The first essay

How does the new technology affect us campus literature?

By

Naitong Li

                                In Partial Fulfillment of Requirement for Instructor Eric Leake

 For the writing class

January 29, 2012

Introduction: This essay is written for calling attentions to the changes that the new technologies make on our campus literature.  It shows both the good and bad influences about the new technologies, which can cause us to think deeply about it. The main audiences for this essay are the students like us. We can see us situation clearly and try to change it better after reading this article.  

With the extensive application of computers and Internet, network literature, as a new literary style comes into people’s lives, and spreads out at an alarming rate. It affects and changes people’s traditional impressions and habits of literature. As a significant part of the whole literature culture, campus literature also be affected by it a lot and has many profound changes. More and more people start to ask a question: whether the new technology gives a good impaction on our campus literature? In my opinion, anything has its good and bad sides, so we can’t simple to say it is good or bad. We must think the issue comprehensive before we get a conclusion.

The first advantage that new technologies bring us is convenience. The main carrier of the traditional literature is paper media. Compared with e-books, paper books are more bulky, take more space, harder to carry and save. Students can hardly always bring a thick book with them because the textbooks, notebooks are already very heavy, most of them don’t want to put any other things to their bags.  Besides, if there are just paper-books in the world, people must decide which book to buy or to borrow before they start to read it, which will limit their choices. And the cost of changing decision is very high. Thanks to the technologies, we solve these problems. Now, we can download anything that we want to read in our iphone, ipad, and computer, they can contain a small library at the same time, and don’t increase any weight of our bags. We can bring them everywhere, and read them whenever we want. In this way, we can save a lot time for reading. In modern times, reading never needs a desk or even a chair; we can read when we are standing in a line, when we are eating or even when we are in the restroom. We must say that it is the new technology gives us students more opportunities to read. Furthermore, from an environmental perspective, the product of paper media requires a lot of wood, and always creates toxic water and air, so it has an inescapable responsibility to the environmental damage and pollution. Of course, we don’t have the same worried about the network literature.  

Second, the new technologies give us students more chances to write. There are lot of new platforms for writing on Internet, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and discussion bar. Even we are still not professional writers, we can also find others to share our works on the Internet.  Just as Thompson writes in his article “Clive Thompson on the New Literacy” that “…young people today writes far more than any generation before them.” They write their feelings about lives in blog, write recommendations for things on YouTube and Amazon, and keep the tracks of their lives by writing on Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it is the first generation who are crazing about writing. We like to do it, because writing is never a hard and lonely job today. We can easily get our readers and fans to share our thinking and words and can get responds directly and quickly from them, which motivate us to write. But in thirties years ago, the situation is totally different, just those famous writers have their readers, and even for them, it is also not easy. Most of them should wait for a long time to publish their works. Like Sullivan writes, “Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence”. So, for a nameless writer, he can hardly get readers, though he has a very good production.  Many people lose their interests in writing because of that. But nowadays, even us, just high school or college students, we can publish our work easily, because what we need to do is just click of the Post button on the Web, then everyone in the world can see our words, if we write something really meaningful and great, it can spread out quickly. It is very easy and free, and the feeling about knowing that there exists someone in the world who has a same thinking with you is fantastic.  So in some degree, the new technologies enrich our campus literature.  They make us like writing.

Third, the new technologies make literature more colorful than before, when we read on the Internet, it always provides us many pictures and videos that related to the writings, so that we can understand what we read better. Today, because the high speed of life, time is limited, more and more audiences choose to watch movie or TV series rather than read books.  But the network literature makes words more brilliant, more interesting, and the combine of graphic and text reduces the boring part of traditional literature. Internet helps literature become popular among young students, because it makes it plain and easier for them to comprehend the core idea for a book.

After look at the advantage parts, we should also pay some attentions to the negative impacts the Internet do on our campus literature.

