Author: Milagros Pagan

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Milagros’ Post for 11/20

This week the article that we read was very interesting and made me think about Google. In the article, he mentions that he has trouble focusing and reading long articles or papers and that’s because he is aware that he spends a lot of time on Google and knowing that he gets a lot of information from Google and from a screen.  I think that the reason why I can’t ever focus on a reading unless its what I want to read is because I am constantly on social media, texting etc and always looking at a screen. I tend to get figgidty when I am reading a long piece of work or I’ll just read the words but not really understand it. Carr says “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” I definitely can relate to this because its just like skimming over the words but not really soaking and absorbing what is being said. When I wasn’t really on social media or too involved on my phone, I think I was more productive and understood lots more.  To this day when I am typing a paper or trying to focus on reading, I have to put my phone on do not disturb so I can just focus.

 

Work Cited

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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Milagros’ Post for 11/13

This week’s challenge was to monitor how much time we spend on our phones and to monitor what we do on our phones. I know I spend too much time on my phone and I literally spend too much time specifically on Instagram.  The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is to check my notifications and to check my instagram. This shouldn’t be the case because this tells my mind the first images I see in the morning is of instagram. I can relate to the reading ‘I am an Addict” because I feel at times that I depend way too much on instagram and texting to make my day go by smoothly. God forbid I leave my phone at home, I think I wouldn’t know what to do with myself but I also feel as if I’ll get a lot of work done because I won’t be tempted to text or to check.  I monitored my activity on my phone and found that even when I just refreshed my instagram feed, I still notice that I still keep refreshing and scrolling. I think that our generation can become too attached to our phones and we can’t imagine what life is and was like before phones.

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Milagros’ Computer Part for Story 11/6

 

Mom was so excited to take me to get some photos taken at Sears.

We get to Sears and the photographer is trying to make me laugh ..

I am not having it

My mom gives up and just takes me home

The next day my dad offers to come with us and then I start to pose and smile knowing that my dad is there

 

THE END

 

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Milagros’ Post for 11/6

I decided to reflect on “I am an Addict” reading for this week. Once I started to read the abstract portion of the reading, I really was intrigued with what the rest of the reading was going to touch base on because a lot of people really just neglect the fact that social media and the use of internet is addicting and honestly effects us as human beings. “This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings.” (Tiidenburg, 1)  This to me was the most important part of the abstract because this is an idea which were there is a struggle to understand or even to look into young people’s personal lived experiences and feelings rather than their feelings and experiences being based on what they post on their social media accounts. Yes, social media has become very influential in young adult culture and sometimes I too find myself really having to sit back and really take in what my personal experiences are and not just being behind a phone or a computer. I appreciate this reading because it also made me realize that sometimes I really do need to fast from social media and understand that social media isn’t everything.

Work Cited

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.”

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Milagros’ Post for 10/30

This week I decided to reflect on Ochoa’s “Aurality”. As soon as I started to read the introduction, I was already hooked because she was talking about  Latin American country. But then this statement came “The apparent lack of documentation of a collected folk corpus has often led to the assertion that in the nineteenth century there were very few studies of folk expressions in Colombia.” (Ochoa, 1) This really made me think about history as a whole because there are a lot of things that we don’t really know about but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. What if there is actual documentation but someone just decided to ignore it and make whatever it is they want their own? This also can lead to “the use of inappropriate methodologies in the study of local expressive culture,” (Ochoa,1) which basically leads to people looking or thinking a certain way about a culture because what has been presented isn’t correct. But why is this such a normal thing and who is there to really stop these kind of things from happening if the people that actually lived through these times are no longer present? I think this is why it’s so important to know one’s true history and culture and to pass it down to different generations because it’s so easy to forget these things.

Work Cited

  • Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press, 2014.
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Milagros’ Post for 10/23

This week I decided to reflect on Johanna Drucker’s “From A to Screen”. One sentence that really stuck out to me was “We take the virtual letters as things, mistaking their appearance for substance, and we also overlook the agency of alphanumeric code, taking it for granted.” (Drucker,71) I really just think we take everything for granted when it comes to technology and we kind of sometimes don’t really know how to take care of certain things. I know when it comes to my phone, I have cracked my screen more than twice but I never really thought about the people who actually make the screens for us. I agree with Drucker when she says this because it is very true in the way that we just type and read things on a screen. “The production of a “letter” in a digital environment is an effect of multiple, distributed processes, each of which participates in it..” (Drucker, 73)  To think that its not just one single letter that we are pressing but there are different multiple processes that are allowing this to happen is crazy. When people just type and see letters on a screen, we don’t think about the coding that takes place or the processes that do help this to happen so just reading about this and learning about this is very interesting and eye opening.

