beginning of class free-write on 4/27/09

I would argue that blogs only bring on the decay of the old system of mass media, the one dominated by television news, newspapers, and radio. I do not think that blogs replace mass media because I think of blogs as mass media. The blogosphere is, after all, massive and it is media. However, because of the ability of people to create their own news in the sense of reporting on things themselves, and giving their own bias to that news, I find that the older forms of mass media are becoming irrelevant. Essentially, it is easier and more fun for a person to read an article about a news event that is written by someone who shares the reader's point of view. Often, the mass media news only reflects very general political or cultural biases and doesn't report on a lot of things that certain people strongly care about. Therefore, it is easier and more useful for a person to find a blog that is written by someone who shares their views and writes about news items that matter to the particular reader. I would say that this is why blogs are replacing the old form of mass media.

Web 2.0

This week I read "Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse" by Geert Lovink (online) + "The Machine is Us/ing Us" + "Social Sematics in a Networked Space." Mostly, I was influenced by "The Machine is Us/ing Us," because of the demonstrative manner it had in showing it's content. The video was about web 2.0 and it was viewed by me on web 2.0, it being a youtube video. The video got me thinking, as I'm sure it intended, about the nature of what the internet could become in the future. Furthering these thoughts was "Social Semantics in a Networked Space." The authors' Italian is better than their English, I'm sure, but the points they made were fairly well thought out. Chiefly, the idea of the separation of message and information. The authors describe the message as "how something is written" and the information as "what is written." This to me goes hand in hand with the separation of form and content as discussed in the youtube video mentioned above. In the video, it was demonstrated that the content of a website is programmed independently of form such that the content can seemlessly linked or inserted anywhere. Essentially, the content in this case would be the information, "what is said." This means that the form is the message. If this is the case, then in web 2.0 we are losing the message, the context as it were, and simply seeing the information. This could mean that internet culture and internet communications become contextless. Essentially, the internet would be a place where context has no meaning, or it has every meaning, such that in a communication with a person that the messenger has only internet contact with, information is completely free to flow: free of societally constructed contexts. On the internet, what is considered socially awkward? Is there anything? The beauty of this is that the internet makes the freedom of information truly free. A person can ask anyone at any time anything and can get an answer that is true.

technotext

My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Kathryn Hayles as well as Writing Machines also by N. Kathryn Hayles provided a good read and an especially meaningful one because I used the computer to read them. This allowed me to understand better what they were describing in the text in terms of linkages between the meaning of the text and the medium that the text is in. For example, I had to read both of the books in the hard copy first because not every page was available for free online. This kind of limitation, as well as the mode of scrolling through the pages enabled for much faster jumping between pages and one could actually see any two pages simultaneously. Therefore, it transformed both books into hypertexts, where in their hard copy, they are simply regular old texts. The conditions for them to qualify as hypertext, according to Writing Machines were satisfied and that made understanding these conditions quite simple. However, I particularly loved the Anipoems by Ana Maria Uribe and The Dreamlife of Letters by Brian Kim Stefans. The Anipoems almost all made me laugh because they were so basic but each one was like a puzzle such that at first it was hard to understand. When one is expecting to see centaurs but a screen full of the letter “h” appears, it is difficult to interpret what the letter “h” has to do with centaurs. Essentially, instead of looking at the letter and seeing its shape, I read it. It brought the realization that I am truly programmed, without thinking, to associate that particular shape with a meaning or an idea: the sound that “h” makes in English. Therefore, it took me just a few seconds to realize that the “h” really does look like a centaur and the fact that there were many on the page made it look like a herd of centaurs. This realization also made looking at the Host of Halfties, Shoal of Mermaids, and Flock of Angles a lot easier to comprehend. Where these anipoems truly shine, however, is in their poetic value. They are whimsical and humorous and convey a sense of wonder at the internet and at digital animating of text and how seemingly limitless it is. Further, they are very fitting in terms of what could be considered “internet culture.” They are very sarcastic, creative, and light-hearted and these are all qualities that I associate with internet culture. The Dreamlife of Letters is another great example of internet culture and the creative possibilities associated with digital texts. Alphabetizing the words of a text by another author and then presenting them in this manner draws equal attention to the words themselves as well as the individual letters. Further, because of the digital medium of the text, the letters and words are able to move, even if not interacting directly with the watcher, and thus convey in motion the meaning of both the letter and word.

