According to Susan Lewak’s article “What Matter Who’s Speaking: Access, Wikis, and YOU”, the idea of a single author equals a single piece of writing is shifting. It is no longer about a pencil, a paper, and a single thought. With the advances in technology and communication over the past couple of years the new idea is becoming a more communal process. There seems to be no limits to accessibility especially in sites such as Wikipedia and related sites.

“The Wiki is perhaps the most “postmodern” of all contemporary writing tools as it is a “hybrid” of an HTML editor, a chat room, email, and word processing software, lacks both a center and boundaries, is multi-linear, multi-vocal, and is “dynamic” (or always in a state of change).”

I think the point of that quote that we have to focus on is the “always in a state of change” this is important because it highlights the unreliability and inconsistency of the information that we sometimes relay on. It is unsettling to think that what one person might read isn’t necessarily what someone else might read the next day, and if that is the case than how can those two people every discuss the subject without both being clear of what the truth really is.

There no longer can be a dependability on the author of a piece, no one can be held accountable for misleading or falsifying or on the other hand no one can be held accountable for a singular piece that may exceed the norms and requires recognition. Susan Lewak address my concerns regarding Wikipedia by reassuring that those who do not abide by the rules set by the Administrative authority than that person will be blocked.

“Within the context of Web 2.0, we need to ask a new set of questions, particularly about the ramifications of an environment such as the Wiki, where the word “author” is replaced by “editor” or “administrator” (roles differentiated only by levels of access). Even then, neither role is allowed absolute control over the content of a page in a Wiki, except in the case of versions that have been tailored for the classroom (such as the course management system, Moodle, which has modified its Wiki to give the instructor complete control over content). The Wikipedia, for example, is controlled only by a labyrinth set of rules “authored,” “edited,” voted upon, and enforced by the virtual community of editors who contribute to it (those editors who do not conform to these rules are first warned and then blocked by high level administrators).”

I hope that the traditional modes of finding useful and reliable information continues to thrive even against the odds of an advancing, fast moving, technological world. It is important to be able to trace the source of the information back to one author because that person with the initial thought takes the responsibility of the work and the message being communicated.

Playing video games has become so intertwined with our society that some people have a hard time distinguishing between truth and virtual worlds. However this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Imagine being able to reach a student going through a hard time, through a video game, or teaching others how to react to a situation through a video game. This seems to be the next big thing that we have yet to utilize. Children and adults play video games, why not use that outlet to get across educational messages and experiences. Ian Bogost’s, “Rhetoric of Video Games” begins by explaining how playing the game Animal Crossing Community can show somebody how to be apart of a community and care for it.

“Animal Crossing is a game about everyday life in a small town. It is a game about customizing and caring for an environment. It is a game about making friends and about collecting insects.But Animal Crossing is also a game about long-term debt. It is a game about the repetition of mundane work necessary to support contemporary material property ideals. It is a game about the bittersweet consequences of acquiring goods and keeping up with the Joneses.”

A game with those kinds of values could be used to help rehabilitate or encourage a social practice with those who may lack a sense of social confidence. Bogost reiterates this by discussing how Animal Crossing could contribute to a social activity,

“4 In this sense, the people who play video games develop values, strategies, and approaches to the practice of play itself. For example, a large group of Animal Crossing players contribute to an online community called Animal Crossing Community (ACC for short) to discuss the game, share things they’ve made, find strategies, or look up the value of different fish, insects, or furniture.5 Within this community, as in all communities, cultural values develop, both by design and by evolution. For example, ACC offers players the option of “getting adopted.” A veteran “Scout” is assigned to a new member as a “foster buddy” to help the newbie “learn the ropes of ACC . . . They’ll also help you with any of your Animal Crossing questions, and may even give you a free item as a welcoming gift!”6 Venues like ACC show that video game play is a cultural activity”

In one way gaming could be used as a way to reintroduce a soldier into the everyday life in his or her community, like a controlled environment that the solider could rely on to re acclimate him or her to civilian life. Or even be used to monitor their psychological progress once back in their communities.  Another way gaming could be used is in our classrooms. We know that video games are used in almost every household, now why not have assigned home work through video games that could be further discussed in the classroom, I can see how such a practice might be a hard transition from the traditional way of thinking about school work, however we need to evolve with the children and reach them by striking their interest.

