Week 6: Howl

Writing Assignment: Write a blog post that considers what are the defining characteristics of your generation. Discuss a few specific works that in your opinion give "voice" to the outlooks and attitudes shared by your generation.

Our Generation. The Millenials. The Digital Age. What defines our Generation? Technology?
Faster than any generation before technology has risen at such a great speed that we have the ability to transfer and share knowledge and information with anyone around the world within seconds. Books, newspapers, and anything analogue are becoming obsolete. We no longer need to store as much information in our brains as before. Why learn math equations when a computer can do it for us at such a faster rate? Why memorize streets and route directions when a GPS can do it for us? Why memorize anything when we can just ask a machine a question and get back millions of answers? Why do anything when we have the technology to do it for us? We "aint got time fo' dat". We're constantly being plagued with new information and technology that we can't keep up with most of the time. We live behind screens and interact at an impersonal level. Face-to-face human interaction is becoming less of a thing. Should we accept and adapt to these technological advances?
I made a video to represent my struggles with a technological world overtaking the natural world that i feel so connected to:

https://vimeo.com/77989382

Statement: In Today's society we live in two worlds: the natural world and the artificial mechanical world. Oftentimes the line between the two becomes blurred as we willingly and sometimes unknowingly cross borders. The video focuses on our personal struggle with embracing and fighting technology.

Week 5: Girl In Landscape

Writing Assignment: For this week's blog posting please write a 350-500 word review of the novel focusing not on whether you liked the book or not, or whether you thought it was good or bad, but rather on a description of the experience of reading the book and what you think are the most defining aspects of the novel.

Even though I was only able to ready 2/3 of the book the experience of reading Girl In Landscape was very fulfilling for me. I've always been interested in Sci-Fi novels so it would only make sense that I was immediately drawn in to the book from the beginning.
It was interesting to start off in the world as I know it now set into the future from a coming-of-age girl's point of view. It felt very relatable in the sense that I live in a very fast advancing technological age where some of the concepts and ideas seemed pretty plausible for the future to come. The novel really pulled me in when Pella and her family went to visit the beach and had to wear sun-blocking cones around their bodies because of the depleted ozone layer. Or how the rest of the continent had a feeling of being made entirely of buildings and concrete except for the little section of beach that remained at the edge. I can also relate with Pella when she moves to an entirely new world and feels alienated. To me that symbolizes the coming-of-age into adulthood. I can relate to being in a place in my life where nothing seems familiar or makes sense and all I can do is watch, learn, try to understand how the world around me works and try to get by day by day. That's what it seemed like for pella when she found her ability to turn into the household deer. She becomes a voyeur in a new world trying to make sense of all the strange things happening around her.
I know it says not to write about whether or not I liked it or not but I did enjoy reading it and will definitely read the remaining chapters when I get the chance!

Week Three: How Illustrations Change the Act of Reading

Writing Assignment: Please write a blog post of some 350 words that discusses the question of how the act of reading changes when the text is comprised of both words and pictures. Please give specific examples to support your observations.

Obviously the act of reading changes when the text is comprised of both words and pictures. When an author uses only text the reader's imagination is left to run wild depending on whether the author wants the reader to imagine everything for themselves or if they want to provide a clear image by using textual descriptions of what they're imagining. When an author provides image along with text they leave little to no room for the reader's imagination because they are observing what the author has provided for them. As a kid and visual learner i preferred to read books with a happy medium; enough text to imagine the story for myself and a few pictures to help understand what the author sees themselves like in Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This works especially well for kids when they don't exactly understand what is being described. Even though I'm a visual person, I don't mind listening to text and having no images like in a radio play or having a movie on but just listening to it. I feel like i can focus and imagine better by listening than reading text on a page. However, it's a different story when there's image but no text, like in a silent film. I can obviously see what's happening, but with no text to back it up my imagination is freer to interpret all the aspects of the story. 

Week Two: The Great Gatsby as a Literary Work

Writing Assignment: Write a 350-500 word blog post discussing why, in your view, The Great Gatsby is a literary work.

In order to answer the question of whether or not The Great Gatsby is a literary work I had to question what exactly defines a literary work. The broadest definition I found is anything expressed in letters of the alphabet. Other definitions define a literary work as any body of work from a societies culture as well as any creative work that is deemed to have artistic value. But who gets to decide if a work has enough artistic value or not? I suppose it’s up to the reader to decide. As a reader of The Great Gatsby I believe that it has enough artistic qualities, such as a stylized storyline and plot as well as identifiable characters, to qualify as a literary work. The Great Gatsby allowed me to take a glimpse back at the culture of the roaring 20’s in a high-class society and into the lives and events of various characters. The content and language Fitzgerald used is very rich and stylized and helps to create a sense of what the American Dream at the time meant to the people of that era. That really allowed me to get a feel of the time Fitzgerald and the characters he created lived in.