Book Arts

Reading both Writing Machines by N. Kathryn Hayles and Johanna Drucker's Century of Artist Books was quite eye opening to me because it made me think immediately of William Blake, whose internet archive was the other link on the assignment website. I had first encountered Blake in high school and loved his style of poetry and it’s similarity to early English romanticism such as Wordsworth. To me, the illustrations had always seemed archaic, as if that was a common thing in books in that day; at least, that was my assumption. What I always believed to be unique about it was that William Blake was the one doing both the writing and the illustrating. However, in reading Drucker’s book, I see that the genre is exactly that, a separate genre of artist’s books that has not gone away. Looking at Blake’s work through the lens of an artist book provides some great fresh insights into his composition and style. Now, instead of looking at the illustrations as just some funny pictures that Blake drew in the margins, I see them more as paintings and read them as conscious of the medium that they are in, one of the defining characteristics of an artist book. For example, Object 3 in the The Song of Los, one of my favorite works by Blake, shows signs that the words were written onto the page at the same time that the illustrations were drawn. It seems that the illustrations at the top of the page were made first and then Blake began writing and composing the text. Of course, I realize that he could have come up with the text first and separately, but what is important here is that he took into account the illustrations on the page, and then wrote around them, at least for that first stanza. In a sense, it could be said that he was “painting” the words onto the page, that is, they are themselves an illustration. William Blake was not really writing a book as much as making a piece of art and taking into account the media that he had: the page, the text, and the paintings he came up with as illustrations. Truly, the work is beautiful in itself and could be taken as a series of paintings, a series of individual objects, which is how the online archive presents it. Object 1 of The Song of Los, for example, is just a painting and quite a fantastic one at that, but that’s exactly how it could stand. The single “object” could be a stand-alone painting entitled The Song of Los. Every subsequent object has writing on it but also could stand alone because the writing is perfectly autonomous with only loose ties to any of the other objects. Certainly, this is evidence of Blake strongly taking into account his medium and the final product itself being conscious of the fact that it is a “book.”

Uncreative writing

Reading Kenneth Goldsmith’s writing was at first very difficult because he immediately jumps into the thick of things and starts explaining the philosophy behind his art without every really saying what his art is until the reader is half way through the description of the philosophy. However, after I had figured out that what he does is write out works by other authors, as well as other forms of uncreative writing, I began to understand what he meant when he described his process as that of turning himself into a machine. In his description “the idea,” he states that all creativity must be purged from the system and this created a very interesting metaphor in my mind: that of a computer running a programming. Essentially, one has an idea, that is, a preset of rules by which to process input. The input comes in the way of a book or, in Goldsmith’s case, a newspaper from one day. Then, one simply retypes the text according to that rule, even if the rule is to not alter or change anything at all. This creates in a person an interesting condition because it truly is the most dehumanizing thing: to turn one’s intelligence off and become the opposite of what could be called artificial intelligence. Essentially, what could be considered as the thing that makes us human disappears and we are left with being an organic computer. On the other hand, perhaps the creativity in uncreative writing lies before the writing, in the formulation of the programming that one is going to employ to process the input, the set of rules through which to write. In that sense, the writing is only truly untainted by creativity if the rules are thought up before the input source is chosen. In other words, if one comes up with a set of rules and then goes out at random to search for an input. When I set out to complete my uncreative writing assignment, I decided that I would simply type the letters and words and not truly pay attention to the layout of the page, only the spacing of the letters and words themselves. I then, at random came across the Wikipedia page for “Islamofascism.” This was interesting because I don’t truly know anything about Islamofascism. After completing the assignment, I still know as much about Islamofascism as I did before the assignment. This makes me think that in retyping something such as this article, I am focused much more on keeping to the programming than paying attention to the article. Essentially, I am not paying attention to what I am reading, but instead I am paying attention to how I rewrite it. Therefore, I think I have succeeded in doing this assignment properly in that I did not think, only process. I successfully turned myself into an organic computer.

