Publicized

Compared to the other discussions in class, the one that took place today was the most intriguing simply because whenever there was an argument made, it would be refuted or complemented with another thought-provoking thought. I almost felt as if we were cultivating a piece of work. Professor Lesh always reminds us that written works are never finished because there is always room for something to be added, revised, or made better. Throughout the discussion, we were feeding off one another’s energy and contributions, only to go back to the thoughts that could have been established, and refining it to create something new.
This idea of publicity versus privacy is a very interesting subject. When writing or presenting something, we subconsciously write or present it towards an imaginative, intended audience. When our works are released, it displays the author’s choice of vulnerability and risk because the message of their work is up for interpretation. Take graffiti for example. Because of the preconceived notions and engrained suppositions of where it is rooted from and the type of people who created them, there is this barrier that forces misinterpretation. There is a difference when we see vulgar, inappropriate messages on the side of the road, versus when we see murals on the side of an elementary school. Not all graffiti is used to vandalize and voice negativity. Graffiti is a form of art that can be used as a means of positive or personal expression. And even though the authors are placed in a situation where their works can be interpreted negatively and are completely misconstrued from its purpose, there is an exciting sense of thrill when the viewers do not know the message or even the creator behind a specific piece of work. Nevertheless, granted that the location of these two works contribute to the intent of the message, there will always be this sense of privacy that shadows its purpose because the audience will, most likely, not know the process in which it became to be, who specifically designed this piece of work for this particular location, and so forth.
In a different light, everybody, whether we realize it or not, places themselves in situations where they are forced to trust. We trust that our messages on Facebook will not read by people other than our connected friends, we trust that when we submit an essay it will not become viral and spread over the Internet, and we trust that when we private our personal blogs online that it will not fall into anybody’s hands or eyes other than our own. However, when we briefly touched upon social media in class today, I thought it was more than appropriate that we came to a relatively conclusion stating that nothing is really private. For example, when we snap-chat images and  messages for one specific person, we are always at the risk of having them screenshot the image and posting it on different social media outlets, or even having him or her show another person who it was not originally intended for. It is that invasion of privacy from the public, even if it means one other person from our intended audience that shakes our trust. Even though people may not completely understand the private messages behind the images or messages that we share, it is the idea of publicizing our works that shakes our privacy. It is realizing that somebody out there in this world holds some sort of private knowledge about you that truly makes our work, our messages, and even our secrets, publicized.

Communicating Cultures

      Today's class discussion was absolutely fascinating. On the topic of public texts, we collectively created the argument that one can address several types of individuals that each relate to a different discourse community. I find it particularly interesting how such a personal opinion can find a place in the political role. Take it as if Chris Kluwe was an ordinary person in our classroom. Although not a public figure anymore, a regular person can equally access discourse communities by making a text public. The availability of text, especially now with the rise in technological methods facilitating the proliferation of texts, now makes virtually any text available for others to interpret.

      "FUCK NEU". Such an uncomplicated phrase can be interpreted as a dense sentiment from someone who made the text available for others to interpret. In class today, I mentioned how the internet and the phrase mentioned earlier still create an incognito personality for the individual sharing the text. In modern days, the availability of the Internet allows for text to become more easily accessed and for our points of views to be expressed easily. As Sam argued in class today, in our modern society, we use technology to speak to people, instead as speaking with people. I am tempted to relate this to graffiti and how a visual representation in a public environment can unite people on the same floor of debate and conversation. Therefore, our public opinions on the Internet are the new graffitis on walls.

      In addition to that, the communities a public letter such as Chris Kluwe draws and attracts are so directly affected or interested by the content and his stance that they feel the need to comment. Like a graffiti on a wall, a comment on The Huffpost's Gay Voices forum allows one to join a debate with a clandestine identity. By remaining secret, one is further aroused by the freedom of expression now possessed and joins this forum shaped by people I have never met so why not say whatever I want. Why not write "FUCK NEU" on a bathroom door if I know no one will ever know it was me? The thrill of not being recognized feeds to the fact that we fear judgment which is why we fear the possible screenshotting of our snap chats since we lose control of what other people might do with them. By remaining unrecognizable, the openness of the public sphere of communication gains power as it becomes more available and protective of people to create conflict.

