Category: Weekly Response

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Carolyn Pena Blog Post Week 3

For this week I am going to write about “Communication as culture” by James Carey because of how many great points were brought up in this reading. On page 25 in “Communication as culture,” James Carey wrote “There is nothing in our genes that tells us how to create and execute those activities we summarize under the term “communication.” If we are to engage in this activity writing an essay, making a film, entertaining an audience, impairing information and advice we must discover models in our culture that tell us how this particular miracle is achieved.” This quote reminded me of our discussion during class on Thursday. There have been so many changes in communication throughout the years and it wasn’t always perceived how we see it now. Culture also plays an important role in shaping communication. One example that I can think of is years ago when the Egyptians used Hieroglyphics to communicate and how they used it for 3,000+ years. Hieroglyphics were used to record important events such as stories, wars and were first used by priests. After years passed by the use of Hieroglyphics were uncommon to rare and now no longer existent as a sense of communication. The reason I mention this sort of communication is that this was taught and learned by so many people for years, only to end up non-existent and no longer practiced. This makes me wonder how our sense of communication is going to change after the years. Most of us learned how to read and write ever since we were able to and I’m sure once you started getting older, you have been curious about where a word came from and why it’s called that word. Also as a child my first language taught to me was Spanish and then I was put into school and had to assimilate into learning English. Why did this happen? Why were schools closing in communication from other cultures? Living in Queens, it is so diverse and for that reason, it would make sense if communication with other cultures was taught to us as children. One thing that hasn’t changed over the years is getting taught how to communicate and what communication exactly is. We were all taught the same language, taught to read from left to write, thinking before you talk and the writing structure of an essay. Who created all of this and why do we keep practicing it?

 

James Carey, Communication as Culture, second edition, 1991

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Jessica Colasacco Blog Post 2

For this weeks blog article, I decided to focus on Walter Ong’s “Orality and Literacy.” This article was interesting to be because Ong argues that the concept of writing “weakens the mind” and warns “those who use writing will become forgetful.” To me, this concept seems obscure because writing is such an integral part of today’s world. There is not one class in college that I have taken that did not have at least one paper due during the term of the class. Also, since I was a little kid, I have kept a journal in which I write down interesting things that happen in my life that I do not want to forget. To this day, I can go back and read those writings and remember exactly how I felt in that moment, which goes against Plato’s claim that writing would make people forgetful. I do agree with Plato’s claim that “written text is basically unresponsive.” When writing, someone is having a one worded conversation that cannot be debated, as opposed to having a conversation with someone, which allows someone else to interrupt and include their own opinions.

Sources:

Ong, Walter J. “Orality and Literacy” in The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.

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Isaac Espinoza Week 2 Blog Post

For this week’s blog post I’ve decided to write about Diana Taylor’s “The Archive and the Repertoire”. While reading this I found myself relating to a lot of what she was discussing. Diana mentions in her work how she is a Mexican immigrant in a Canadian boarding school. She says during her time there “the training failed miserably” meaning she never fully adopted the Canadian culture. However, when she returned to Mexico City she didn’t quite feel Mexican nor Canadian. She was stuck somewhere in between which is how I feel most days. I was born and raised in New York City, however, I come from Ecuadorian parents that immigrated here shortly before I was born.  I’ve been to Ecuador several times and every time I come back I do so feeling more and more Ecuadorian.  These trips give me an opportunity to learn about my roots, spend time with my family, and open up about different ways of living. It is because of this that I don’t quite identify as American nor as Ecuadorian but actually as a little bit of both. I’m somewhere in the middle like Diana Taylor which allows me to see the world from a couple different perspectives.

Citation

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2007. pg. XV

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Michael Farias Blog Post 2 “The Craft of Thought”

Michael Farias

 

For this blog post, I chose The Craft of Thought by Mary Carruthers. In her writing, Carruthers talks about memory, creating, and inventing. Carruthers says that when one invents, he or she is creating. Then further into the text she begins to talk about “inventory”. This term relates to memory because Carruthers defines it as “the storage of many diverse materials, but not into random storage” (Carruthers 11). Basically “inventory” is an organized group of innovative thoughts. Another quote that really stood out to me is when Carruthers says, “Having “inventory” is a requirement for “invention.” Not only does this statement assume that one cannot create (invent) without a memory store (inventory) to invent from and with, but it also assumes that one’s memory-store is effectively “inventoried,” that its matters are in readily-recovered “locations” (Carruthers 12). This quote says that our minds store different innovative thoughts or images into different parts of the mind. This is very interesting to me because it shows how complex the mind really is. Our minds store these inventories and are easily accessible when we want to use them.

 

Work Cited

 

Carruthers, Mary. “The Craft of Thought”. 1998.