Texting ideas

I recently had a bit of a revelation in terms of the implications of texting to modern American society. I had previously always believed that the gloom-and-doom sociologists who were saying that texting was the death of the English language, as well as modern Western society, were simply full of it. However, I had an interesting experience while dining at Southside a few days ago. I had just finished eating, when I got up to take my dishes to the dish depository and turning my head I noticed three female students in the booth behind me. What caught my attention was that they were all just sitting there and not talking. Now, I understand that in some circles it is good manners and considered polite to simply eat one’s lunch and not talk at the table. However, these particular students were not observing polite table manners. Instead, they were not talking because two of them were texting and the third was simply sitting there with her cell phone on the table. I began to think about it and I realized that I had not heard a continuous conversation coming from that booth the entire time I was eating, only the occasional word or phrase. This brings me to one conclusion: that texting had almost completely eliminated the desire for face-to-face speech between these students in their “down time.” Essentially, this group of girls was completely content to carry on communications with what amounts to a web of friends through their cell phones. This web of people is continuously in contact, sending messages back and forth to many other people within that web, and for one single person to stay in this social network, as it were, they had to continuously engage in these little one-liner messages back and forth otherwise they wouldn’t be savvy to the newest information inside this network and would simply fall out of the web. I think that humans are inherently a social creature and that staying in contact with each other is the only way to maintain a society. Therefore, people within a society have an inherent need to stay within that society. There is in fact a term used for people who do not participate in this behavior: antisocial; this is considered a disorder in psychological terms. Getting back to the point, however, people are in need of social contact and cellular phones, in particular texting with cellular phones, enable people maintain a higher level of social contact. The problem arises with the fact that text messages are very short because of the character limit and therefore cannot convey a lot of information like a deep thought. The second problem is that there is an amount of time spent waiting on the text that one receives as a reply. This means that it is very difficult to convey a long deep thought over the course of several messages because it comes off as disjointed, awkward, and very difficult to tie together. Subsequently, texting is very suited and, in fact funnels one into, making short, flarfy one-liners back and forth between people just to maintain contact. However, because this is the kind of communication that people get used to, they are then fairly incapable of keeping up long, deep, face-to-face conversations with people. Instead, even in a face-to-face situation such as eating lunch together, this group of students communicated to each other in speech just as they would with texting: in short, concise, humorous one-liners with long spaces in between replies such that no continuous conversation was happening. This has very interesting implications in terms of the ability of this and future generations to communicate deep, meaningful thoughts. As a result, those gloom-and-doom sociologists don’t seem so loony anymore.

Flarf in class freewrite

I choose the second topic to write about. I will take the word "lol" as a prime example of a Flarfy word. The word "lol" came about on the internet, it is a product of online communications, of chatting over the internet. In this way, it is precisely like Flarf in that it is the direct product of the internet. The meaning of the word has taken on many abstractions from the original "laugh out loud." Now, like many words in the English language, its meaning is dependent on context. However, because it is an online term, and context can only be determined by vocabulary, "lol" creates a context, it immediately triggers in the receiver a set of emotions.

Flarf poem

Euro Scumbag, champagne and cavier, techno bullshit
WITHOUT. god, techno lyrics suck. XDDD "you touch my mind in special places."
Sounds like the so-called Eurotrash-techno to me and that hurts my ears
Pulsing with a techno intensity that only Eurotrash could love
a Euro Trash night-out!

Call me Max
Music non stop, techno pop
I'm thinking what I'm giving,
I'm giving what it takes
Max, Max, Max,
Elektroklänge überall
I'm in love with you and I love my ex
I love you both, and to be true
I don't know what I'm gonna do
Decibell im ultraschall
I gotta warn you,
Max, don't have sex with your ex
It will make your life complex,
Music non stop, techno pop

