For this week, I read “I’m an Addict and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” by various authors. This article focuses on how social media affects adolescents. In the discussion about discourses, the authors wrote “People enact, resist, and co-construct social reality through their everyday discursive practices and interactions. This gives discourses certain ideological power [15,55] to, for example, reproduce heteronormativity, racism or sexism, but also to position certain phenomena as significant and others as trivial, some as social problems and others as solutions. Thus, “discourse not only puts words to work, it also gives them their meaning, constructs perceptions, and formulates understanding and ongoing courses of interaction”(Tiidenberg, et al., 2017). This quote is saying that because of the internet, the youth is more prone to having different discourses about anything involving social issues that can give others and even themselves different perceptions. Using the internet brings on these discourses due to everyone having a different opinion. This is a good and bad thing. Currently, Facebook and Twitter are pushing towards letting people, especially young people, have these social discourses online as a way of “hearing both sides”. However, we can not “hear” both sides if these platforms like one side more than the other. Through this method, young people put more emphasis on trying to be right no matter what side they are on. It is more exhilarating to argue with strangers online than leaving it alone and doing something else. Both sides use their screens to hide behind.

References: Katrin Tiidenberg, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Meghan Dougherty, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga, Jannek Sommer. “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.”

For this week’s response, I will talk about Brian Winston’s article “The Capture of Sound”. In this article, Winston talks about the invention of the telephone. He starts the article with “it is unlikely that Philip Reiss, researcher into Helmholtz’s wave theory, was particularly looking for a system to transmit the human voice”(Winston, 1998). I find this interesting because, from the time when the telephone was invented to modern technology now, society has advanced very far. The invention of the telephone led to many things. We went from the telegraph to wireless and portable phones.  Not only new technology but new ways of communicating with each other. However, this is a good and bad thing. Back when the telephone was invented, people used that and communicated face to face. Nowadays, we have more than the telephone to rely on for communicating with other people. The boom of the telephone ultimately influenced this change in how we communicate with others. The only bad aspect is that we rely a lot on technology to communicate with others which I will guess was not the idea back when the telephone was first invented. It was made to use for communication and to expand on that, however, in today’s society it has expanded at an alarming rate.

Brian Winston. “The Capture of Sound.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

For this week’s blog, I will talk about Johanna Drucker’s “Comparative Textual Media”. Specifically, I will focus on one of her chapters called “From A Screen”. In this chapter, Drucker talks about letters and the alphabet. She brings up “who created the alphabet?”. That is a good question. Most people believe it was the Greeks. Others do not believe it was the Greeks. Everyone has a different idea of how the alphabet was created. Drucker did debunk this concept by saying “The Semitic language speakers forged an alphabet to serve a tongue whose consonantal morphemes communicated adequately without vowels, and the technical specifications for their writing were different than for the Greeks, who later modified the writing for their own use”(Drucker, 2013). However, who is to say that the Greeks didn’t invent letters? They simply just changed what they learned. Other cultures also do this with letters and make it their own to fit into their society. Letters and the alphabet change throughout cultures, however, they all consist of the alphabet that is conditioned into our minds when we were young. The ABC song is the same, but in every culture it’s different. It isn’t about who came up with it first, it’s about who can modify it into their own.

References: HAYLES, N. KATHERINE, and JESSICA PRESSMAN, editors. Comparative Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era. University of Minnesota Press, 2013

In this week’s blog post, I will be talking about Mark Nunes’ Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. In one particular chapter called Email, the Letter, and the Post, he talks about how people have adapted from writing letters to email. I agree with his point. In today’s society, people email each other all the time. We as a society has moved from writing to typing. Nunes explains this by saying “In this regard, electronic mail, with its (ap)proximate immediacy, appears as the telos of “tele-graphe”: now the letter can be “here” and “there” at the same time”(Nunes, 2006). I believe people are more in favor of sending emails because it’s faster than sending a physical letter. It will probably remain as the main mode of online communication for people. Most likely in the future when technology has fully taken over, letters would become an ancient thing. Post offices will probably still be around but not a lot. E-communication would be the way people from many distances communicate with others. Nunes also wrote “With the emergence of electronic discourse, the point-to-point can and still does exist, but only to the extent that it can perpetuate a simulation of this postal representation of space”(Nunes, 2006). This further explains that lettering and the post can only go so far in this world of emailing.

In this week’s post,  I will discuss Lisa Nakamura’s article,  “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet”. In this article, she begins with talking about a dog that is pretending to be a human on the Internet. This may be a silly cartoon, however, it speaks volume about the kind of people that are willing to lie and deceive others for their own amusement. Nakamura explains this by writing “The technology of the Internet offers its participants unprecedented possibilities for communicating with each other in real time, and for controlling the conditions of their own self-representations in ways impossible in face to face interaction(Nakamura, 1995). She is proving my point that people use the internet in any way they can and that people sometimes will use it to their advantage to manipulate and put on a facade in front of others. For example, this show “Catfish” explains how this is done. People pretend to be other people online and get into relationships with people for years although they are lying about who they actually are. The show continues on with the “catfish” being exposed for their lies. This is a modern example of Lisa Nakamura’s quote about how the internet provides opportunities for people to lie about themselves.