After reading the Writing in the Wild article and related blogs, I couldn’t help but wonder if in fact the way we study holds us back. And if all this new age access is limiting our hands on experience. Like the article states with a pencil and a paper a student can write on location experiencing and interacting with our subjects. Thus leading to Moblogs as referred to in the article or in other words a podcast. The ability to post or convey a message in real time by adding photos, videos or sounds to your blog or your audience. this is a new way of expression that simply can not be achieved with in the walls of a library or cubical.

“Rheingold predicted that advances in mobile technology would soon give everyone the tools to publish independent, real-time news reports directly on the web and other platforms”

While this is no longer a prediction in these days there is still a separation between the writers and the subject they write about. According to the article, “This binary separates the space of writing and publication from the object and tends to privilege work-in-progress genres such as essays and websites.

The purpose of the Writing in the Wild article I believe is to challenge the norm. It is not asking for a complete change of the way we approach writing an essay for example it is asking us to try and change the way we approach it. I agree with this because I don believe that the atmosphere in which you convey your thoughts definitely effect your thoughts all together. In other words if sunshine makes you happy, then maybe writing your paper out doors will translate into a more positive toned thesis. It is important to relate this back to our studies of the art of conveying ones self because if we think about how different out thinking process is in relation to where er are and who we are with, we can make the connection that this article is making.

Data display is a way of visually presenting numerical information in the form of graphical images.  The use of text is only secondary in terms of data display results. According to Chapter 7 of Designing Visual Language there are at least three reasons to using this form of data display:

• Visual data display can be a more appealing and attractive way to present numerical information. Also some readers are more visual and would find it easier to understand and might even prefer it visually presented rather than textual.  Information can also be more engaging in visual in contrast to textual form.
• Another reason that was highlighted in this chapter is using visual display to translate highly complex data into a more accessible chart a single place where the reader can find what would be too much textual information in visual form.
• Visual data display can also be a way of creating data that can be easily accessible when looking up specific data. The chapter refers to it as a top-down perspective. It is a good way of categorizing information for the reader to use as a guide of some sort.

Jacques Bertin shows in Graphics and Graphic Information-Processing (2-23), discover things about the data by shaping them visually. At the same time, however, this freedom may also be a bit perplexing because you have to control so many design elements– spatial, graphic and textual.  Just remember that the cognate strategies you use to shape your design are driven by the rhetorical situation.  Using rhetorical situation to guide the design process will help you manage this freedom, giving you the control you need to create an effective display for your readers.

In other words Bertin is expressing the difficulties in knowing what type of visual to use in order to best convey your information. And he tries to guide us by explaining the importance of knowing the rhetorical situation. Which is defines as, the context of a rhetorical event that consists of an issue, an audience, and a set of constraints. I think it is extremely important to understand your data before you try to visualize it and present it to an audience. It is also important to try and understand your audience and how they prefer to perceive their information, which alone should guide you when formatting your presentation of data.

Being able to convey complex information in a way that can “paint a picture” is an extremely helpful tool especially when your specific audience is not necessarily very familiar with the terminology that might be used instead of a chart or a graph. This is a highly important tool to understand and utilize, because it allows your data to be organized, accessible and most of all engaging which is important to the reader.

A concordance in a way is a summary of the most important words or phrases with in a body of a text. And this is often used to identify the main theme or words of that text.

The first concordance, to the Vulgate Bible, was compiled by Hugh of St Cher (d.1262), who employed 500 monks to assist him. In 1448 Rabbi Mordecai Nathan completed a concordance to the Hebrew Bible. It took him ten years.

Since it took so long to do a concordance analysis prior to computers and tools of that nature, there were only a few bodies of work that were deemed important enough and worthy of the time and effort it took to compile such a list. However, nowadays this can be done rather quickly using all these computerized tools and in a way deemphasizing the importance of the results. What is the importance of the result you ask? Well to understand the main ideas that were present in the head of the writer or writers of a certain body of work one can begin to get a better understanding of the work, perhaps even a more guided understanding. This is important especially when you are trying to interpret a body of work, like in literature.