Flarf and Spoetry

Spoetry and in particular Flarf is, in my opinion, the best thing to come out of web 2.0 thus far. The fantastic creativity of the authors in combining their source materials, whether Google searches or other internet tidbits, creates a unique kind of sense out of the internet as a whole, its culture, its dark side and is just plain hilarious. I spend a lot of time on the internet: I surf just for fun, when I’m bored, any time I need to find something out, etc. I am, therefore, quite in tune with the culture of the internet and that makes reading Flarf and Spoetry a kind of sarcastic look at myself and the culture I’m familiar with. It brings to light the kind of things that I take as normal but are in truth very absurd. The emphasis on vulgarity is particularly effective because the internet is so full of it. After a while, a person is desensitized to it and then it loses some of its meaning. However, reading Flarf and Spoetry is a like an antidote for me, something to keep me sane through all of the insanity. In particular, I liked the poem “Truckin’ Poem,” by Chickee Chickston, not necessarily because it has any of the qualities described above, but because it is so light-hearted, effective and hilarious. The repetitiveness truly does bring to mind long hours on the road. The way the lines are mixed furthers this effect by bringing to mind how road travel is just a mix of the same actions (left turn, right turn, honk, stop, go) but in various often different combinations. The lines of the poem act like mile markers, helping me get through the poem’s monotony, and yet, it’s a monotony I love and wish there was more of. Perhaps I also like it that much more because I do love road trips.
I even thoroughly love how Flarf poetry came into being: as a sarcastic bating of Poetry.com. There is perhaps nothing more omnipresent on the internet than sarcasm and disgruntlement towards the real world and even towards the internet itself. This is what produces all of the flame wars and internet memes that are a hallmark of all chat rooms and anywhere else that internet culture is prevalent. Even the way that the original Flarf Collective communicate, through email, is distinctly founded on the internet. This makes Flarf completely and fully rooted in the internet and that makes it particularly suited for the social commentary it provides. In perhaps a similar way that poetry and song-writing in the 1960’s provided society a mirror, Flarf is providing the internet a mirror in a form that can be taken seriously in literary circles and gives the internet a kind of legitimacy at the same time as showing its shortcomings as well. More importantly, it seems to be a warning against taking the internet too seriously and what might happen to a person through overexposure to internet culture’s negative influences.

In class response to "Carnival" by Steve McCaffery

In response to the first prompt, about the destruction of a book to create a panel, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy the procedure described. Really, what is a book? If one takes clay and shapes it from a square to a rectangle, it is still clay. I find that the same would be true about this book, and about the physical manifestation about writing. If a word is written, but the letters are all out of place (for example, instead of helicopter if one wrote cpeltiorhe) then the word remains, however its meaning is lost. McCaffery's book is not about the meaning of the words though, but about their form, their structure, their letters or lack thereof. Therefore, I would say that one is not destroying the book, just changing its shape. To destroy the book, one would have to do something to the book that would make it impossible for a reader to understand the writer's intent or meaning in the work. It is interesting then that the author uses the word "destroy" in the directions. I think this means that the destruction is of the form "book", the sequential nature of the pages, not really of the idea "book".

Visual text

The Iron Whim and Carnival

In reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s The Iron Whim, I couldn’t help but continuously think back to the first chapter in which he describes the destruction of a typewriter by throwing it out of a car window. He makes the point that in the destruction of an object (once it is trash) one can fully understand the meaning of that object as a cultural object. Essentially, he means to look at all the parts, rather than the whole. The collection of anecdotes that is in this book is a continuation on this theme. Wershler-Henry investigates each little snippet of a story about typewriters or writing machines and then the reader can make a whole meaning from that if they choose. I, for one, love this approach and don’t feel obliged to make a “whole meaning.” The interest in the details is enough for me and, to use a Foucaultian phrase that Wershler-Henry also employs, I would like to focus on the discourse. The freedom to ponder the little details is I think what the typewriter really is about. Each key is one letter, one little part of the whole. This means that one would have to throw a word out of a car at 90 miles per hour to understand the meaning of its construction and not just the meaning of the word in the language that it’s in. However, throwing a word out of a car is perhaps not as practical. The medium that the word is made in, for example: ink on paper, becomes the object that gets destroyed, not the word on it. This then leads to the question of how to destroy a word, which, to me, is answered by Steve McCaffery, in his work Carnival. There are two different panels, each from a different time period, that are essentially large canvasses covered in letters, sometimes whole words, that are constructed and destructed in progressions. However, the words are often arranged to form shapes, but, to me, look like the result of driving a car over the canvasses and throwing letters out onto it at 90 miles per hour. The strange shapes produced by the words are the work of the author and perhaps indicate at what time and in what succession McCaffery threw each word out. One of my favorite examples comes on the second panel when the word “flower” is written and then under it, the word “flow” appears and towards the bottom of the progression, simply an “f” and then the word “lower” slightly below it and to the right. Not only does one get a feeling for the word’s meaning in the language, there are other words with separate meanings within the word “flower” than can contribute to its construction and perhaps inform the reader of subtle nuances of meaning. More importantly, the reader notices the letters used to write the word and immediately begins to think of the actual manner in which those letters are produced: the typewriter, the whim of the writer.

