Reflecting on First Quarter

  Although I have noted almost no change in myself physically or mentally these last 8 weeks, my exposure to the online realm of digital information has expanded extraordinarily. My use of the internet has been transformed from a purely informational/entertainment source into a world of opinions and individuals. I have developed a sense for communication through this media from virtually nothing, and my improvement in the blog format has clearly shown that.

       My first post, dated the 6th of September, is as visually appealing as it is casual-- that is to say, very little. The mass of words organized with precise, neat margins down the side and no indentations is troubling to the eyes, the reader is would lose interest in a post so bland very quickly.

      Also, the writing style is uninteresting. The last 11 lines are consumed by 2 sentences, which drone on, and though thoughtfully written, do not create the same literary punch as deliberate, short sentence.

       I corrected this aspect of my blogging in later posts, such as my post regarding textbooks on October 3rd. Two sentences in this article truly embodies have I have corrected this area of my blogging, "As a liberal, I am morally disturbed by this claim. As an American, I am appalled."

This simple change has made my posts easier to read, and hopefully more enjoyable to the reader.

     While I have put effort forward in my blog posts, I understand that there is much left to be desired. For one, my recurring political topics are probably uninteresting to many of my classmates, and unless they are more polarizing in the future, they don't generate much discussion.

       Another aspect I will work on in the second semester is posting more frequently, and casually. Ideally, I will try to post several times a week, about minor things we discussed in class, there by generating more conversations. 

Here is a sample of one of my better posts:

http://shotsfrommyblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-controls-how-we-learn-about-past.html

Reliability of Authors

Rupert Murdoch, president of
News Corporation

Any firsthand account is bound to have some sort of inaccuracy, as humans are inherently imperfect when it comes to their own memories. The account of Frederick Douglass' life that we are currently reading in AIS is most likely not the one many who lived with him and "owned" him would give, and it was written for the consideration of abolitionists. No one was hiding the fact that the piece was unbiased, or that it served a purely informative purpose, rather that it was meant to be expositional and persuasive.

There are media outlets that exist today that portray themselves as informational, when in reality they serve more the purpose of Frederick Douglass' narrative. Recently, Fox News' donations to several Republican groups has taken them out of the strictly informational realm, and has given concrete evidence to what many American cable viewers have long suspected.

While I was never a fan of this station, the commentators were free to speak whatever was on their minds, and claim no affiliation to any one political party. Now that their paychecks and massive donations to conservative political organizations are coming from the same source, it is hard to dispute their unbiased view of politics. 

Fox News has left any notion of the informational realm aside, and entered into a purely political arena.

Who controls how we learn about the past?

A mock textbook cover? No.

The state of Texas is known for being big. In physical size, population, and larger-than-life characters, Texas appears more like a small nation. One aspect of Texas' influence, which comes with its massive size, is its ability to influence the material taught in schools nationwide. Our AIS discussions regarding textbook bias is manifested in a recent vote, in which the Texas Board of Education voted on new standards regarding American history and how it ought to be taught. 

Cesar Chavez: Not significant enough
for textbooks?

This topic was fresh in my mind because of a recent article which appeared in a magazine I was reading. The new standards contained ideas of America being a "Christian land governed by Christian principles," as one board member put it. As a liberal, I am morally disturbed by this claim; as an American, I am appalled. 
The reason this was such a landmark decision because Texas has the largest textbook market in the nation, and publishers are heavily influenced by what material must be included. While the article did say that other states nationally would be minimal, neighboring states would feel the pressure to purchase the sam textbooks as Texas, for cost and accuracy. This is a total miscarriage of the process of education, and I am personally in favor of a national governing body to dictate the content of textbooks. 