According to Svenja Adolph’s Introducing Electronic Text Analysis, a concordance analysis can lead to insights that are not easily generated on the basis of intuition alone. In other words the analysis can give us a better understanding of the work as a whole just by analyzing the patterns that are most common within it. This is easily missed especially in a long body of work or in multiple works by the same author. This kind of analysis can help us tie together all the works of say Shakespeare or Walt Whitman by taking a look at what the author most often talked about or referenced.

This is also a great tool when it comes to comparing main themes of a certain time, for example, what did the writers of the 18^th century want to address, and how did they do it. Or what did the women of northern Ireland want to express in the early 20th century. The search can be specific to a single author a gender a time or even a place. I think that this is a very interesting tool especially because we can get an insight about the writers and their personal beliefs, things that we might not really be able to do just by reading some of their popular works.

Understanding how to navigate the internet most efficiently is not only important in today’s technical world, it is important in your day to day life whether technical or not. Svenja Adolphs tries to provide an understanding of how language is used in today’s media and how even search results can be greatly influenced by the words and patterns you use while searching. A good example Adolphs provides in her book “Introducing Electronic Text Analysis” is in using search engines, and how patterns and specific language will greatly influence your results. And furthermore your understanding of your original search.

Corpus Linguistics is the field of electronic text analysis, and understanding this form of text analysis will make us better communicators on the web and in general. In and article posted on WiseGeek.com they simplify the definition as “Parental diaries of a child’s speech as he first acquires language is a simple example of a corpus that can then be studied to learn language patterns.”

In that same article they begin to touch on the importance of corpus and search engines, “While searching patterns in a corpus of millions of words would take too much time for a human being and the results would be less than accurate, a computer can search and retrieve information in mere seconds. It can calculate frequency, sort data and exploit corpora in ways that were impossible in the past.”

Eventually through all this sorting and understanding of the corpus process we should be able to weed through all the non-useful junk that might come up when we search and get a better understanding of the actual subject matter. The article also helps understand the purpose of the electronic corpus, by highlighting its non-human abilities to conduct a speed search that a person could never do in the same amount of time.

Corpus Linguistics is important because it opens up the world of information and makes it instantly available to us. It is also important to understand how these patterns work in order to articulate ourselves correctly on the web/.

In the first chapter of The Economics of Attention, Richard A. Lanham’s begins by acknowledging that we are now facing more information then we can process. And that companies are no longer making products to last, rather they are more focused on making a relationship with a loyal consumer. And that as a consumer we are no longer looking for things of quality. Lanham stresses this in the very beginning by highlighting the new relationship between the product and the consumer.

Products used to be designed to last a lifetime. Now they have a shorter life than young love. For computers, it is three steps from cutting-edge to doorstop. It is the relationship to the consumer that matters now, not the object that engenders it, or the database that such relationships generate that generates value, or the associations that can be built on such relationships, or the brand, the box it comes in. So enamored of brands have we become that we walk around plastered with sponsor decals like a race car. The clothes, the stuff, have become an excuse to display our brand loyalties, what we think about stuff.

Furthermore, he begins to talk about this new age of information. He talks about how nowadays we are bombarded by more information each year then we can process. Lanham then begins to talk about the economy and how all this stuff has changed the ages or stages of it. The ages of economy are now defined as “agriculture, industrialism, and fluff”. Fluff as he described it by highlighting someone else’s definition is if you didn’t dug ut, grow it, or build it, then it is considered fluff; in other words if you didn’t work for the outcome of the stuff then it is fluff. However, according to Lanham all that has changed now, the definitions of stuff and fluff have switched;

Richard A. Lanham

But when you interpret nature as information, stuff and fluff change places. The “real” world becomes a printout, a printout created increasingly by computer graphics, by digital design. We see this synthetic reality everywhere nowadays, from TV commercials to scientific visualization, computer games to military training. In this world, every element has been created from specific information keyboarded by master illusionists. Made objects, from buildings to airplanes, find their beginning and central reality in computer assisted design and manufacture. The life-giving act inheres in designing the object on a digital screen. The manufacture or “printout” of the object becomes a derivative function performed slave-like by a computer-controlled machine.