Freewrite about Interface Culture

Steven Johnson, author of Interface Culture, states that the hypertext link is the first new form of punctuation in centuries. To me, and again this could be because of a lack of knowledge of written English, punctuation has a lot in common with grammar in that there are proper and improper uses of punctuation. However, because the hypertext link "lives" through the internet, it is difficult to understand exactly what would be correct grammar in its usage. Punctuation is also used to convey subtle tone in language as well as background information about the sentence or statement. In this sense, a hypertext link can offer background on whatever a person may be speaking about by linking to a page containing these previous ideas.

Baron Freewrite

Baron has several general stages that literacy technology goes through. First, he states that as a technology is developed, it is only used by a few people who are either the inventors of the technology or who want to hold to the knowledge either because of privilege or because it is unfamiliar to the general public or potentially because the technology is very expensive. Then, as knowledge of the technology spreads, the original or “priestly,” as Baron puts it, caste of holders of this technology become mediators between the common person and the technology itself. As further knowledge of the technology spreads, the common people start using the technology for themselves and eventually, as the knowledge base becomes broader and the technology becomes cheaper and more available, it is widely used and adopted. I think that these are very good general stages that can be widely applied to literacy technologies. For example, mechanical pencils were once a new invention, probably fairly expensive compared to regular pencils and only used by people who had access to them. I’m sure they were not sold everywhere. Gradually, as they became less expensive and more varieties came about, more people used them and now one can buy twenty mechanical pencils for a dollar. I think Ong would agree with these stages of technology. The web 2.0 technologies are a briliant example of these stages in that not only are more people willing to use the technologies because they are getting easier to use and to learn how to use, but people are also more willing to learn. This is especially true of computer programming, also.

Proust and the Squid

I must admit I read this book quickly, but I also found it very interesting. The chronological approach is really helpful in breaking down the steps of written language development whether originally or for each individual child. I had always wondered what the steps were going from an alphabet where each "letter" represents a word or part of a word to an alphabet where each letter represents a phoneme. Also, the approach of giving many examples was particularly helpful. In the child-development section of learning how to read, the example of the word "elemeno" in the alphabet song particularly struck me because I, when I was learning the alphabet, also thought that that was an individual letter or a word in the middle of the aphabet or something of that nature. I already knew how to read by the time I thought back to the alphabet song and actually realized that "elemeno" was not a word or letter, but the letters l, m, n and o. Perhaps the most interesting thing about that is that the "name" of each individual letter is composed of perhaps more phonemes than the letter itself represents in terms of sound. Also, the fact that the author Maryanne Wolf used her own child as an example really brings the facts to life. I suppose that not many authors would be able to use a personal example as legitimate data but because she is already an expert on the subject, Wolf gets away with it well. However, despite using some gee-whiz examples, Wolf doesn't seem to provide enough background science and the book takes on the feel of a layman's text instead of a serious book in the field of the subject. It was a very good read, though.