First, when writers write on the Internet, they don’t need to think too much. Unlike other publication writers, the writers on the Internet have less responsibility for their words.  They can write before events settled and a clear pattern emerges. As Sullivan writes: “We blog now-as news reaches us, as facts emerge.” Because there is no one to edit a bloggers’ blogs, the content of them are always personal and extreme, which brings bad influence to students. Because at their age, they can hardly figure out what is right and what is not.  Furthermore, there are many pornography and violence on the Internet, which is not good for teenagers.

The second, the information on the Internet often be edited so that it can attract your attention quickly, so the information here usually not very exactly and often shorter. Furthermore, because the information we can get very easily, we usually don’t treasure it, and always don’t read it carefully, which makes us miss a lot of important materials. It is a big problem today that students become custom to ask Google when they have questions rather than go to library to find answers. We all know that the information on the Internet is edit by second hand, which contains lots of wrong. What’s more, more and more students begin to copy from the Internet or buy papers from it to finish their assignments. These habits which brought by the new technologies to students are badly harmful for their academic studying. 

The third is the biggest problem, because students are custom to the fast and quick reading habit, most of them lose many meaningful things in reading. I have a same feel like the author Carr, ”The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” , this is a big problem, especially for students who need to read a lot when they are studying. Carr uses a very vivid metaphor sentence to describe the change. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ” It is true, most of us feel that the more we use internet, the hard we can focus on a long piece of writing, it changes our reading habit gradually. In the end, we have a high-quantity reading habit, but also a Low-quality reading one. In some degree, Internet reading makes us lose some reading habits. It weakens our capacity of deep reading and makes rich mental connection with the author.  It leads to a poor concentration when we reading.  We never do marginal notes when we read.  

What’s more, there is also a problem that the culture gap situation is more and more obvious among students. We really need to concern about the losing of our culture today. Now, more and more students use network language. They are full of the campus literature. Besides, because students can use smilies and graph to show their feelings easily on the Internet, and when they need to describe a thing they can use a link to replace it, the description ability for a student today is gradually decreasing. For example, in China, there are many new words be created on the Internet, they appears on the Internet, magazines, TV, and any other media products. You can hear a same again and again in one day. People’ vocabulary seems become smaller and many old but beautiful words will never be used today. This situation is more serious among students. It is a problem for the campus literature.

From then on, we know that network not only has positive impacts on our campus literature, but also creates some negative influences. It just like a Chinese proverb says, "We can’t get fish and bear’s paw at the same time." So though the Internet has a lot of advantages, we still need to pay attention to it. What we should do is trying to take good use of the advantages that the new technologies bring us and avoid being affect by its bad influences. We should try to let the new technologies service us, but not let it lead and master our lives. Only in this way, we can create our own campus literature culture and be sure it is much better than before.

My feeling about blog during these days

 

Today, I find that I have already written eight blogs, it happened without my being aware of it. This is the part which surprises me most.  I can’t believe I have written more than two thousand words, because I don’t feel very hard to finish them. Actually, I feel much more relaxed when I start to write than before. Once, I wrote English just because it is an exam or an assignment, I must pay much attention to whether I use a right word and whether my grammar is right or not. Sometimes, in order to avoid making mistakes, I don’t write what I really think; I just write some sentences that I am sure they are right.  But this time, for the blogs, though it is also an assignment, the form let me think I just write something to show my own opinion.  My attitude toward reading and writing on the web changed a lot in this process. I have never paid any attention to this question before; I just look the Internet as a tool, but now I start to find what the difference between reading and writing on the web and on the real paper. I find merits and drawbacks about it. For example, if I read on the Internet, I can translate the whole article into Chinese with Google easily, though it makes a lot mistakes, I can find the main idea about the article quickly and decide whether to read the original article line by line. But the information on the internet is always not exactly right and in detail. So it is hard to get enough information from it to finish my academic reports. The most change of my Internet habits is I look and use more English web than before. By the way, I think the most challenging part is to read others blogs, because there are fifteen students in the class, it seems like we need to read thirty blogs to finish all the readings, which lead me sometimes just can scan them.

