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.