     Today's list of elements of the term "public" mentions how it allows a relationship among strangers. By having an easy access to the comment forum of the public letter to the state delegate, I am engaging with other members of my society as if we were both speaking about a graffiti at a bank. We might be both equally affected by the graffiti's existence or its message, therefore it unites us into taking a collective stance on the graffiti being on the bank's wall. This is where pathos, or emotions, meets ethos, or ethics, since an emotion that I express so publicly now creates an ethical argument on other people as to why I am thinking that way, therefore stimulating logic, or logos.

     Lastly, communication is a perplexing aspect of society that we definitely take for granted. By analyzing how we connect on a public level we are seeing how our society is building itself through "poetic world making" as the list says, because we are gaining the courage or necessity to spread our ethos and pathos and making them being heard so that we can intercept other people's panoramas on logos so that society can move forward based on what we think.

The Mona Lisa

So I thought today's discussion was very interesting and not comparable to any other conversation I have had within a classroom. I enjoy discussions more when they never really reach an end point. I feel like the discussion today on the varieties of what is considered public or private, or even a mixture of both never really reached an agreement. Every time someone would make, what I thought was a pretty valid point, someone else would give an example that made me question the first point made which I previously thought was solid. What I'm trying to say is that I find these discussions more enjoyable and more challenging I guess. I think the point that effected me the most was one that Olivia made. Well I think this is what she was sort of getting at, if not then what she said I guess inspired these next thoughts. How much privacy exists in something that was intended to remain public? Just like the "Fuck NEU" message, we established that it is plausible that the author probably had an intended audience (those that use the bathroom), but no one can account for the distribution of the message. Although "Fuck NEU" speaks of a pretty clear message, I guess I mentally compared it to when Kanye West said  that Bush doesn't care about black people. It's pretty clear what he meant, but something is always lost in translation. We don't know their true intentions behind those words spoken/written so I guess I think that gives off a sense of privacy. Maybe there is some subliminal message that we are missing and only the author understands. I think the two examples I gave probably aren't the best, but I think you guys get what I mean.
More specifically, take the Mona Lisa. A painting created by Leonardo da Vinci sometime between 1503 and 1506. The biggest discrepancies that come out of this painting are: Who is she to Leonardo? and Why is she smiling? Now I know there has been research done on this and some claim that it is supposed to be a portrait of some guy's wife but I don't think we will ever truly know. Because of this, this extremely worldwide known painting, that has been completely accessible of the public, still maintains some sort of privacy. No one knows exactly what he was thinking when he painted her or why he painted her or who was she to him. So although this painting is public, it holds a lot of privacy. I think this analysis is comparable to almost any form of writing or art. No one is inside the head of the author so something is always lost which I feel creates that sense of privacy. Whether the author has a subliminal message within their work or even the inspirations around a piece of art. Now I'm not going to get into ethos, pathos and logos because I had never heard of those terms before class today, but I'm sure they can be connected to what I'm trying to say somehow. From what I understand, I definitely think that a character is created by both emotion and logic, so I don't think that these three can be separated but I think that a person's character also speaks to a form of privacy, because no two characters can be defined or closely compared.

Can we really separate Public and Private?

The topic of public writing seems to deviate from our past projects. In the past we have all heavily focused on our own discourse communities, even with the abstract project—despite collaboration—we had to use the knowledge and writing styles of our own field in order to complete the assigned task.  In today’s class we attempted to define public, which in retrospect was not as simple as it may seem. The definitions are as varied as the outlets in which public writing is produced and coming up with a singular cohesive definition seems to be impossible. But is this a bad thing? I would say that it is actually quite the opposite in that it allows for an open and lively discussion on a topic that affects us all. The intersection of public and private documents can be seen in everyday life. In my opinion it is impossible to label something as 100% public because there will always be someone that is excluded from access to that specific text. Similarly, I believe it is impossible to label something as 100% private because in our modern world there is always a way to make something public (i.e. snap chat). 

