"The Material Medium"

I guess the first thing that I have to say is WOW! I think that if I didn’t know that The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan was written over 40 years ago I would have read/absorbed the information differently. It seemed like these passages were ahead of their time. I wonder what he would have to say about today; especially with the internet and the connection of people worldwide.

Well now that I got that out of the way I can talk about some of the passages that I found either interesting or confusing. These passages were very hard to follow and read but the summary on Wikipedia helped.
The first quote that I found interesting was when Marshall McLuhan in the first paragraph said that any medium is an extension of ourselves. I totally agree, especially in writing. It allows a person to collect and put their thoughts on paper and (like in this class) show other people.

One thing (I am worried it is one of the main points of his passage) that I was confused with was the comparison with the light bulb. It was hard to follow his examples and hard to make some of his connections.

Another passage that commented on what we have talked about over the course of this class was by Napoleon (pg. 63). He said, “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” This comment attributes to the fact that words are very powerful. It also shows how some people can use words to have control over or command legions of people (an example may be Hitler).


“We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture” (pg. 64). This quote really stuck out to me because I feel like this all the time. I finally learn to master some kind of technology or technique just to find out that it has already been outdated or obsolete. This is especially seen with computers and cell phones. You can watch movies from the early 90s to see the characters using cell phones that are as big as their heads. Or when they first came out with computers they were the size of a room in a house. I know that these examples occurred over many years but I just feel like I can never keep up with technology. I always hear my older family members complain about how they don’t know how to use technology or for example don’t know how to turn off televisions or cell phones. I don’t even want to imagine what I am not going to be able to do if I eventually become a parent or a grandparent.

The last thing that maybe stuck out to me the most was at the very end of The Medium is the Message. The psychologist C.G. Jung wrote, “….. Because living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected through the unconscious with their psychology. No one can shield himself from such an influence.” I want to take out the word slave and put in the word technology. I think that quote encompasses our lifestyle. Nobody in this country can go through a day without using some type of technology. Nobody can be uninfluenced by the world of technology that surrounds each and every one of us every day.

What a Thursday Night!

Well I had a rough Thursday so I was looking forward to relaxing with some of my friends. I went to La Ciel and was ready for a couple of drinks. Well a couple turned into a few and a few turned into many, incorporating pong and Mario Kart on Nintendo 64. About 11 o clock I thought it was time to go home because I had class early on Friday. I got on the bus and went home just to realize that I had left my keys at my friends. I didn’t know what time the bus would be going back so I had to walk back to La Ciel which is a little over two miles. By the time I got to La Ciel the busses weren’t running anymore so I eventually decided to stay there and get up in the morning and go to class. Went to sleep and woke up at 8:30 just to realize that all of my school work that I needed was at my apartment. So I planned on catching the bus again (this time I made sure that I had my keys) but I missed it by about 30 seconds. So I had to make the hike again to get to my apartment. By this time I had already missed my first class but I did make it to my last two. And now I am getting ready to go watch the hockey game for the last time this year :(. Hopefully tonight will turn out better than the last. Catch you on the flip side.

"Academic Writing" vs. New-Aged Media

I have had bad experiences (well at least never a good one) with “academic” writing. When I first signed up for this class I thought I was going to hate it. But I had to take it for a pre requisite for the Business School so I was just going to have to grin and bear it. Before I knew anything about the class I thought we were going to have to write a few 5-7 paragraph, boring papers but I was pleasantly surprised. So far this class has allowed me to write/type relatively freely. We write two two-page papers a week and I am much more comfortably doing that. I don’t have the pressure of having two or three papers that make up the whole grade for the class. I don’t feel like I need to use an outline (which is where I normally get frustrated). I feel that I can write what I want to and get feedback from the teacher and from my peers.

New media has brought about typing. Some people even take laptops to class to take notes, which was probably unthinkable 10 years ago. With the introduction of computers and typing I think that my writing skills have suffered. I can type faster than I can write so when I am writing I think faster than I write and screw up words. For example, when I am taking notes in class and writing down a lot I screw up letters and get words all mixed up. My notes are messy and the words barely recognizable when reviewing. So that would definitely be a huge bonus with typing on a computer. Plus you have one of the greatest tools in MS Word, the spell check.

