For this weeks post I am reflecting on Walter Ong “ORALITY AND LITERACY Writing restructures consciousness”. This reading especially stood out to me. “Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resomce for what ought to be the internal resource of memorized multiplication tables.” All my life my parents have always taught me different strategies on studying. They were not allowed to go to school but they were fascinated with education. Although they were only allowed to go up to 8th grade, they are such intelligent people. My parents grew up extremely poor but my grandparents made sure my parents studied. They had no paper, so they studied on napkins. They memorized there history, there math and writing skills on napkins at home. My parents have always told my sisters and I the more you write the better you’ll understand what your studying. I was always a math struggler but when I was little my mom use to sit with me and she would teach me how to do math problems over and over again by writing them down. If you write things down using your own words it’ll stick better in your memory. Writing, in my own experience has been the best strategy to help me with school, work and just life in general. I disagree with Platos statement because writing is very crucial in everyday life, it is the key in life. It may not be everyones favorite thing to do, but it is something that you hold onto for the future. The human brain cannot remember everything. My parents grew up without calculators and they tried to teach my sisters and I how to do math without calculators as well. They can do math in there brain as fast as a calculator.
StClair on Mary Carruthers’s Memories Week 2
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.
Carolyn Pena NYPL Oral History Project 9/9
There were so many different interviews/transcripts to choose from but I decided to choose Barbara Fisher’s interview “Stapleton Speaks: Our neighborhood oral history project” because in her description Richard Spiegel wrote that she was “avid animal lover” and I love anyone that shares a passion for animals as much as I do. This was my first time seeing a transcript as well as editing one. I didn’t realize how time-consuming it is to edit a transcript and the significance that it has. While editing a transcript, you want to make sure it is exactly as what you hear from the audio but that isn’t as easy as it seems. One thing I found difficult when it came to editing the transcript was all the pauses that were made and the “uh’s” that Barbara Fisher’s kept adding when she was stuck telling her story. When you tell a story verbally, there is a lot more said that is in between and during your storytelling. A lot of the in between’s is not in the writing because it wouldn’t make sense to be put in there. Also, when someone is verbally telling a story, they have to do it right on the spot which means whatever is said has been said but when you are writing a story you’re able to really process what you’re thinking and then write it down when you choose to. The easiest thing about editing the transcript was listening to the audio because I personally love listening to stories especially life stories. Although for some reason the audio for each sentence was not playing, I managed to listen to the original audio and edit the transcript from there. I had to keep pausing the audio and play it back a couple of times to make sure I was translating it correctly.
Abby Potashnik, Blog Post #2
For this week’s blog post I decided to respond to Diana Taylor’s, “The Archive and The Repertiore”. I chose this reading because her introduction and story life really stood out to me, and I actually will be speaking as a devil’s advocate this time around, to challenge myself. Diana grew up a certain way, continued her education a complete 180 from what she knew and was comfortable with. As she writes her experiences in school, she ends off by saying “I am delighted to report, that for me at least, the training failed miserably”. Referring to her education as the anglican finishing school. I definitely hear that her experiences weren’t pleasant and I probably would say the exact same thing. However, our experiences and where we come from make up for what we have , and I say this an objective eye to Diana’s story. People have all sorts of stories, Skeltons in closets, experiences, lessons, backgrounds, etc, and it’s what we make of it. one could say Diana saying she was delighted for failing, for not abiding to Angelican rule was her experience, her story. Yet on the other hand, once could say she had a terrible experience in the school, yet she came out the way she did because of it, despite it, and there is no need to be “delighted”. I believe it is both. I believe every action that we do, or has been done to us, makes up our story. how we go about handling it, is the key. we all come from various parts of the world. being here in the United States grants us ( or our immigrant ancestors ) various opportunities. We don’t need to fit into a certain mold or label to have our story. It’s our story so we can make do with it, how we would like to.
Jailene Mangome, Week 2
While reading Diana Taylor’s story, I was pulled in by everything she was saying up until she started talking about NYU and expressive behavior. After that I was kind of just lost. But before I got up to this part, I couldn’t help but keep my eye on a certain line. “Identifying with everything rather than nothing may amount to the same thing, but the spirit behind it was far from nihilistic: I overflowed with identifications, white and brown, English- and Spanish-speaking, Anglican and Catholic”(pg. XVI). The reason why this stood out to me is because there are so many people in the world, including myself, that feel this exact way. They don’t really know where they fit in in society because you’re not enough of one thing or maybe too much of the other. We’ve become so used to having titles that we don’t know how to identify ourselves anymore so we just go with everything. There’s never really an in between, only this or that. I feel like it’s very important to embrace where you’re from and if that means that you identify as more than just one thing, than so be it.