I'll conclude this discussion with a plug for a favorite magazine of mine: The Week. My aunt first sent me a gift subscription about two years ago, and since then I've been an avid fan of its unbiased view of national and world events. Instead of having staff writers, The Week has a team of editors who summarize the best articles from national and global news outlets, and extract phrases and sentences from those articles within the summary. The end result is usually a short, to the point three paragraph article, with a two polar voices and a moderate commentator's opinion. The format is genius, and I recommend this magazine to anyone with an interest in fairness and world events.

a recent copy of "The Week" magazine

Connecting to the Rest of America

      The theme of "connectedness" has been a central point in AIS class this week, as I begin to interview my average American about how they feel connected to society--whatever they define that as. But as I have seen recently, when you connect yourself to a community very tightly, there is no way that you cannot help but alienate some other group of people.

Is she representing "American values,"
more so than any other American?

      When Sarah Palin emerged as a public figure two years ago, she was heralded as a new face of the GOP, as a young voice to energize far-right supporters who feared that their party had strayed from their original values. Her appeal was that she could identify with average voters, as a relative outsider to politics. She connected, some say, in a very basic way to middle America. Perhaps she was too unconnected to politics, as her several major slip-ups proved.

      In the present day, the Tea Party movement has become of symbol of alienation in modern America. Christina O'Donnell, the new poster girl of the Tea Party has advertised her campaign as representing a "philosophy centered on the core values of the great American tradition." It seems to me that she tries to advertise herself as the most patriotic candidate, the one most connected to America. But in actuality, how can one person claim that they are more connected to America, more so than any other American? I'm confident many Americans could make that claim. When someone wants to "institute the values that made America great," how can they say that they have a better handle on those values than any other active member of American society?

      

Arbitrary Numbers

Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to travel to Peoria with the cross country team to run in a major invite. By simply traveling through part of the relatively unpopulated middle section of Illinois, I experienced a very small amount of American history, as the historian Studs Terkel chronicled in his work we read for AIS. One of my teammates commented on our hotel, saying that "this is probably where people from around here take vacations." It was very average, well-maintained but by far much less than anyone on the team would experience on an average vacation. The Stony Creek Inn was occupied by several teams, plus a couple of families there for a brief weekend vacation. It didn't appear to me that these were the average Americans who made history everyday, but my sense of a vacation is really skewed, based on what the small-towners considered a weekend getaway. Although my teammates and I only stayed there a bit, there were a lot of comments about how none of us could imagine living in such an "isolated" area. Although it would be a different experience, I believe it would be a valuable chance to live in a much smaller community, even for a day or two. The north shore environment has shaped me in many ways, but I think I'd only truly appreciate it if I lived in this different world for a week.

Slaves to Format

The first week of school brings many challenges, but one of the most pressing is getting acquainted with your new teachers' styles: how they expect your work to look, what kind of format they want on assignments, and how friendly and formal your interactions can be with them. In AIS this week, one day's discussion centered on the "proper" way to write our essay, the limitations, the format, and how informally we should be writing. Mr. Bolos introduced an interesting example when saying that he wanted to steer us away from a set format, using the term "tyranny of form" to describe how structured many of our interactions are in the technology age. We, as suburban teenagers and computer-literate human beings, are all very familiar with the layout of the iPhone operating system. The little ability it gives us to customize is restrictive to most, but in my opinion, is essential and comforting. The interface was likely designed by a team of computer whizzes, combined with designers who were likely paid thousands for their consultations, so shouldn't the final output be the best possible? The same question can be posed in relation to our "Death of Mr. Bolos" essay. There is obviously a format which works, for which the essay would best read, but Mr. O'Connor and Mr. Bolos chose to withhold guidelines which we so desperately sought. Maybe that is for the best, as it is a classroom and we have to learn through experimenting with our writing, but the fact that the class as a whole was concerned so much with the form of the essay shows that technology, such as the iPhone interface and Facebook layout, has taught us to seek out guidelines, rather than develop our own what we see best fit for the assignment. Even the blogs have, though loose, a format, which we can only master through repeated postings. The structure we live in for most of our life is important and comfortable to stay within, but some things can only be learned through experimentation.