have in my phone and buy a little photo album to put them in. I don’t want to miss out on being able to look back on special moments I had.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxDiS0GWv2s

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Brieya Walker 9/18/2018 WEEK 4 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man

This week’s journal is about Marshall McLuhan’s, Understanding the Media.  In Chapter 1 of his book he discusses how the medium is the message. This phrase defined to mean that ” the personal and social consequences of any medium–that is, of any extension of ourselves–result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any technology.” (McLuhan, 23) Honestly speaking this definition alone was hard for me to analyze and figure it out as he used analogies I’ve grasped more of an understanding. For example, the first one he mention was the creation of automation. Automation being a form of technology and replacing the job of a human unfortunately eliminate jobs and this can be considered a negative effect of the creation. But on a positive note automation can create new roles for people. In result, many people will argue that it wasn’t the machine that was the issue but what they did with the automation machine that was the message. To summarize,  the impact of the medium itself is more significant than the content it carries. He also showed a concern in how society focuses more on the things that are obvious and how we sometimes miss the structural changes that occurs over long periods of time. We focus on the obvious of what it does and what it’s intended to do but we do become unaware of what it’s actually doing to us.

 

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. The MIT Press, 2013.

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Brieya Walker 9/11/2018 WEEK 3 Marie Battiste, Print Culture and Decolonizing the University

For this weekly response I’m reflecting on Print Culture and Decolonizing the University, written by Marie Battiste. This reading shares the history between Euro-Christian travelers/missionaries and the indigenous peoples. These travelers and missionaries completely transformed and tried to erase the history of their aboriginal literacy and claimed the Indians to be illiterate because they didn’t agree with or understand their ideographic and symbolic literacy. Aboriginal literacy relates to the spiritual, practical, public functions of symbolic literacy which includes their pictographs petroglyphs, notched sticks, ideographs, and wampum. I believe this reading successfully showed that any literacy process can work as long as people have a use for it because it shows how critical it was to many Indigenous societies. In addition, it mentions that many of the history taught regarding the indigenous people and the Europeans is very one sided and I one hundred percent agree with that. Reading this automatically made me think about a passage I read in an English class called American Identities. The passage basically spoke about how Indians were portrayed as savages, how they were always killing each other, and their excessive alcohol use, which all were true but we’re not taught why this occurred. This week’s reading made me think of this because this is another example of how the Europeans portrayed the Indigenous to be illiterate but in fact their culture influenced their own creations in several ways.

Marie Battiste. “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 1.” The Future of the Page . University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Brieya Walker Media Log

I feel like my media log is kind of embarrassing because I didn’t know that I spent an average of basically 7 hours a day on my phone. Looking through the breakdown of all the data of my screen time I feel like it’s clear that I’m literally addicted to my phone. I spend the most time on my phone using Instagram. I actually don’t even post much on Instagram I literally just scroll, double tap, scroll, click on a profile, read the comments on a blog, the cycle repeats and I spend an average of 3 hours a day on Instagram doing  that. Also sometimes I hashtag things and follow profiles of websites I shop on. For example, besides scrolling and looking at comments or pictures, I hashtag things that I might want to buy to see better angles of it, people using it and stuff like that to help me make my final decision. The text messaging app I spent an average of almost 7 hours because I get text messages all day long and I got 644 messages last week. The Safari app I mostly use to look something up really quickly, sign on blackboard, online shopping and stuff like that. I actually used Safari more than usual because I’ve been scouting for Christmas presents early and trying to see if I can catch sales.  Even though I feel that my media log is ridiculous and to be using my phone so much is absurd, it does serve as a past time like if I’m bored, waiting on a train, riding in a car etc. It’s just so convenient that almost everything I feel that I need is in this one device and it keeps me occupied. The saddest part of this whole analysis is that even though I’m aware of how much I use my phone I probably won’t make a conscious effort to cut down.

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Brieya Walker 11/20/2018 WEEK 13 Is Google Making Us Stupid by Nicholas Carr.