Citation:
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2007. pg. XVI
Anesiya Rivera Week 2
Once the world is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done without the aid of the highest technology available’’
I feel everything he said, was so true. The fact that this was said years ago and applies to how society functions today. We can’t live without our IPad’s or Computers. We don’t go to books to ask question anymore. We run to Siri and Alexa. Ask them how to spell stuff we can’t spell and math problems he struggle to solve. This also has cons not only negatives though. Blind people are able to read with technology, Deaf people can hear with technology, People can fall in love based off technology. Technology such a bittersweet thing .
Referance: Quote: Ong, Walter J. “Orality and Literacy” in The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006
Jojo, I feel like this is the same article that we read so I just copied and paste Your reference because I didn’t know the name of the book I thought it was just an article
Jailene Mangome, Blog Post #1
This week I decided to reflect on Italo Calvino’s “Cybernetics and Ghosts”. The reason why I chose this story was because there was a very specific part that kind of just blew my mind a bit. “Having laid down these procedures and entrusted a computer with the task of carrying out these operations, will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author?”(pg. 12) Being someone who enjoys reading, I was very surprised to see that people are actually considering letting machines take over and wipe out the beauty and art that is creative writing or just writing in general. I don’t see how we could potentially live in a world without authors. There is no purpose or true meaning to a book without the author because the author, although may write a fictional story, can take their own experiences to create something that many people can relate to.
Citation:
Calvino, Italo. “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” from The Uses of Literature: Essays. Harcourt Brace, 2009.
Post #1
For this weeks reading I chose to reflect on Cybernetics and Ghosts. The part that stuck out to me the most as I was reading the article was “Electronic brains, even if they are still far from producing all the functions of the human brain, are nonetheless capable of providing us with a convincing theoretical model for the most complex processes of our memory, our mental associations, our imagination, our conscience.” This part stuck out to me because being born in the early 90’s and now we are in 2018 our generation has seen a drastic change in technology especially in this day and age. Technology producers have always said that eventually school teachers will be replaced by robots, there will not be anymore teachers or customer service representatives etc. I am a chilhood education major and this made me reflect on how students are so phased by technology that education is not education anymore. Students are so stuck on there phones and tablets instead of picking up a book to read they pick up there tablets. It is sad but true how slowly we will see robots acting like humans and will have the functions to tell you everything you need to know.
Clary Capellan, Blog Post #1, 9/4/18
For this week’s reading I decided on writing about “Cybernetics and Ghosts” by Italo Calvino. In this piece one part that stood out to me was when Italo states “Just as we already have machines that can read, machines that perform a linguistic analysis of literary texts, machines that make translations and summaries, will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?” This made me think about how in this time and age with technology being as advanced as it is. It allows things such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to rise. However, going back to the question Italo made about machines replacing authors and poets I don’t believe a machine could truly replace the originality and empathy of a human. Italo then states that such a machine would only be able to “produce traditional works, poems with closed metrical forms, novels that follow the rules.” To which I agree, because as he mentioned throughout this article as humans storytelling is in our nature. We have the ability to create and express through stories. In order for a machine to construct a poem or a piece of literature it would have to already have it in it’s system in order for it to regenerate a “new” story.
Carolyn Pena Blog Report Week 1
For this week I decided to write about “Almanac of the Dead” by Leslie Marmon, Silko. The reason this reading grabbed my attention was the style of the way it was written. It wasn’t your basic reading that had one story to tell but it had various stories from various people. The fragments of these Ancient notebooks were unique. In all honesty, the fragments were hard to understand. Mostly because the way that we communicate now is different from how it used to be years ago. Silko wrote “If they had any curiosity about the writing, then their fear, which was greater had prevailed. What they feared were the spirits described in the writing and the glyphs on the pages” this shows the power that communication holds. In my opinion, this shows that although these fragments were written hundreds of years ago, these fragments were valuable and taken what was written seriously. The people who had written these fragments understood each of them but personally, I didn’t understand it as well because it didn’t follow the structure that I am normally used to reading.
