Dictionary vs. Dictionary.com

There's so much information that the Internet can give us. I can look up whatever I want at anytime as long as I have WiFi or 3G. I don't have to wait until I'm near an encyclopedia or a computer anymore.

I remember looking up words for my word study class in elementary school. I would learn random words along the way. I learned the word "contortionist" while I was looking up another word that started with C because there was a picture of one that caught my eye. dictionary.com doesn't provide that opportunity, but it provides me with what I want to know at the exact time I want it. When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher made it mandatory for us to use a printed dictionary and not an online one.

A Brighter Future

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One thing I really liked from chapter 3 of Smarter Than You Think was the idea of a "theory of multiples", that big ideas are often discovered by multiple people at the same time. I fully agree with the concept that our big ideas often stem from our environment or the state of the world around us, because humanity doesn't thrive from thinking in a "sealed-off, Rodin's Thinker fashion". (59) We thrive from working together, clearly seen in the story of "Ushahidi", Ory Okolloh's brilliant thinking made a reality by a couple of colleagues who shared the same passion for altruism, for making the world a better place.

Share Something Everyday

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I think that Kleon's idea of sharing something everyday is much more plausible now in the social media age. You can easily share things you're working on, or things you're feeling or experiencing to friends with a click of a button. Something I'd like to share that I'm particularly proud of that tells a story is my interactive PDF I had to make for my Visual Comm class. It was really interesting to only be able to use a few pictures to go along with my paper, and to embody the theories that I used through images was definitely challenging. I got a good great on the project and worked very hard on it so I was very pleased. Through the use of images, I was supposed to be able to tell a story without the reader needing the words. It was challenging for sure.

The Internet

Clive Thompson claims that, "before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college." I think this is very inaccurate. I feel the exact opposite, before the internet people had to write everything down. Isn't the blog just a public electronic version of a journal or diary? An e-email just a crude version of a letter? I think most of the writing before technology was for pleasure. Maybe some was for business like newspapers and scientific journals, but there were very few writers who did not like writing even if it was their job. Take Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for instance, he was a historian who wrote great volumes on historical events.

50 Shades of Introverted Writers

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I really liked the story that Clive Thompson used in Chapter 3: Public Thinking of Smarter Than You Think when he talked about the successful blogger Kenyan-born Ory Okolloh and how she refused to write a book because she described herself as having "a very introverted real personality" (46).

HAHA. What?
Blogging is introverted? I guess I've never really thought of it that way, but I guess in a sense she is right--wanting to be published does involve having a little bit of an extroverted personality. You are basically putting your work out there for others to see. And blogging on the other hand is a little more private.

An Age of New Literacies

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Studying with my roommate in our apartment last week, I glanced at his computer screen and was dazzled by what I saw.

Instead of poring through the dense collection of information in a textbook in order to acquire knowledge about the content his class was covering, my roommate was participating in a virtual scientific laboratory experiment on his computer so lifelike that he was essentially wearing a white coat and doing the work in-person.

Before and after the internet

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I want to focus on a few lines from the reading. "Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college." pg48. It is very hard for people from our day an age to grasp how little people wrote before the internet. Now however there are scores of writings of all types from blogs, to books, to articles. So much that its hard to imagine how it all came about just from introducing the internet into our daily lives.
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Blogging: the New Literacy

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"...digital tools have created a renaissance in the written word."

Clive Thompson starts off chapter three by talking about Ory Okolloh and her blog. This got me thinking about how the new literacy relates to blogging even though this wasn't in the New Literacies chapter. Before computers and the internet, everything was read in print. This is not the case anymore, not by a long shot. With the technological revolution that came with the internet, blogging was created. Blogging is done solely on the web which makes it a new literacy. Most of us have blogs that we read daily or weekly. some of us even have blogs! Here is a link to my Clemson sponsored blog. Check it out!

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