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Carolyn Pena Blog Post Week 2

On page 143 in “Orality and Literacy,” Walter J. Ong writes “The reader must also fictionalize the writer. When my friend reads my letter, I may be in an entirely different frame of mind from when I wrote it. Indeed, I may very well be dead. For a text to convey its message, it does not matter whether the author is dead or alive”. The reason this part stood out to me is that I never realized how many times I actually did this while reading.  When I look back at myself reading I would always have to try to fictionalize the writer so it could help me get a better idea of what I am reading. Another thing that Ong wrote was how “the writer may be dead or alive but that still does not matter for the text to convey a message to the readers”. Writers try to convey their message as direct as they can get so they can get their points across to the reader. Writers have to think ahead about any questions that a reader might have and therefore tries to cover all the questions that can possibly come up. Another thing is about the “different frame of mind” and how quickly the mind of a writer can change. I say this because I have met writers that published their books and said that they wish they could’ve changed this or that about this book but could no longer because it’s published. At the end of the day, we still fictionalize what we want about the writer although he might be dead or alive, it does not matter because it does not change the message they wrote.

 

Ong, Walter J. “Orality and Literacy” in The Book History Reader. eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006

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Brieya Walker 9/4/2018 WEEK 2 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word

This week’s blog is a reflection on Walter Ong’s ORALITY AND LITERACY Writing restructures consciousness. In the passage he states, “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.” (page 135) This statement caught my attention because I feel the complete opposite about writing and I think many others do as well. I believe writing something down instills anything I need to learn in into my brain more efficiently than just memorizing what I was verbally told. Writing is me making the conscious decision to write down the information I want my brain to retain. Furthermore, he makes the comparison of parents feeling the same way about calculators. They make the argument that calculators weaken the mind and dismisses it of the work that keeps it strong. I agree with this statement because of my personal experiences. Growing up, in elementary school I learned how to do everything with a pen and paper and had to show my work doing math problems. As I graduated to middle school, calculators took over and having to show full work for these same math problems were not mandatory and all I had to do was use the calculator for my answers. In the long run, this resulted in me not remembering how to manually do the process of long division, fractions, etc., second guessing how to do the same functions of what I was taught. Therefore, I do agree that tools like calculators can weaken the mind, but the process of writing does not.

 

Ong, Walter. ·Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media….. In David Crowley and Paul Heyer, Communication in History: Technology Culture, Society. Third Edition. New York: Longman, 1999, pp. 135.

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Marisa Brincat’s Post for 09/10

“But even with a listener to stimulate and ground your thought, the bits and pieces of your thought cannot be preserved into jotted notes. How could you ever call back to mind what you had so laboriously worked out? The only answer is: Think memorable thoughts.” (Ong, 66)

This quote really stood out to me because it touches on the concept of time. The way that I translated it was that even if you have a person listening to the words coming from your lips, the idea cannot be savored from just some bits and pieces that you may recall. The only way to really remember your ideas is to think memorably and make it something worth while. I thought that this quote was really deep because time is so limited and we all have so many big ideas. Even when we have a lot going on in life, it could be hard to remember all the thoughts and ideas that pass through your mind. In order to make your thoughts ones to remember, you must think memorably. I thought this quote was so beautifully written and it really hit hard due to the fact that we must make all of our important ideas count.

Work Cited:

Ong, Walter. ·Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media….. In David Crowley and Paul Heyer, Communication in History: Technology Culture, Society. Third Edition. New York: Longman, 1999, pp.60-67

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Milagros’ Reflection for 9/10

While reading Ong’s Orality, Literacy.. this statement really stuck out to me and I connected it to a class discussion we had on Thursday. “First of all, names do give human beings power over what they name, without learning a vast store of names, one is simply powerless to understand.” (Ong,65) This quote resonates with me because as were were talking in class, Professor Karlin discussed how humans make things real and when we put ourselves in these technologies, this is when we make them ours and not artificial. This relates to the quote from Ong and made me think about our discussion because when humans do name something, we have power over the objects that we do name such as a pen, pencil, computer, and even humans at times. Using a pen or pencil and naming it we have power because we power these things to do what we want them to do even if they are inanimate objects. I thought it was interesting when Ong mentioned Adam in the bible and said “Explanations of Adam’s naming of the animal in Genesis 2:20 usually call condescending attention… “(Ong 65) because this is the perfect example to me when a human had power and named the animals from the beginning.  As humans, we could have named things differently because we have the power to do so but its interesting to see how and why names came to be.

 

Works Cited

-Ong, Walter. ·Orality, Literacy, and Modern Media….. In David Crowley and Paul Heyer, Communication in History: Technology Culture, Society. Third Edition. New York: Longman, 1999, pp.60-67.

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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

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Chris Hobbs 9/5, Haraway

A Cyborg Manifesto creates the myth of cyborgs, or cybernetic humanoids, for the purpose of representing many socially divisive problems facing humanity. Haraway brings up a term that struck me as important, a cyborg is “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, 1). I believe this to be Haraway’s most important and simple explanation of her ideas that it would take a tremendous effort for humans to have real social awareness of other humans plights. Such plights as the fights against patriarchal and capitalistic traditions which hinder many other humans ability to prosper. The metaphorical ‘Cyborg’ serves Haraway as an all encompassed, socially aware, human. Haraway describes the cyborg as non-gendred, heavily in favor of collectivism and a united political system. As ideal as this cyborg would be, for the betterment of a united prospering human coalition, what would be the cyborg’s emotional  investment in these social probelms? Would this cyborg be beyond human comprehension of what empathy means? As a metaphor, it is unnecessary to explain the reasoning behind it. But if it was translated to humans, wouldn’t the same questions arise?