“Is Google Making Us Stupid” written by Nicholas Carr discusses many topics that I personally think are true. Not that it’s true for everyone, but for many, maintaining focus for a lengthy article or book has become difficult due to the increase in the use of the internet. With the web, everything is so easy to just click on and we can find what we’re looking for within seconds in contrast to reading a book where you actually have to sit and soak in all the words on the page. Over the last ten years we began to rely more on technology and the internet has become the “goto” of the information we consume where we now “power browse”. I think Carr’s concerns have been acknowledged and addressed but things have gotten worse. In the article it states, “In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, ‘Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.’ Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is ‘really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.’” (Carr, 2008) Adding artificial intelligence to the mix would have an even worse affect to our brains. Yes, these new technological advances are good as far as convenience, but what about challenging the mind and exercising our brains. If the web already has the possibility to lessen our attention spans what would an artificial brain do?

 

Carr, Nicholas. 2008. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The Atlantic. July 1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.

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Brieya Walker Computer Story

My story is about how I found out about my allergy to nuts and it was a complex story with a lot going on. I can see my story being told through gifs that would condense it to a much shorter story, which in a way eliminates the suspense but gets straight to the point. Using gifs fits into my idea of computer technology because it contributes to displaying how quick and instant almost everything is. For example, how fast and simple the process of sending messages has become. From mail being transported on foot to now sending a simple text message that someone receives right away. Unfortunately, the telling of the story with gifs would eliminate sharing many of the details but it would still get the message across. One can relate that to almost anything involved with technology though. Ideally technology is supposed to makes things much simpler and easier. I feel like it would be the same with computer technology.

(has pecans)

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Brieya Walker: Wikipedia Assignment

The Wikipedia Assignment was something different for me that I’ve never done before. In my experience many professors told me that using Wikipedia wasn’t allowed because anyone and everyone can go into whichever article and alter it however they please. Doing this assignment taught me new things about how editing Wikipedia really works if one does it the correct way. During the training I learned the five core rules of Wikipedia, what the sandbox is, talk pages, watch lists, and wikiprojects. This exercise also gave me the opportunity to actually edit articles. What I liked about the training and exercise was that it included actual tutorial videos of what to do. Also while actually working on the actual wikipedia page it had little bubbles that had directions to guide you to the next step or what to do. I learned that editing on Wikipedia is actually not that quick and easy like everyone thinks. Each fact that someone writes on there has to be referenced from a reliable source that cannot be biased. In order to add images to Wikipedia you can never use images found through image search, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, Imgur, or even the “Free image” or “free stock photo” websites. You have to find images with proof that the creator gives permission for people can use their photos. In addition, I already knew that Wikipedia articles were edited by many people but I didn’t know that they had a talk page where editors discuss among one another, their edits why they’re making changes.There’s really a lot of rules to using Wikipedia and I don’t see myself ever editing an article on there again unless I take another course that requires me to do so.

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Brieya Walker 10/16/2018 WEEK 8 Mark Nunes: Emails, Letters, and The Post

For this weeks blog post I’m reflecting on Mark Nunes’ Emails, Letters, and the Post. In this reading he discusses the evolution of sending mail to one another and the drastic change in communication between present day and the 1600’s. He also connects how writing a letter and sending an email “define a well-established social space within the world.” (Nunes, 86) In addition, he made a connection between the telephone and virtual mail by saying with emailing being so instant it appears as the telos of telegraphe making the letter available in any place at the same time. In the text it also states, “In volume, email is equally impressive: the number of emails originating in North America per day outpaces U.S. Postal Service (USPS) volume by over 1,000 percent.” (Nunes, 86) Being that this book was published in 2006, one can only imagine the extreme change of numbers from then to now in 2018. The the evolution of mail very interesting and makes me think about how mail will be in one hundred years from now. I truly believe that eventually the only way to receive mail will be by an email. If you think about it everyone born in this generation and younger is/will be technology savvy so it definitely doesn’t seem impossible.

 

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