Lisa Nakamura, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet” in Works and Days, Volume 13, 181-193, 1995

In this week’s response, I will be talking about Homi Bhabha’s article, Signs of Wonder. In this article, he talks about how European Christian values influenced the culture of books and reading(from what I have picked up). Bhabha brought up this example about the Bible. Bhabha brings up the Bible by telling a story about an Indian catechist named Anund Messeh who discovered a group of people reading the Bible. He wrote “‘These books,’ said Anund, ‘teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR book; and they printed it in our language, for our use”(Bhabha, 1985). Bhabha mentions that since this group of people never seen a printed book in their lives before, they cherished it like it was given to them by God. However, in this case, the group of people was given a “book” by Europeans and was forced to believe that is the word of God by European religion standards aka Christianity. Bhahba goes on and writes “The discovery of the English book establishes both a measure of mimesis and a mode of civil authority and order. If these scenes, as I’ve narrated them, suggest the triumph of the writ of colonialist power, then it must be conceded that the wily letter of the law inscribes a much more ambivalent text of authority”(Bhahba, 1985). I believe he is saying that European Christians used the Bible as a contribution to colonization and used “the Word” as a way to “right their wrongs” that is the right to authorize and colonize those who need “saving”.

References: Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 144–165. JSTOR, JSTOR

The transcript I chose to go over was about Lillian Doctor interviewing Christal Ellis who talks about Harlem and how it was when she was going up. Ellis is a librarian who spent the first 25 years of her life living in Harlem. I chose this because I used to live in Harlem for two years until I went back home to Long Island. I resonate with the parts where she talks about how Harlem is going through a change because I know she is referring to gentrification. It was easy to transcribe because she talked at a normal pace and articulated for the most part. The only parts that were hard were when there was a clear indication of the microphone falling and the background noises such as the air conditioner that you can hear mid-way through her speaking. When listening to the audio, you can tell how much emotion and passion she has for Harlem. From the stories she tells about her childhood, she is sharing her experiences that you can almost imagine by yourself because she explains them vividly and with emotion. Ellis also expressed how she can see the change from when she started working in the library in the early 2000’s to now. I understand what she is saying because whenever I visit Harlem nowadays, it keeps changing rapidly.    That is why I chose to do this audio because I felt like I can connect to what Ellis is saying and listening to her talk about it resonated with me. Therefore, doing this project was relatively easy for me.

The work I choose for this week is Marie Battiste’s Indigenizing the Page. In this article, Battiste talks about how Indigenous people retained their oral culture and Aboriginal forms of literacy during the time of being colonized and assimilation of Eurocentric ideas and imperialism. Battiste brought up this one example of Mi’kmaq, an Indigenous person who was living in eastern Canada and was part of being colonized with other Indigenous people in eastern Canada. Battiste explains how Mi’kmaq kept his culture during this period of colonization. Battiste wrote “Stripped of their wealth and power in eastern Canada, Mi’kmaq maintain their knowledge and heritage through symbolic literacies and language, as they are also becoming increasingly bilingual. They are restoring their knowledge and heritage by taking over the education of the youth, and healing the harmful psychological and economic damage of colonialism.”(Battiste, 2004). Although Mi’kmaq became bilingual and had to assimilate, he still preserved his Indigenous culture and Aboriginal forms of literacy from being completely erased by Eurocentric ideals for future generations that followed. Battiste emphasized how Aboriginal forms of literacy is prominent in Indigenous culture and how important it was for it to “not been replaced or displaced by print culture and new technologies of the page.”(Battiste, 2004) Through this, Indigenous people have retained their culture for many generations.

References: Battiste, Marie. (2004). Print culture and decolonizing the university: Indigenizing the page: Part 1. The Future of the Page. 111-124. 10.3138/9781442657250-007.

The work I choose for this week’s response is  The Craft of Thought by Mary Carruthers. In this article, Carruthers is talking about memory and images. There is a specific quote that really stood out to me. Carruthers wrote “Memory images are composed of two elements: a “likeness” (similitudo) that serves as a cognitive cue or token to the “matter” or res being remembered, and intentio or the “inclination” or “attitude” we have to the remembered experience, which helps both to classify and to retrieve it. Thus, memories are all images, and they are all and always emotionally “colored””(Carruthers, 1998). Carruthers is saying that all memories are put into categories based on the emotions or experiences that was associated with that particular memory. When reading that, it reminded me of the movie “Inside Out” by Pixar. In the movie, the main character’s memories were based off situations and the emotions that came with them which made them different colors. For example, her sad memories were blue to represent a sad or disheartening time in her life. Her memories that represent happiness were the color yellow. Although her memories were most color aligned with the emotions in the movie, it still was attached to the emotions she felt from the memories and that experience that happened for them to become memories. That is my takeaway from that quote.