 In our discussion we paid particular attention to Chris Kluwe’s An Open Letter to Emmett C. Burns. When I first saw this article I was immediately struck by the fact that I had already read it. I don’t remember exactly when, but I remember getting an e-mail thread from one of my roommates. After class today I decided to search through my mail and see if I could find the original e-mail to see how my roommate approached it as a part of this so called public audience. I was immediately amused that the subject was Gay CockMonster!!. This subject brought up an interesting question in my head about the nature of public versus private. My roommate sent us a link to the article on ESPN’s website which by nature is a public website but his use of a vulgar title (a phrase actually taken from the article itself) makes me think it was clearly meant to be sent to a select few individuals. If he was sending this link to a boss or a professor for whatever reason, I’m sure his subject heading would be different. So the article itself is clearly a public document, but his email was not. Despite his intention to send this e-mail to three people it actually went to more because I then forwarded the e-mail to some friends and they continued to do the same. How wide spread did this e-mail with his original intent go? Honestly I have no idea but it is an interesting question to think about when we send out e-mails, texts or even snap chats. 

Our class discussion on the public nature of this article was very lively and I think it hit on quite a few important points when trying to decipher public versus private. My above example just touches on the idea of how a public document can become private but as we eluded to many times in class today the reciprocal happens in our everyday lives. Facebook is an obvious and very relevant example that has affected our entire generation. I’m sure we have all looked at our Facebooks in the past and seriously regretted certain pictures that we have posted, whether it be from high school or college. The important point here is to note that what we believe to be private information can very easily go public. Chris Kluwe’s article was clearly meant to be public but we have all seen public officials writing go public that was clearly meant not to. Based off of this discussion I think it is impossible to separate private and public documents as they are constantly being intertwined with each other.   

From painful to thought-provoking

It wasn’t until May that I decided to take Summer II classes. As many others have stated, taking a class in summer can generally be less painful than taking it during a full spring or fall semester. While selecting the classes that I thought would be the most painful for me I saw English and Algorithms as two that fall into that category.
I did not know what to expect. As an international student without a very good knowledge of English I was always scared of these kinds of classes. My skills in creative thinking were bad and writing papers in English could be a long and exhausting process. One of the worst things I have seen professors do is forcing the discussion in a particular direction, following bullet points and not letting the conversation go in the direction where the class takes it.  What is so good about this class is that there is so much freedom. We discuss very serious and very fun ideas to prove the same point.

Doing a thin slice turned out to be a very fun experience. It was something new for me since my experience with writing papers was a bit different. We would get a topic to discuss and we would have to write a paper on it. This assignment turned out to be very fun because no one seemed to know what to expect as a result of thin slicing. It was like doing a lab report and then analyzing the results. It got us thinking in different kind of way.

The best way to see the success of this class is to look at the interest that students show in this class. There is always a discussion going on and everyone is eager to give his or her own opinion.  While working for the abstract assignment I learned more about English than I have in my previous studies. Sam really helped me expand my vocabulary and think in a different way about writing. I would often repeat myself and use words in wrong context and working with my partner gave me a very interesting insight into my writing. We carefully created each sentence and it was surprising to me how language could be used to make such strong impressions on a reader. While it was very helpful for my English skills, this assignment opened our minds on the way the disciplines work together and many realized that the best ideas come when we think outside of our fields. When I first met with my partner I was skeptical about what we could find in common within our disciplines but as we started working together, more and more ideas were created.

One of the effects that this class had on me is that I no longer see writing as a painful process. In general, I believe that everyone was pleasantly surprised with the diversity and atmosphere of this class. I hope that in the next couple of weeks we will continue with this pace. 

Wiping away preconceived notions of AWD

Having read many of these blog posts already I can see an obvious theme that we all felt worried about taking this course. Our class is small—consisting of only 19 students—but in this summer session alone there are twenty-five 3301classes. I can only imagine that the overall consensus of expectations for all of these students before registering for these classes was fear. Of course I cannot over generalize about 25 classes from our one but based off of our first day of class I can assume that we all had reservations about the outcome of this course.