Messages in the Landscape

My "messages" have the unifying theme of being bathroom literature. I went around to various gentleman's rooms on campus and took these photos. I will comment on each one individually and then give an overview afterwards. Also, the order of the images is the order in which I took them and therefore also map out my path on campus. I left my dorm in the apartments and went to the main floor of SUB I where I took the photo above. It was the only "message" in the entire restroom. It's written on top of a toilet paper dispenser. It's written in marker and it's interesting because the author used a wavy script, the font is not actually his own handwriting. What it means I don't know, but I think it's a standard graffiti mark, that the author puts in various places. I proceeded to leave SUB I and go to Krug Hall but I found no messages in the bathrooms there because the stalls had be freshly painted: a foreshadowing on the rest of my trip. I left Krug Hall and went in Robinson A to the first floor. There I took the next two photos. There are two authors to the message in the first photo; I found that commentary on previous messages was extremely prominent in bathroom literature, which now seems more like a blog or a message board on the internet. The content of the message is also a case of the internet springing out of the computer and into real life. Ya Rly! The second image is illustrative of a theme common to graffiti at GMU: politics or current political issues. This message seems quickly scrawled in pencil and deals with the assassination of the President. Again, a second author has come along and offered a reply. People must feel pretty strongly to stop on their way out of the bathroom (as this message is not in the stall but by the door) and reply to a bigoted remark speedily written. There were extremely slim pickings in Robinson A because most of the stalls had been repainted here as well. I therefore left Robinson A and went in to the Johnson Center. I went into the restroom near the exit which opens up to face David King Hall and Science and Tech II. Here I hit the jackpot. For whatever reason, all of the stalls had been painted except the one farthest in the back of the restroom, whose walls were covered with messages. Most were written in markers with a few in pencil. The first picture shows a brief obituary with one mistake, which someone obviously corrected. The second picture is the word "Token" with a French-sounding suffix. I don't know what it means but it almost seems like a one word poem. The word is by itself in the top left corner of the wall. The next picture is yet another comment on an existing message which didn't show up when I tried to photograph it. 420 is in reference to marijuana.
The next picture shows an interesting word play posing as philosophy but the reply underneath it again speaks of larger socio-political issues. The next picture shows another piece of philosophy, this time in the form of a quote from George Orwell's "1984." The following picture is of a message unique in that stall as it was the only one who asked a question and was the only one in white marker. The question by itself is very all-inclusive and almost profound. Do you realize whatever it is you have the potential to or already do realize? The next picture is of what appears to be a gang sign but the commentary below it is priceless, it reads, "We're in college, that's not cool." Apparently, gangs went out of fashion once people entered college. Here I departed the JC and went into Southside. I walked into the farthest back stall in the ground floor restroom and was confronted by the same gang marker that dominated the wall in the JC stall. In this picture, the gang sign is slightly different than in the JC and I'm also told that Bongo is somewhat nifty. The last message is either an interesting scribble or potentially someone's initials.

Several themes emerge from these photos. The main one, I think, is the lack of explicit sexual propositions or sexual bigotry, which I've seen dominating bathrooms at gas stations or restaurants, for example. The messages seem to focus on politics or current issues and often from a pro-immigrant perspective. This is particularly true in the JC bathroom. The other major theme, and perhaps the more relevant one in terms of this class, is the prevalence of retorts, replies, and commentary about previous messages. This suggests that people are becoming more used to the idea that their opinion really counts and is just as valid as any written word because they have the power to create written word themselves. Whether this stems from Web 2.0 or not, it is extremely interesting how people seem to feel the need to express their view even in a seemingly inconsequential setting as a bathroom wall. Truly, it redefines the meaning of validity when deep concerns about the refugee and immigration crises are expressed next to the occasional racist slur. As lewd and stupid fake comments about sex become more scarce, bathroom walls are becoming a legitimate medium for the expression of the vox populi.

Ong Freewrite

By this statement, Ong means that human perception of oneself and paths of thinking were changed by the invention of writing. Also, that human thought about language was allowed to flourish. When language is written down, it can be taken apart and looked at, it can be dissected into its constituents’ meaning, and it can be held constant or developed. For example, being aware of the patterns of communication by being allowed to preserve them and turn them into something physical has a profound impact on their meaning, but, because writing allows communication not between two people but between a person and the writing, written language also creates a whole other world through communication with oneself and an inanimate object. The other obvious invention that has changed human consciousness is the internet. However, it can be said that the internet comes out of writing because a lot of information on the internet is in written format. However, the availability of communication in so many different forms (written, visual, now oral-aural) in real time offers humans the ability to communicate in any form with anyone or anything anywhere. Writing to send information to someone far away does not need to take place if one can turn on a webcam and put on a speaker headset and tell the person face to face. In a way, the internet is lessening the importance of writing because space and time are no longer the great boundaries that can only be overcome by written language. Perhaps at some point soon, there will actually be no need for writing at all.

