Thursday, July 22, 2010

Laken

Visual Strategy
1. Split columns
to tell the same story in two different views, first and third person view, showing two separate kingdom.
2. Sounds
drums-to allow time to past and catch up with the other story.
animals- to express sounds that are from another kingdom, the animal kingdom
3. Mirror text
to show us that the story is now at the same place, time, kingdom.
4. Column bridges
to show us that the story is still in the same time but in a different place, kingdom.
5. Italian text
symbolize thoughts?

Purpose
In Valerie Laken's essay, "Separate Kingdom," she takes us into an odinary family and show how they lived their lives in a modern world surrounded by technology. This family consist of three members, Colt as the father, Cheri as the mother and Jack as the son. Colt recently lost his thumb at work from operating a machine. From that he soon realize that he feels like he is growing apart from being human, like he is drifting away from the human kingdom and into the animal kingdom. He felt as if he is in a separate kingdom from his family now that he has lost his thumb. But what he doesn't realize is that he's been in his own kingdom from the start. Colt, Cheri, and Jack, even though they all live under the same roof, they have their own way of enjoying themselves. Colt, normally glued to the TV, Cheri has her Tae-bo, and Jack has his Xbox, separated from each other by technology. All three of them are in their own world, their own kingdom without even realizing it and normally comes together when it feels urgent. Laken's purpose of writing this essay is to show us how technology can separate us, separating us into our own kingdom, destroying the meaning of family.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Controlling purpose/Revised Intro

Old purpose
The purpose of his essay is to show us how information could be destroying our own personal memories from the inside out and what we can do to prevent it from being destroy.

New purpose
The purpose of his essay is to show us that no matter how much shame, how much we may forget, how much information the world may offer us, we must never forget who we are, our own memories, our past experience, all that separates us from the world, by not letting anything come in between them as if they were the world to us.

New introduction
Do you sometimes feel like you have forgotten who you are? According to Charles Baxter's essay, Shame and forgetting in the Information Age, he wrote about how memory has changed over time. As we enter a new age, the information age, a world surrounded by information technology, we tend to lose focus on ourselves, and focus more on information. Not only that, we sometimes let shame and forgetting interfere with our memory. This in the long run, could in fact take away the most important piece of memory that any human being could possibly have, memories that sets us apart from everyone else, memories of our own personal experiences. The purpose of his essay is to show us that no matter how much shame, how much we may forget, how much information the world may offer us, we must never forget who we are, our own memories, our past experience, all that separates us from the world, by not letting anything come in between them as if they were the world to us.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Introduction

In Charles Baxter's essay, "Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age", he took us through a series of content about information and how shame and forgetting plays within it. He started with this brother Tom, who remembered everything but couldn't process information and ended his essay with him. Baxter's purpose of this essay is to show us the importances of memory, not just any memory but our own. Surrounded by technology and relying on information as our own memory, it reduces and limits our own personal memory, experience. Over time, we can forget our own personal memory, experience in place of new information. Which will take away our purpose of life, which is to live and experience it. It is like we are turning into computers ourselves. By relying on information as our memory, we must be careful when we use it, otherwise it can lead to shame, and will follow by more forgetting. But forgetting is not always a bad thing, when we are dealing with our own memory, experience. We can choose to forget the things in our past that could be traumatize to our present live and hope that it will helps us live a normal life. Information itself is not everything there is to life, most of it is trash, but it does offer us something to live by. But most importantly, we must learn to value our own memory, experience and not let information alter it.

Quotes
"He was always giving something away...but it was also a request; please remember me; after all, I remember you." p. 143

"Your memory, can now in casual conversation refer to your computer's memory rather than your own." p. 145

"Remembering data and remembering an experience are two very different activities. It is possible that the quantity of data we are supposed to remember has reduced our capacity to remember or even to have experiences." p. 146

"In the information age, forgetfulness is a sign of debility and incompetence." p. 147

"Against a shame that you cannot bear, your mind detaches itself from its own memory and sails off in the direction of a psychic Lake-of-the-Woods." p. 157

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Charles Baxter's essay

From reading Baxter's essay for the first time, I think what he is trying to say is that in the information age, people tend to rely on information and not on what they know inside. Most of the time its all about memorizing the the information when we needed it, for example a presentation or a speech. If we forget the information that we are to present, we become shameful, and when we are done with it we simply delete out of our memory.
By relying on information as memory, we tend not to keep them for ourself, or experience them first hand and with more and more information, our chance of experiencing something decreases. When we delete information, it becomes a form of garbage because we no longer cares for it or even bother to store it in our own memory, like how Neil stated in the epigraph, " We have transformed information into a form of garbage." (Neil postman, p. 141) Like Baxter's brother Tom, when they went to his house to see if he had a will, they found nothing but information all over the place, information to Tom was purely garbage, since he wasn't able to process it. But what he had was his ability to remember, and that was what kept him going.
Forgetting is something that everyone who relys or information will eventually do and it can be shameful when it is something important. But forgetting can also be good, if we were to forget about bad experience from the past which interfer with our present live. But it is what we still remember and have stored in our own memory is what really counts.
Eventually, with time, information will interfer with the way we remember our past experience, but what we remember up till now and what we decide to forget is more than all the information in the world.

About me

Hi everyone, my name is chai her. I am 24 now and going for nursing. I live in milwaukee for about 7 years now and I work part time at Menards. When I am not at work or school, I enjoy listening to music and play video games. Sometimes I find myself on the internet doing nothing when I am bored. I have a yorkie named Roxas and a tank full for fishes. I am very excited to be a Dad this year and hopefully everything goes well. Beside that I would love to complete this course this summer!