 

Works Cited

-Drucker, Johanna. “From A to Screen.” Comparative Textual Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2013, pp. 71–96,

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Milagros’ post for 10/16

I reflected on Mark Nunes’ “Emails, Letters, and Post” because this reading really explained the beginning of the telegraph and the inventions that changed human interaction and communication forever. In the reading he includes an example that describes what the invention of telegraph meant “Neil Postman, for example, views the telegraph as a defining historical invention, reconfiguring ideas of transport, communication and corporeality.” (Nunes, 139) “Before its introduction in the nineteenth century, a message could travel only as fast as a human being could travel—about thirty-five miles per hour (on a train).” (Nunes, 140) I think that the invention of telegraph was so essential to how we communicated because thinking of like back in the day where they had to write letters and send them by either horse or walking was crazy. How about if these people lacked writing skills, or they couldn’t afford to pay for the letter to be mailed out and this was a life or death type of situation? This is bizarre to me to think that I would have to wait 2 weeks or maybe even longer in order for my message to get sent out, especially if I was trying to communicate with family in overseas.

 

Works Cited

-Nunes, Mark. “The Email, The Letter, and The Post.” from Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

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Milagros’ Post for 10/9

I reflected on Brian Winston’s “Media Technology  & Society” and while reading this I was amazed at how technology and how the computer came to be. The process of inventing better quality to add to computers and technology is crazy. Somebody had an idea to make something and they worked to get the product to work but then its also about improving their product. There is also the question that Winston brings up “The question is largely begged as to what is the real impact of the machine on society.” (Winston,239) I think that this question comes from looking at the wealth that certain people have acquired from making these inventions. But I also think that older generations would be the ones to ask this question because they were used to just reading out of books or not having these complex technologies around them so they ask what is the point of this and why are people making this much money for inventing these new technologies. I think that these machines have advanced our societies in ways that are unimaginable but again this has effected us in bad ways because we become so reliant on these technologies and machines that we forget about the real world and real knowledge.

 

Works cited

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

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Milagros’ Illustrate Wikipedia 10/1

I decided to add a picture to my high school’s wikipedia page. I had a photo of my high school in my camera roll and I was hoping that there wasn’t a photo so that I could easily just add a picture of my own to it. Luckily, nobody had added a photo so I decided to upload the photo of the front of the school. I think we choose photos to accompany descriptions based on what it is and how can it relate to the description. For instance, a description of a Starbucks coffee can be accompanied by a picture of a Starbucks’ coffee because that it was it is describing. I think pictures add the real part to something because its one thing to just read about something, but its another thing to see it for yourself. I decided to add a photo of the front of the school because I think that seeing the school gives the page more character and shows the readers know what the school looks like. I chose to represent the beginning part of the page, basically the introduction. I chose this part of the article because I noticed that it did not have a photo and that is the first thing that people see when they look up this article. I think that if there is a photo in the beginning, then people will be more interested in reading about this certain thing and have an image in their mind related to this certain thing.

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Milagros’ Post for 10/2

This week I decided to reflect on “Race In/For Cyberspace reading. “Users define their presence within this textual and graphical space through a variety of different activities‹commercial interaction, academic research, netsurfing, real time interaction and chatting with interlocutors who are similarly “connected”…”(Nakamura,1) This quote really resonated with me because it made me think about social media such as Instagram and how we put our versions of ourselves at times that aren’t really who we are. “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,1) This quote just explains how using social media or any type of cyber communication lets us in a way create ourselves how we want to be looked at and what we want to put out there. I think that the internet has changed the way we communicate with others even face to face because there are times where I see people together and they are all on their phones not really being able to communicate properly or confidently face to face. But this can also be harmful because if we solely go based off the internet and who we are as people on our social media, then at times we will only look for validation from our likes and not our real selves.

 

Work cited

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