I for one judge a class heavily based off of my first day and my preconceived notions about this class gave me a very negative bias for how this first day would go. Coming off of an amazing coop abroad I was not looking forward to reentering classes for the first time in 6 months, and to make it worse I had to take three. I was advised countless times to not take such a heavy course load in a summer semester, especially when one of those courses was AWD. My advisor repeatedly warned me of the heavily work load and fast paced nature of this class and as someone who hasn’t taken a writing course since my first semester freshman year she thought this would be an overwhelming experience. I must admit that she scared me and I was dreading this class to say the least. As many of my fellow students have already written I figured it would be better to tough it out over 7 weeks then a full semester. I must admit that I have been presently surprised with this class. This isn’t to say that I haven’t found it difficult, because to be honest it’s by far the most work I’ve had to complete for a summer course and it will probably be my lowest grade. Does this mean I am not enjoying the experience? No. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. One of the ideas that our professor has tried to instill in us is that he wants us to feel disoriented and I certainly have. The style of the writing in this class is definitely out of my comfort zone but I would like to think that it has improved since my first day. 

I have never had to close read or thin slice in my field before and so I believed these assignments to be useless. Even if these papers were not my best written I am pleased with them because I learned to look at my field from a new perspective.  More then the final product itself I found the research and process of writing and revising to be the most important parts of these projects. The collaborative nature, through both class discussions and peer reviews gave me an insight on how I write and what I need to change about my writing process. In almost every writing assignment that I’ve had in college (except for college writing and a few group projects) I have done solitary research and written papers on my own with no outside influence. In this class, however, I have often changed my entire project idea based off of a discussion with a fellow student in a different major. Despite the fact that they may not know or understand psychology, they are also academics and their opinion on my writing is unbiased. Instead of writing to fit a particular prompt I will hopefully see my writing as having purpose. Overall the collaborative nature has been my favorite aspect of this class and my preconceived notions of a dreadfully boring required class have been wiped away.  

Surprisingly, Not Completely Awful

The fact that AWD is a required course among all disciplines, along with all the horror stories I have heard about the class, I was surprised at how useful the class actually was. As a mechanical engineer, I tend to ignore writing long, fluffy sentences whenever I can. This course, however, was tailored to each specific major, and I found myself writing and evaluating the exact technical styles that I am used to seeing in my field.

We started off the year talking about Thin-Slicing. This might have been my favorite topic of conversation. The article that we read was surprisingly entertaining, and easy to read and follow along. It touched on a lot of ideas about small samples of information being able to tell a larger, yet still accurate picture.  Even after only 15 minutes of talking with a couple, the length of their relationship could be determined with a large degree of accuracy. While I am slightly, ethically uncomfortable with determining the length of someone’s relationship based on a 15-minute window (maybe I’m a hopeless romantic), I can’t argue with the numbers. I also found the thought that we thin-slice subconsciously extraordinary. Simple decisions are made by our brains based off of tiny bits of information we have collected, without us ever being aware of it! But, continuing on with the writing, I was surprised at how much information and data I was able to determine about the engineering discourse community from solely 24 years of journal article titles. I felt that starting with Thin-Slicing was the perfect way to introduce the type of writing we would accomplish in this class.

Not only did we write about items within each of our specific discourse communities, we had to branch out and learn about other discourse communities as well. The Scholarly Audience assignment had us thinking outside our own discourse community, and forced us to combine two normally separate fields into one idea. Once our ideas were combined, they had to be trimmed down, and each word had to be carefully selected to prove our document’s worth. Proposals, like the ones created for this class, are actually used to evaluate papers worthy of being shown at conferences. I felt like I was actually writing something that was important, something that I may actually use in my future.

Now, I did not have some type of grand epiphany about my field or do a major overhaul of my way of writing, but I did pick up a few skills that I will take with me moving forward. It is crucial to keep your audience in mind when writing anything. Your audience decides the tone of your paper, the language used throughout your writing, and the overall purpose of the writing. I learned what types of vocabulary and structure are to be used when dealing within, as well as outside my discourse community.

Oh, and I loved how we close read song lyrics. I’ve been a huge music enthusiast for a long time, and I constantly look up song lyrics. Just a little side note.