HW26 Ironic isn’t it?
In reading chapter two of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of Ones Own” I had a hard time finding statements of irony. I couldn’t really find any, but there was one statement that i found that might be. The first statement was “Why does Samuel Butler say “Wise men never say what they think of women”? Wise men never say anything else apparently.”(29) I don’t know if this is irony but i think that she isn’t trying to be sarcastic but she sounds like she is sort of making fun of them. When reading this i was a little confused but for the most part i think that she asks a lot of good questions to help her think about what truth is and how it comes about. She thinks a lot about anger and if it has to do with power. She finds her self drawing an angry professor and wonders why she drew him angry. I just think that she finds things that she does and trys to figure them into what her analysis of truth is.
HW22 “Web of Influence”
The paragraph that i chose from “Web of Influence” was the bottom paragraph on page 88. This paragraph addresses how blogs are a quick way of gaining knowledge on a topic. It is saying that people can blog to get information out quickly instead of waiting to put it in the paper or something like that. It is also saying that people can respond faster in this type of informant. I think that the material in this paragraph is important because it is a very true stated paragraph about why blogs are a good thing to use. For example in my opinion i wouldn’t use blogs normally but my point is if i were a business person and needed to get information from the newspapers fast i wouldn’t want to wait to get the paper and then have to find what i was looking for, instead it would be much easier and faster to go onto the blog and read what i need to know and respond to it if necessary. It is also important because it states how “the comparative advantage of blogs in political discourse, as compared to traditional media, is their low cost of real-time publication.”(88) My conclusion, then, is that the paragraph really demonstrates and gives good evidence of why blogs are good to use and are “less time-consuming for outside observers to acquire information.”(88)
HW20 which one?
Well to tell you the truth i wouldn’t and wont be voting in the upcoming election because I’m not really interested in all the political stuff. But if i were to vote i think the Wonkette would influence the way i would vote. The Wonkette would influence the way i vote because it gives a fun and more interesting insight into politics. It also gives you another view into what you are voting for and gives it a twist. I mean don’t get me wrong you definitely need to get all the important and meaningful facts to put toward your voting but to be able to read and be informed on the funny information about the party you are going to vote for would help in making my decision. This blog takes away most of the seriousness of everything and makes it interesting. For me personal i think politics is boring so with this blog she makes it interesting for me to read.
HW18 Scoble
The blog that i looked at for this assignment was from deadspin, called “when your too slow to avoid the Zamboni”. From Scoble’s 20 principals this blog lives up to number 3 where he says “Use a human voice”(133). There is a quote from someone from the rink that explained the whole situation. This blog also lives up to number 2 because they posted this sort of bad news as quick as possible. This blog doesn’t follow Scoble’s principles in many ways. One of them being that it doesn’t link to any competitors or any teams that would be benefited from this or that they can benefit from. This blog didn’t really follow on number 8 because they did in a way screw up by the machine breaking down in the middle of a game and delaying it 15 minutes. They acknowledged that there was something wrong but they never really did anything to make it up to all the fans but to have them sit and wait for it to get fixed. For this one blog in particular i don’t think that it should follow most of Scoble’s Manifesto because it doesn’t have a lot of information so there’s not a whole lot that they have to work with in order to go by his standards. I think that if they gave more information then yes this blog could be applicable to his Manifesto. But also a bunch of his principals are relatively the same in some ways. For instance number one is “Tell the truth.”(132) and number fifteen is “Don’t lie”(134). Aren’t those two the same thing but the worded the other way around? So in ways it could be applicable but in other it cant.
HW16 Nick Deonton interview
This interview was a bit confusing to me. His interview talks about how web-logs are going to change the importance of the New York Times and what is going to be on the front page and what goes inside. Therefore when he starts talking about “so while I don’t think blogs are going to change the structure of original reporting, they are going to supplant in some ways the editorial layer of the news- and by that I mean the role of the New York Times in deciding what’s important and what goes on the front page.” he gets confusing in the way that he is stating this. Although he is saying that the New York Times will still be important Deonton doesn’t make it clear about the difference between the structure and the role of the New York Times. Naturally isn’t the structure the way it is put together? So then how is the role any different, if it is what is deciding to go on the front page. Also my opinion on this interview is that I don’t think that web-logs are going to change the importance of the New York Times. Therefore Ithink that even though people may be using web-logs more people are still going to be looking and relying on the New York Times.
HW 14
My favorite blog post of this week was “Judge Judy has zero tolerance for drunken plaintiffs.” This blog was on Jezebel. This post was about a girl who got drunk and got into an accident with three other people in the car, but she cant remember anything that happened. She cant even remember who was in the car. She was also assaulted by being punched in the face. “The plaintiff was so drunk (and allegedly on meth) that she didn’t remember why she got beat up, who exactly beat her up, where she was hanging out or who she was with. She’s suing her former BFF and roommate, as well as the BFF’s sister, who, BTW , wasn’t even there.” I picked this post because it was funny to read about how she couldn’t remember anything yet she is still suing her best friend. After reading it there was a clip of the trial that i watched and it was unbelievable that this was an actual court trial because it was so stupid, but funny.