A bad consequence of new media and writing is that people don’t really know how to write “traditional academic” papers anymore. But then again, maybe there isn’t a great need for “traditional” papers. My dad used to judge papers for scholarships for high schoolers 10 years ago and he would always say how the essays were horrible and that kids don’t know how to write anymore. And I could guess that what he said was right because I suck at “academic” writing (although I know I’m just one case). I don’t think that I have enough creative style to be a really good writer. Maybe I have been desensitized through too much television and video games. Who knows?
Another consequence would be the lack of writing technique that people may have lost (never really learned) from using a computer. Talking on instant messengers, people have learned to abbreviate and most of the time never using appropriate punctuation or capitalization. I have noticed this in my writing and typing skills. I find myself making abbreviations and using poor grammar that some people may not understand.

But I really don’t see any need for talking about bad consequences because I really don’t think they matter anyway. I can’t imagine computers dieing off in the next 50 years (or ever) so talking about consequences may be a mute point. I think what our society needs to work on is incorporating the good qualities of actually writing into computing. I think that some “new-aged” teachers are already starting to do that (a.k.a. this class and other articles/movies that we have read/watched in class). I think that meshing new media and English curriculum is necessary because I believe that the merge will happen anyway. We need to act know before our writing literacy has totally vanished.

What is writing? - Collage

Sparta made the map!

Hey all,
I just wanted to pass this along. It came to my attention a couple of weeks ago that my little hometown (Sparta, WI) was on a Jeep commercial, so here it is.



It is on with 10 seconds left in the commercial. Thats all for now.

Prosumers and Wikipedia

A couple of days ago I watched “Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition” by Daniel Anderson. To tell you the truth I wasn’t very impressed and let me tell you why. I don’t know if he was just trying to show all that you can do with a little knowledge of computers but I just thought that there was always way too much stuff going on at once. It was very hard for me to follow what was going on and concentrate on the message that he was trying to get across. I had to go back and listen to things over many times and I still didn’t understand most of what was going on.

I did pull out some information from the site though and what I understood I thought it was very interesting and he had some good ideas. The first thing was called the “computing prosumer” which I understood to be the “convergence of professional and rookie digital equipment.” This has been assisted by relatively inexpensive and consumer friendly digital (computers, editing equipment, video cameras) equipment. I think it is a great idea to introduce low-level technology to people who aren’t very good with technology. It may give those people a foot-in-the-door and maybe they will come to enjoy using digital equipment.

One statement that kind of stuck out to me was by Diana George who said, “students have a great deal of experience with new media communications technologies such as visual communication.” As soon as I heard this I linked it back to the end of our class on Thursday where we talked about technology being implemented in schools as soon as kindergarten. I think that the more people use computers, video cameras, etc. the more they will be comfortable with them and want to use them. Going back to the end of Thursdays’ class I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed it. I feel like I can talk about stuff like that for hours.

Another thing that we talked about it class was the use of Wikipedia when doing research in the article “A Stand Against Wikipedia”. There were two comments from Becky Bs’ blog that I found really interesting. The first one was when she said that a student has to start researching somewhere. I totally agree with her. I think that it is ridiculous to ban an educational (yes I know not all of it is correct) site when researching a topic. It could be a good way to get some other resources for the topic you are interested in. The other thing that I found interesting was when she questioned why people would even want to cite an encyclopedia. I don’t ever remember being told by a teacher that a student shouldn’t cite encyclopedias. And maybe I could have been spacing out but our class discussion on Thursday was the first time that I have ever really talked about Wikipedia. I never knew that anyone can go on the site and put whatever information they wanted. Which brings up a question that I had about Wikipedia. I was always taught (I guess I was taught wrong) that if a website ended in .org that it could be counted on as a truthful website. Maybe whoever reads this can comment and maybe explain to me why I don’t understand.

The last thing to kind of sum up “A Stand Against Wikipedia” was the last couple of paragraphs when Steven Bell commented on the use of Wikipedia. I thought the best statement was when he said, “a better approach would be to teach students how to ‘triangulate’ a source like Wikipedia, so they could use other sources to tell whether a given entry could be trusted”. That in a nutshell is how I think teaching should be handled. Not to just say that something is banned but teach how and why not to use whatever is in question.

Brett Favre

Way to go Brett. Good decision. We got him for at least another year. Woohoo. I don't know if anyone has seen this clip on You Tube but I think it is pretty good.



This ones for you Holly.