The 8th post

As the title, Literacy in Three Metaphors, Sylvia Scribner uses three metaphors to define and describe what literacy is and how important it is. They are literacy as Literacy as adaption, literacy as power and literacy as a state of grace. At premier time, maybe also the most basic function of it, literacy is what we need to adapt the society.  We need the skill to survive. We need it to learn things, to do jobs, to operate our lives. The second one is that literacy makes us powerful. It can help me to develop our countries. For most of the world, compulsory education is a primary nation policy. If people are illiteracy, it always means that they can’t have advanced technology and culture. The third, of course, we always educated person is great and grace. Hedges has a similar theory with Scribner; he thinks literacy is important for a citizen, only with that he can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. But he also believes literacy is not the only thing we need to develop our life, to improve our economic situation, he use an experiment to explain it. Thompson and Carr both write something about how the modern technologies today change our reading and writing habits. They have entirely opposed opinions. Carr shows his worried about the change. He thinks Internet makes us lose the ability to read and think deeply. People just want to do some short readings; they become never want to pay much time on it. On the contrary, Thompson thinks Internet makes us situation better than before. Because of the Internet, people write much more in than last generation. It helps people improve their writing ability, and provide a platform on which people can show his works. Beside, people will never worried about the writing style can ruin our ability of serious academic writing, people can distinguish it easily. But in my opinion, I think we really need to concern about the loss our culture today. Today, more and more people use network language. For example, in China, there are many new words be created on the Internet, them appears on the Internet, magazines, TV, and any other media product. You can hear a same again and again in one day. People’ vocabulary seems become smaller and many old but beautiful words will never be used today. So I think it is a problem for us, we can create new culture, but we should also try to keep the good part of our traditional culture.

Amercia the Illiterate

In his article, “America the Illiterate”, Chris Hedges shows his discontentment to the America government. He writes a severe situation faced by America: there are still many illiterates in America, but the government does not make any effective efforts on it. They only try to make a false appearance when they enter into an election contest, when they need those illiterate and semi-illiterate. After the campaigns, they remain powerless. The politicians are now evading this question; they don’t help these people to improve the existing situation; they just change the nation from a print-based to an image- based. To be honest, I feel very shocked after I read this article. I always think America is the most developed country in the world, and its education is also the greatest one.  I never heard a voice to describe America from this point. Even the word “illiterate” the author use is not the same meaning as I use.

Actually, we always admire American politicians’ power as a speaker.  We advocate that they can use very simple words and sentence to make a speech. But from the author’s opinion, it is not seems like a good thing. He thinks it represents and aggravates culture gap. He thinks only the America that functions in a print-based, literate world, can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. Americans can’t make their culture and future rely on “image”. I think this situation can be understood, in this information generation, people become blundering than before. Just like Carr’s worries, we now use more quick information source, and we can hardly to sit down to read a book. It may be is the negative part that bring by the modern technology.  So even Hedges shows an example that a third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book, it never means what they read is less than the former people. Maybe they just take another form. So in my opinion, everything has its positive and negative parts, whether our culture problem is too big to bear is still need time to check.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Is Google making us stupid? I think it is a very good and interesting question. In the modern life, fast, effective and great information are the most important characters of everything. More and more people want to read the shortcuts news on Internet rather than get them from newspaper, which we can clearly see from our Internet habits. Nowadays, people want to use Internet to find every answer. They use Internet to do reading, to learn how to cook, to learn how to make friends. So maybe it is just the time that we should to think whether it is a good phenomenon.


Of course, Google makes our life more easily, we can get lot of source and information from it, but there are still many problems with it.  The first, the amount of information on the internet is too large; it combines words, music and video together. We can easily start from one website and click on one link and one link, at last end up with a website that far from our first destination. The second, the information on the Internet often be edited so that it can attract your attention quickly, so the information here usually not very exactly and often shorter. Furthermore, because the information we can get very easily, we usually not treasure it, and always don’t read it carefully, which makes us miss a lot of important materials.