In other words, nowadays if the machine doesn’t produce it some how then it is fluff; that the hard work is now credited to the machines and the computers that produce all the stuff. I find this to be really sad because in a sense he is saying that we no longer give value to man made things, we no longer trust it if it isn’t mass produced.

Lanham then goes into making an interesting parallel between the definition of Economics now and than. He defines Economics than as, ” the study of how human beings allocate scarce resources to produce various commodities and how those commodities are distributed for consumption among the people in society” and he questions what is scarce resources in the Information economy? finally revealing it as the human attention needed to process all the information. This is extremely interesting because now it seems that our economy is only as strong as our attention spans, and with all the information produced each year, that our attention span can’t possibly be as strong as those of earlier times.

He references the famous economist Herbert Simon as he considered the attention-economy problem in 1971 and saw it as simply a question of filtering. Computer “knowbots;’ as we now call them, digital librarians, would organize our attention for us; our news would arrive pre-Googled and personalized. Or we would hire live special librarians to step in where Google fails.And so, at least to some degree, it has worked out. Special librarians are a growing job category. But either way, bots or bodies, the thinking remains “commodity” thinking. We have too many boxes of information arriving at our loading dock. We must find mechanized ways to organize their arrival. A UPS problem.

This is also very interesting because  he is basically saying that we can all become more efficient, however not on our own, that we need to be filtered in order to be productive. And immediately I think of how often I get distracted while working on a research project or this blog, and how the adds all along my search results are created specifically for me to do just that, distract my attention so that I feel the pressure of indulging in my distraction while also knowing I need to make a fast decision in order to get back to my “work”. This is an example of how the information economy is fighting for the commodity, that is my attention. And how when they take it upon themselves to fitler their machine filtering becomes so specific it is almost impossible to ignore. As if they know what you want and need better then you.

What makes a good public speaker is exactly what the public needs. One must be able to earn the trust of the audience and in a sense be trustworthy, Being a good speaker obligates you to using your talent for good, because you have the power to influence the thought process of the people in your community. Thus becomes a very important trait of a speaker or a or a leader or a candidate of some sort, because they need to appeal to the majority of the country and at the same time earn the trust of strangers. In Quintilian’s Institutes or Oratory book 12 chapter 1, it is emphasized that “A great Orator must be a good man,” a good man is defined as a good speaker. This is a great attribute that a man of power, a leader, must poses in order to gain the trust of the people and be heard, whether or not what he speaks about is the absolute truth, as long as his intentions are that of a good man, than a fallacy is acceptable for the better good of the public. This becomes evident in Quintilian’s book 12, “A good man, doubtless, will speak of what is true and honest with greater frequency, but even if, from being influenced by some call of duty, he endeavors to support what is fallacious (a case which, as I shall show, may sometimes occur), he must still be heard with greater credit than a bad man.”

In THE SECOND ORATION OF M. T. CICERO AGAINST LUCIUS CATILINA, we see an example of the deliberate fallacy by Cicero:

Cicero was aware of his motions, and knew that he had previously sent a quantity of arms, and military ensigns, and especially a silver eagle which he had been used to keep in his own house with a superstitious reverence, because it had been used by the great Marius in his expedition against the Cimbri. However, he thought it desirable to counteract the story of his having gone into exile, and therefore summoned the people into the forum…….”But as I saw that, since the matter was not even then  proved to all of you, if I had punished him with death, as he had deserved, I should be borne  down by unpopularity, and so be unable to follow up his accomplices, I brought the business  on to this point that you might be able to combat openly when you saw the enemy without  disguise. But how exceedingly I think this enemy to be feared now that he is out of doors,       you may see from this—that I am vexed even that be has gone from the city with but  a small retinue. I wish he had taken with him all his forces. He has taken with him Tongillus, with whom he had been said to have a criminal intimacy, and Publicius, and  Munatius, whose debts contracted in taverns could cause no great disquietude to the republic. He has left behind him others—you all know what men they are, how overwhelmed with debt, how powerful, how noble.”