"Orality and Literacy" by Walter J. Ong

Upon reading Walter J. Ong’s “Orality and Literacy,” I was struck by two things. The first is simply the Western-Eurocentric views that the book takes and uses as a meterstick to judge other cultures and classify them. The second thing that struck me was how little thought I had ever given to the implications of written word over oral-aural language. To address the first concern, it seemed to me that certain examples in the book, about the shift in mentality towards and way of reacting to writing following the development of mechanized printing instruments, were insufficient to allow Ong to make the kind of conclusions he did. For example, Ong states that even though Korean and Turkic tribes had mechanisms for printing their language, it was not until the development of the printing press in Europe that individual letters came into importance and people began to study them. One can’t say that the Turkic tribes or Koreans didn’t value letters simply because their printing implements were whole words. Also, certain alphabets may make it impossible to divide words into letters simply because a language does not need an alphabet of letters to be written. Mandarin Chinese is written in characters that have the meaning of whole words and only sometimes characters are combined to take on the meaning of one world. Further, the characters in Mandarin Chinese often represent more than one phoneme. The biggest problem here is the implications that Ong draws from the created importance of individual letters. One implication is that written language is needed to carry out analytical thought as well as categorization and chronological logic, the foundations for modern science. I think it is very possible to carry out these mental exercises in one’s head and also then to be able to tell someone everything that you’ve thought about. Another assertion that Ong makes is that this is simply a form of apprenticeship style learning and that to truly “study” one needs writing to accomplish it mentally. I think this is fundamentally false and that perhaps in learning something by reading it, one is simply apprenticed to the book. After all, Ong repeatedly states that even in reading, a person is hearing the sounds of the words in their heads or even sounding the words out as they read. It would seem, then, that a person is listening to the master they are apprenticed to in reading a book by that master or any other author offering information or knowledge. This book, however, did open some very interesting paths of mental exploration into the world of language which I have thought about before, but never in this context. I personally have never been a “good reader.” I read very slowly, but understand what I read, however, I often have to read a passage twice to grasp its full implications. Because of this, I often joke that I am “half-way literate.” I wonder whether or not this difficulty in reading has led to me using language in different ways than people who read a lot or read faster than I do and whether or not “good readers’” understanding of language and communication is different than mine. Major difficulty in communication has been avoided, however, because I am encultrated into Western society as are the majority of people I meet on a day-to-day basis and this (encultration) I think is the main factor in communication. However, that communication is done on an oral-aural basis and so I wonder whether or not what I write, in essays such as this, for example, will be understood when read by others.

Helvetica Freewrite

I noticed Helvetica everywhere I went, it was as if my eyes had been opened to something that had been staring them in the face my whole life and I didn’t know it was there. I went to work out at the Aquatic and Fitness Center, whose signs in the interior were all helvetica save for a very few. The few signs that were not in Helvetica were often temporary and meant to catch your attention by being flashy. I could tell that most of the permanent signs were in Helvetica because of the horizontal cut-offs of the letters. There was also something interesting about one of the signs on the interior that I believe was for decoration. In the movie, one of the older designers mentioned that the beauty in Helvetica is the seemingly immovable nature of the letters, as if they were stuck in the whiteness of the background page. This particular decorative sign was simply “Aquatic and Fitness Center” written out in steel letters over bare brick wall. It was amazing how much permanence seemed to be emmenating from the sign: steel with brick as a background. The contrast was fantastic because the brick used was brown and dull whereas the steel is shiny and smooth. However, the letters reminded me of veins of iron within a rock freshly mined. The final appearance was that of modernity, permanence and nature. Both the brick and the steel as well as the font contributed in some way to all three of the above mentioned characteristics. Other than that particular sign in the Aquatic and Fitness Center, I was struck by the level of complexity that certain typefaces or fonts attained to have the meaning that they do.