The third is the biggest problem, because people are custom to the fast and quick reading habit, we lose many meaningful things in reading. I also have a same feel like the author Carr, ”The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”  He uses a very vivid metaphor sentence to describe it. “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ” It is true, most of us feet the more we use internet, he hard we can focus on a long piece of writing, it change our reading habit gradually. In some degree, it makes us lose some reading habit. It weakens our capacity of deep reading and makes rich mental connection with the author.  It leads to a poor concentration when we reading.  So though the Internet has a lot of advantages, we still pay attention to it. We can let it lead and master our life.

Harris&Sullivan

In his book “rewriting”, Joseph Harris shows the art of rewriting, he teaches us how to quote others works in our own essay.  Harris’s aim of this book is to help readers make interesting use of the works of others, because his thinks “interest” is one of the most important things in rewriting as well as in writing.

I think Harris looks reading as a progress of “defining the project of a writer”. To define a project of a writer is far more complex than just to get the main idea in it. It includes many details. In Harris opinion, people must be targeted when they are reading. They must know exactly what they want to know and get from the front article. People should grasp some basic things about the reading materials such as the aims of the author, how the author organize his or her writing, and what specific details the author use to achieve his or her destination.

In my opinion, Harris thinks writing is a way to show the author’s own opinion. I got this idea from his opinion for quoting. He says the purpose of quoting is to do reexplain of others’ works. It is to help an author to point out his or her new views about it or show readers a different way to read the old text. Even quoting is acting such a role, so I think the most appropriate defining for writing is to show the author’s opinion.

The connection between Harris’s understanding of writing and Sullivan’s understanding of blogging is they all think highly of showing the author’s own idea. Sullivan supports blogging mostly because an writer can express his own private and original ideas. They don’t need to make changes of their works to cater to others’ feeling. So I think blogging is a way for people to write his own private ideas, and to share them with the public, then get real feedback of the readers, of course, also learn and progress during the whole process.

Our Internet Habits

According to my classmates’ notes of their internet habit and mine, I find some similarities and differences between them.

First, Facebook becomes the most popular thing among young people. It seems becomes the first thing that everyone will do when they access to the internet. Besides, I find that maybe fewer people use twitter than Facebook in America, which I think is different from China. In China, weibo(Chinese twitter) is as popular as renren(Chinese Facebook). Especially for famous stars and adults who are already have works, weibo is more common.  

Second, we are all costumed to use Google to search information. Google plays an important role in our daily life.  When we have some questions, the first solution is to go to Google to find answer. It is makes our life easily, but can we say it is totally a good thing without any harm to our lives?

Third, I found people not use computer to get access into Internet. Most of us can do it through our iPhone or other smart mobile phone. Thanks to Wi-Fi, it make our more colorful.

The biggest difference between my notes and my classmates is the format. I just write down the webs that I look for a long time, and the activities I do on the internet. But my classmate notes include each detail of their experience, which is more easily for others to do the following observation.

Another surprise for me is that it seems no people use internet shopping during these two days. Though I don’t have this habits, there are many people in China are crazy about shopping on-line. In China, there is a website called taobao, which is like amazon in America. It is very popular; many people will log on it every day to see whether there is something on great discount.  This website is also among the top ten popular websites around the world, and you can see the list on Mandy’s blog.

Internet Habits

As usually, the first thing I do after I get access to the Internet is to open my Facebook and twitter to see what my friends did recently. After leave some message to them, I begin to see the news happened today both in China and America. I like to read social news report, because it can help me know and understand the world. Maybe the biggest social news for Chinese people today is that Taiwan will choose their new president in the following days; there are many reports about it.
 

Besides, because my major is economics, I always keep following the news in finance field. But to be honest, I spend the most time on entertainment news.