HW12 “Making Global Voices Heard”
In Rebecca MacKinnons interview one of the blogs she mentions is Oh My News. When i looked up this blog on the Internet its appearance was nothing special. It had the tile in red on the top of the page, then down the left hand side it had multiple different top stories that have been talked about, with the titles in blue. Then on the right hand side were a bunch of different things, for example there was a poll, top people that have been talked about, and important people. The only pictures that were on it were a couple pictures for some of the topics that were talked about. Lastely on the bottom were different topics that you can choose from to find stories on. The people that blog on this site are all kinds of people. Really anyone can blog on this site. Some of the topics that the blog posts are about are, “spectator of war looms in Mideast”, “Diminishing Hamas”, and also “Where dogs make the scene”. MacKinnon’s view on this blog site is that it is a really good newspaper site. She says ”it was largely because of OhmyNews that the current president of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, got elected.” My opinion on her view of the site is that it may not be as important as she says it is. It is just a newspaper online for South Korea and even though it keeps everyone updated it may not change the way things happen. A skeptical reader would probably say that this site can change the way things happened because people can read about current events that are important and comment and spread their opinion around.
HW13 Business of Blogging
In my opinion, the impact of blogging on businesses is more important than the impact of blogging on communication that is not business related. The impact of blogging on businesses is more important because blogging on communication is just gossiping about events, people, or anything else that may be interesting to the common human being. On the other hand blogging on businesses is a totally different story in which when people blog about businesses it can change everything. For example people can blog about a business saying how terrible it is and say if it is a food business, they could say that they found a worm in their food and then that business can get sued and then possibly shut down. That one person blogging about a business may it be real or not can impact the businesses future and its employees. Blogging on businesses can also go the other way in which the businesses can look at what people are blogging about them and maybe try and change things or try and fight back on what is true about the company. As in Stephen Baker and Heather Greens “Blogs will change you business” they say “Blogs are different. They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute.” Just as they say businesses can know what people are thinking about every minute so they can use those blogs to their advantage. Blogging on businesses has a huge impact on the business in a good way and in a bad way.
HW10 Huffington agree/disagree
In Huffington’s interview I found that I agreed and disagreed with many of the things that she said. There were only a couple of statements that I agreed and disagreed with at the same time. One statement that Huffington makes is “Blogs have made a huge difference because they have broken the monopoly of the mainstream media.”(344) Although I agree with Huffington up to a point, I cannot accept his overall conclusion that blogs have made a huge difference. I do believe on one hand that blogs have “broken the monopoly of the mainstream media” because it has broadened the way in which people can catch up on current events and on the news of the world. Only to that point can I agree with what Huffington has said, because I really don’t believe in the other part of her statement that, ”blogs have made a huge difference. I disagree with this part of her statement because I do not believe that they have made a huge difference. They have not made a huge difference in my opinion because until I took this class I didn’t know what a blog was and I know that most other people don’t know what they are either or are not interested in using them. Like I mentioned earlier I agree and disagree with many of the statements that Huffington uses, and one of them that I agree with is, “You don’t need to reach everybody in order to have an impact.”(348) I agree with this because I believe you only need to reach one person to have other people see what you have done and be impacted by it and then they too will reach someone to impact others.
HW8 parents?
After reading “My so called blog” by Emily Nussbaum I agree with the position of parents should not monitor everything that their middle school children write online. I don’t think that they should because children have a right to their own privacy and what the kids write online isn’t usually bad. There are many ways that kids can write online, such as IM, Email, online journals and much more, but all of these ways aren’t anything that parents should be concerned about. They should be more concerned with what their kids are doing out in the real world. In her article, Emily Nussbaum says that “a significant number of writers treat their journals as actual diaries, toting up detailed accounts of their day.” (Nussbaum,354) This quote is just saying that kids writing on these online journals is harmless and the parents have nothing to worry about. Mostly all they are writing about is themselves and how their day/life is going. Its just a way for them to get their feelings out and have people comment on it. Emily Nassbaum also says in her article that “unlike a real journal, with a blog, your friends are all around, invisible voyeurs-at least until they chime in with a comment.” (Nussbaum, 356) This is just saying that instead of sharing their feelings and emotions with themselves they are sharing them with all the people that read it and it gives them a sense of comfort to know they have friends who care about them to read what they wrote. So parents have nothing to worry about and should not monitor what their kids are writing online because if they wanted their parents to know about their life they would have told them, instead they share it with everyone else.