From this exert we see Cicero trying to bring back the trust of the people, he is trying to expose Catalina as a bad man by finding holes in his previous speech and using them to insert dishonesty and distrust, when in fact he is fully aware that he is delivering a fallacy.

In modern days this is a commonly used practice, trying to find weakness in your opponents speech and using it against them to hinder their trust with the public. We see this most often in presidential debates. Fallacies are powerful when used correctly and for the better good.

httpv://youtu.be/at_gzkwSF4k

We see in this example that Obama has taken something Romney said in a previous debate and has used it out of context to shift the focus of the crowed.

Plato’s Phaedrus is a dialouge between Phaedrus and Socrates in which they discuss an upcoming speech that Licymnius is involved in. The begin to discuss the art of Rhetoric which according to Aristotle’s Rhetoric means, “Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic.” and according to Wikipedia, “Rhetoric is the art of discourse, an art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations.”

In both Phaedrus by Plato and Aristotle’s Rhetoric there is a focus on political writing and the art of persuasion. The ability to argue for or against something by the writer is considered to be a good attribute. And that Politicians should not be ashamed of being good writers because, according to Socrates in Phaedrus, “The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.”  That to me identifies the argument of the paper, which is what makes a writer or writing good? and this could be directly related to blogging because it is important to understand the art of persuasion and using it for your advantage especially in a court room, however using “non-essentials” as in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ”The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case.” I believe what he is warning against is using the art of persuasion in a negative matter by talking about things that don’t matter, trying to change the image of something or someone by provoking a specific emotion in the judge. And in Pheadrus, Socrates adds that, “The deceiver must know the truth, because he has to find a likeness of the truth; he must learn to deceive by degrees. The art of disputation, then, is not confined to the courts and the assembly, but is one and the same in every use of language; this is the art, if there be such an art, which is able to find a likeness of everything to which alikeness can be found, and draws into the light of day the likenesses and disguises which are used by others?” In this part he argues that if you decide to take on the art of persuasion for a deceptive purpose that you as the deceiver must know the real truth in order to find something that the audience will relate to and ultimately fight for.

I find these two reading to be very interesting because not only do they reflect on something that is so prominent in today’s courts it also highlights the dangerous that could come from it. They talk about the ability to be well spoken and that is very important especially when writing a blog because in a sense it is like a public speech. That one has to be able to persuade his audience to agree with him or even disagree with him if that is his intention, and that as the writer you have to have total control over what you are saying and what emotions you intend and do evoke.

Danah Boyd at TED Confrence

Boyd talks about trying to understand Blogs and Bloggers. In a section of her paper she talks about limited representation of a those who are non-English speakers and those who are of Color and those who live in rural parts and those who live in non-Western civilizations. To me this is very important in trying to understand blogs and blogging as a medium because it leaves a big gap in  expression and content that is not represented. She also talks about blogging as a mode of communication and how this form of communication is left completely up to the blogger. I think that this is important culturally speaking because it gives an understanding into how people view freedom based on what might be socially accepted in their society.

“Using a combination of snowballing, public advertisements on Craigslist and cold emails to random bloggers, I chose sixteen bloggers who represented many of the diverse practices I observed and heard about during my informal discussions and daily blog surfing. I interviewed each for an extended period in a formal, recorded setting. Of the sixteen subjects chosen, eight identified as male, six as female and two as transgendered. Their ages ranged from 19-57 with a mean of 29.4. All lived in major metropolitan areas, with nine located on the west coast of the United States, four on the east coast and three around London. All but one blogged in English. Twelve identified as Caucasian, three as Asian-American and one as Latino. Although teenagers blog in droves, I did not formally interview any teens due to external limitations. The lack of representation of rural regions, non-English speakers, people of color and non-Western cultures limits my understanding of the full breadth of practices, but this paper is not trying to articulate all blogging practices. The diversity of practices found in my relatively homogenous subject pool still shows a variety of experiences and attitudes.”