After read news, I always read books, see films or chat with my friends. Today, I chat with my friends on-line about a recently popular film. It is called The Flowers of War. Many people categorize this film into the history or war-themed field, but I think the most important thing this film to show is the beauty of humanity. The film describes a story which happened during the World War II in China. The main clue is about how a fake pastor and thirteen prostitutes save other young girls. The play is rearranged from a famous novel written by a female author, and it is directed by Yimou, Zhang, who is also the head director of the Beijing Olympics’ opening ceremony. Now, the film earned a Golden Globe Awards nomination and begins to show in cinema in some big cities in America from today. On the other hand, there is still some debate about this film. Whether Western audience can understand and accept it? Just from the point of art, whether it is a good film? Whether the film has ultranationalism in it?  I am not a film critic, so I don’t know whether it is a good enough film to win Oscar, but I indeed moved by the beautiful hearts of those women and the foreign  “pastor”.  I don’t know whether it will show in Denver, but if you want to see some Chinese film, I think it is a good choice. Though the history and culture are really very different in the world, but I think there are three things that are same to everyone; they are beauty, food, and love, isn’t it?

The Flowers of War North American trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6pleoCcBw0&feature=related

Sullivan's reasons for blogging

Though there are still many problems with blogs, in general, Sulliva supports blogs a lot, because it has many advantages indeed.
The first one is when writers write blogs, they don’t need to think too much. Unlike other publication writers, bloggers have less responsibility for their words.  Bloggers can write before events settled and a clear pattern emerges. As Sullivan writes: “We blog now-as news reaches us, as facts emerge.” Because there is no one to editing a bloggers’ blogs, the content of them can be much more personality, more alive, and more fresh. What’s more, it is hard and expensive for a writer to publish his works in other formal. Like Sullivan writes, “Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence”. So, for a nameless writer, he can hardly get readers, though he has a very good production. But bloggers just need a computer and Internet, in this way, what he need do to publish things is just click of the Publish Now button. It is very easy and free, which let everyone can write something and share them with other people. The second advantage for blog is writes can get more feedback. Readers can respond easily, quickly, and directly to the author. Though these response maybe more brutal than any editor, they are more approximates to the facts. Writers need them to improve themselves. The third, author need to correct errors and acknowledge mistakes in time, they can rewrite again and again. Furthermore, he can also change his altitude alone with the whole situation change. The fourth, thanks to the hyperlink, authors can use less word to describe a thing more particular. Sometimes a link is valued than many words, and the authors don’t need to worry about the copyright problem. The fifth, a bloggers can also learn a lot of things from writing a blog. Because there would be some readers who are more familiar with what the author writes. So they can provide many useful information and links to the author. On the other hand, these things make the article more comprehensive.

I think these five advantages are the main answer to the question in the title. In the end, using a sentence from Sullivan as a conclusion, “blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, and more alive”.

Creating a Blog

There were two difficult things I encountered when I created my blog. The first one was there were some difference between the new blog and the old one I used in China. When I was in China, I also had a blog, but not on Google web. It was on a Chinese website. Though the main things on the home page of the two websites are same, there are still some differences between them. For example, I could decorate my old blog more easily and put some moving songs on it, so that when others open it they could feel very good.  But I didn’t know how to do these things on my new blog. The second problem was I must try to adapt to the English words. Every function of my old blog I used before was shown in Chinese, so I must know the Chinese meaning of every word on the new website that I can quickly know what functions the buttons are represent for. But when I used dictionary to translate some words to Chinese, the meaning of it were not match one to one with the words I used before. Sometimes, it made me feel confused. In order to be familiar with my new blog, I must click of some buttons to see what are they used for. But I became familiar with my new blog quickly. Whatever, creating a blog on Google web is much easier than I think, and the information it asks me to fill is less than my old website.

For me, compared with Facebook, Blog is a more useful tool to record my life, thoughts, and feeling (Actually, we can’t use Facebook in China, but we have a very similar thing called renren). I think the words on blogs are greater depth than those on Facebook. Furthermore, there are many famous and learned people using blogs to show their new ideas to the public. So I can learn a lot of things from reading their blogs. The biggest difference between my blog and my Facebook is who can see it. To be honest, except some close friends, the people on my blog are those totally strange.  Sometimes I am eager to share some words with these people rather than those we know each other but not familiar. Because I may writes some words that I never use in my daily life, like some novels, and short poems.